Priestly predicament: Catholics sue over abuse reporting law

On Thursday, a group of Roman Catholic priests in the state of Washington announced it is suing the state over a new law requiring religious clergy to report all instances of child abuse—even those mentioned during the act of confession.

While advocates for abuse victims cheered the new legislation, high-ranking priests said they would rather go to jail than violate church doctrine by breaking the confidentiality of confession.

The law, which Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson signed on May 2, adds religious clergy to the list of professions required to report child abuse. The list already includes doctors, counselors, and teachers. The law takes effect on July 27.

At least 24 states make clergy members mandatory reporters, but most include an exemption for any knowledge gained during a private confession of sin. Washington’s new law does not include this exemption, causing a stir within the Catholic Church. Five other states also have a similar law that doesn’t exempt confession. Bishops in Washington said complying could require them to break the “seal of the confessional,” which in Catholic doctrine would result in excommunication.

Bishop Thomas Daly of Spokane issued a statement saying he would defend the seal of confession “even to the point of going to jail.” Archbishop of Seattle Paul Etienne added in a separate statement that the Catholic church already requires priests to report abuse and has implemented policies to protect children. Daly and Etienne are among the group of priests that sued the state last week.

“It seems as though the driving force here is not the protection of children per se, but it is to plant the flag of rejecting the authority of the church to run its own show,” said David DeWolf, a visiting professor at St. Thomas University College of Law who testified against an earlier version of the bill. DeWolf, who is Catholic, said the Catholic Church’s rule of complete confidentiality ensures a priest cannot interfere with a sinner’s attempt to make penance for any type of sin, even if he feels compelled to.

“Somebody in the church confesses a bad thing, ‘I cheated on my wife.’ Do I have some kind of a duty to intervene and try to fix it?” he said. “It’s just a whole lot easier when the rule is black and white and it says, ‘Nope.’”

The U.S. Department of Justice appears to be siding with the Catholic Church. It announced on May 5 that it is opening a civil rights investigation into the new law, arguing that it violates the First Amendment’s right to the free exercise of religion and is “anti-Catholic.”

Confession—also known as the sacrament of reconciliation—requires each Catholic to declare his or her sins to a priest. Forgiveness by God requires absolution from a priest. Unlike in Protestant doctrine, Catholic teaching says the priest must serve as an intermediary in the confession of sins. Some Catholics interpret John 20:23 to mean that, if someone doesn’t confess their sins to a priest, God may not forgive them.

“It’s integral to the faith. It’s not like a side policy or some minor thing that’s no big deal,” said Joshua Mercer, vice president of CatholicVote. “We ultimately think this has massive repercussions for a person’s soul, and it has eternal consequences.”

But many Christians disagree with Catholic doctrine and the idea that confessions need to be private at all costs.

There is nothing in the Bible that says confession needs to be confidential, notes Victor Vieth, who is Lutheran and the director of the Center for Faith and Child Protection at the Zero Abuse Project. The Bible includes numerous stories about sexual and physical abuse, which Vieth said sends a clear message to Christians about the consequences of not protecting the vulnerable.

“We have to ask ourselves, why did God inspire the writers to record in some detail the rape of Tamar, the rape of Dinah, the sexual exploitation of Bathsheba?” Vieth said. “Obviously, God must have wanted us to learn something from these stories of trauma and to learn what can happen if we don’t respond appropriately.”

Vieth added that some perpetrators of child abuse could be clinically diagnosed with pedophilia, which is a defined psychiatric disorder. Like most psychiatric conditions, Vieth says those suffering from pedophilia need to be diagnosed and seek professional help while government intervention keeps them away from children.

“Even if they are sincere and want to turn away from their sin, they’re always going to have that inclination,” Vieth notes. “They’re always going to be at high risk to continue to abuse, unless we make a report, unless there’s civil or criminal governmental interventions, unless there’s sex offender treatment, unless there’s a system inside the church to manage the sex offender.”

Members of the Catholic Accountability Project pointed out the church’s history of hidden child abuse. “This is an opportunity for all religious organizations that have used existing loopholes in the law to reexamine the harm caused to children by their policies rather than fight this positive change,” the group said in a statement.

Some Protestant denominations support instituting a requirement for clergy to report child abuse, even if they hear of it in the context of a private confession. In March, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America drafted a social message about child protection that said, “The right to confidentiality in pastoral counseling or individual confession does not override the body of Christ’s clear biblical mandate to protect the vulnerable.” The message is up for public review through June 30.

Admissions of child abuse within the context of Catholic confession are extremely rare. No one I spoke to said they could recall a single instance when a priest broke the seal of confession to tell authorities about ongoing child abuse.

William Metzger, a pastor emeritus at Our Lady of Good Counsel Catholic Church in Vienna, Va., told me that, if a person admitted to child abuse during a confession, he would advise the person to make that public knowledge, which could include turning oneself in to the authorities.

But Metzger said he would not report the abuse because it would destroy one of the most important traits of the confessional—its privacy.

“It’s dying with the person you’re telling,” he said. “That’s the end of it.”