Word: confessionals
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The facts of the California case were more tortuous than a television melodrama: a family therapist, acting under the demands of a 1980 state law requiring that child abuse be reported, gave Solano County officials information about a physician who was alleged to have molested his stepdaughter. The information had...
...11th century; five centuries later the custom developed of holding confession in a booth, with penitent and priest speaking to each other through an opening in a partition. So strict is the privacy that a Catholic priest is forbidden even to reveal knowledge about crimes acquired under the confessional "seal...
Eastern Orthodoxy shares a similar tradition of sacramental confession before a priest. Anglicanism allows for, but does not require, private confession, in addition to the general confession and priestly pronouncement of absolution in liturgical rites. Although Martin Luther advocated private confession, Protestantism rapidly abandoned it, on the ground that the...
John Paul designated penance as the topic for last October's synod of bishops, not only because he stresses the sacrament's importance but because its practice nowadays is in a state of flux and confusion. Theologians disagree over what sort of sins require absolution, and whether young...
After the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), American Catholics "walked away in droves from the sacrament of penance," says Russell Shaw, a layman who is public affairs secretary of the U.S. Catholic Conference. Shaw speculates that some of the defectors are married couples who use birth control, and "they don...