Relationship of Trust Between Confessor and Confessant

CHAPTER FOUR RELATIONSHIP OF TRUST BETWEEN CONFESSOR AND CONFESSANT From what we have now observed, the confessant's trust m his confessor-obviously an essential element in any serious confession may be said to depend on an authority which the confessor possesses in some exterior way, also on his entirely personal attributes and individual conduct. Having dealt in the last chapter more particularly with the part played by external authority, we ought now to examine specially the nature and importance of the confessor's personal qualities. First, we may note that the confessor should acquire what could be called an inner authority through his own involvement, through his willingness to comprehend and enter into the confes sant's troubles : such authority of the confessor is rooted in the confessant's mental situation, and thus he can exercise a profound influence on it. In what follows, we shall study the evidence of a confessant's trustful attitude founded on authority of the kind. Let us, to begin with, turn to confession in the Catholic Church and see what significance is attached to the personal element there. The confession we meet with might of course seem to be of a purely institutional kind : in principle it should function ex opere operato and thus have its effect whatever the confessor's personal attributes and manner of proceeding; so the personal factors ought really to be of no consequence. But closer investigation shows this to be a rather superficial view, applicable only when Catholic confession is practised in a routine fashion. The actual situation is that, even if the penance sacrament is objective in principle, the personal element seems to have asserted itself and broken through the institutional framework. We shall take first some examples which illustrate indirectly the im portance of the confessor's individual faculties : these will reveal how a number of penitents reacted when they had confessors who did not suit them. Instances will then follow where the confessor's persona lity expressed itself directly : confessors who have been able to enter into genuine communion with their confessants will here come under view. When the German psychiatrist A. Muthmann wished to gain infor- RELATIONSHIP OF TRUST BETWEEN CONFESSOR AND CONFESSANT 37 mation about the psychological factors which are in operation during confession, he questioned carefully devout Catholics whose confidence he enjoyed. 1 From answers received, it was clear that not all priests could achieve the right results when their penitents confessed. As a case in point, one priest was too tactless and insensitive about the penitent's emotional reaction to a particularly burdensome sin. Another priest reprimanded so sharply2 that the act of confession became too painful for the penitent; he could no longer submit to it, however much he wished to recieve absolution. Muthmann did find in his survey that absolution always brought a sense of "release of tension", notwithstanding that the priest might have been a bad confessor.· But it is worth noting that, even if the penitent was convinced of having received full absolution for his sins, his emotional state after confession varied in accordance with the confessor's personal beha viour.3 Henri Bremond depicted the response of a French mystic, Marie de l'Incarnation, to a mechanical sort of confessor. She went one day to Notre-Dame in Paris, and while there felt a powerful impulse to confess. Put in the mystic's language : "I perceived so clearly from an inward illumination the significance of making a good confession; and I acquired so strong a conviction that I ought to make one, I could not doubt that I should". 4 Consequently, she entered a confessional. But the priest who took her confession proceeded in a very routine manner, without establishing what was of importance to her in it. She afterwards related that her heart closed and she could no longer confess as she had planned to do, in accordance with the promptings that had newly come to her. Sensitive people are put off by a customary and unadapted method of confessing. Bremond added some reflections of his own to his account of the case given. Often, he said, when he passed a confessional and pictured all the fine-souled penitents who had perhaps found only dense and common-minded ("epais, vulgaires") priests behind the grill there, he thought of the severe blows that must have been dealt 1 A. l\fothmann, "Psychiatrisch-theologische Grenzfragen", in Zeitschrift fur Religions psychologie, I (Halle an der Saale, 1908); pp. 49-75. 2 "Der andere Geistliche schilt so sehr". (Ibid.; p. 65.) 3 "Der Gefiihlston aber sei auch bei der beruhigenden Uberzeugung volliger Absolution je nach der Art des Geistlichen ein verschiedener". (Ibid.; p. 65.) 4 Bremond, op. cit.; vol. VI, p. 17 (note). .

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