CHAPTER FIVE

CONFESSIONAL METHOD

The confessor's ability to inspire confidence is evidently connected with the method he uses for confession and spiritual guidance. It is clear, too, that a confessor endowed with special personal qualifi• cations will create a confessional method worth following. He does so sua sponte, without reflecting closely on his course of action. Later, however, he may derive a system with clearly framed rules from his experience. We might study the methods of some prominent confes• sors, basing our examination either on clear and systematic state• ments, when such exist, or on what may be deduced from how those confessors practised : this should supply us with more information than can be gleaned by merely directing our attention at the confes• sor's personal virtues or "intuitive capacity". One of the great figures in the Catholic cure of souls is-as we have already stressed-Fran9ois de Sales. We ought to find that such an exemplary confessor had an ideal method for confession in its Catholic form. His ideas about spiritual healing are still valid and have a normalizing importance in the Catholic Church.1_ By examining his method we should consequently make a somewhat closer approach to how he could get his penitents to rely so completely on his direction -in, for example, such cases as those of Jean-Pierre Camus and Madame de Chantal. The basic principle of Saint Fran9ois' spiritual leadership is, we perceive, that the confessor should not force orders and regulations on the penitent. Fran9ois de Sales assumes that his penitent has a strong desire to attain moral perfection, a desire which should be supported by the confessor's instructions. But he is quite aware of the psychological law that people resist commands and statutes

1 Concerning the model set by Fran<;ois de Sales, Vincent said (op. cit.; p. 550) that one should always go to him for instruction. "Not one of his ideas as director of souls, not one of his lines of procedure, has gone out-of-date". Cf. Georges Goyau, Orientations catholiques (Paris, 1925), p. 68 ff., about the value of Saint Fran<;ois' principles in spiri• tual leadership: " ... Gette direction, qui est peut-etre pour l'EgliBe le pluB subtil et plus efficace moyen d'aacendant". ( ... This direction which is perhaps for the Church the most subtile and the most effective means of ascendancy.) CONFESSIONAL METHOD 51 which are imposed from without and have no hold on their convictions. We find the basis of the old observation about the attraction of for• bidden fruit in his words: "Just as there exist people who are unwil• ling to take a medicine, however good it tastes, simply because it is called a medicine, there are souls who are frightened of actions that are enjoined upon them simply because they are decreed. It is said that there was a man who had lived for eighty years quite conten• tedly in the city of Paris without ever venturing outside; but when, by royal edict, he was ordered to remain there for the rest of his life, he went out to look at the fields which all his life he had never cared to see". 2 One must not give strict orders and prohibitions to the person one wants to direct. That is to impede the work one wishes to perform or see bear fruit. Saint Fran9ois wrote to an abbess who desired to carry out a reform in her nunnery that she ought not to make any stir about what she had in mind. "That would only mean", said he, "that all sensitive souls will have prepared themselves against you and become obdurate". He added: "They must reform themselves under your guidance". 3 Saint Fran9ois practised his own precept. Ordinarily, he issued no commands. He only advised his penitents, and that with a respectful diffidence ("timidite respectueuse"). For instance, after providing Jeanne de Chantal with instructions for her spiritual life, he wrote: "These are good and appropriate counsels for you, not at all com• mands"4 He wanted to allow great freedom to his penitents. He considered spiritual liberty to be a sacred thing, a view related to his basic concept of the human soul: for him the soul is the place of divine inspiration. There the creation of God goes on, and this must not be disturbed by petty interference from without. Francis Vincent, the biographer al• ready quoted, says that Fran9ois de Sales placed his guidance under God's: this meant that before giving his advice he carefully inves• tigated the forces present in his penitent's soul. He perceived from these how God imparts to each person an unquenchable desire for a faultless life. The confessor's function is to distinguish between the divine and the human, then to sustain and promote the divine. The confessor can never lay claim to having instigated the new spiri-

2 Vincent, op. cit.; p. 412. 3 Ibid.; p. 413. 4 Ibid.; p. 414.