An Arizona court refuses to force the clergy to betray the confessional

The Arizona Supreme Court has ruled, unanimously, that ministers of religion cannot be compelled to disclose what they learn in confession, nor required to report it to the authorities. The case concerned leaders of the Mormon Church, not the Catholic sacrament; but its principle also protects the seal of confession and other religious communications held to be confidential. The Court held that the First Amendment protects a religious institution's right to define who belongs to its clergy, and forbids judges, absent fraud or collusion for secular ends, from inquiring into that designation.

The case was a sordid one. Three children were suing the Mormon Church for failing to intervene: their father had confessed to a leader of that faith that he had abused one of them. In the same State, a bill rejected this year would have punished with fine and prison the priest who, learning of abuse in the confessional, failed to report it. A federal court in Washington State had already, last year, struck down a similar law. A law professor argued that such laws do not push back abuse — a guilty man scarcely confesses to one who must hand him over — and he noted the anti-Catholic prejudice that shows through the attacks on the seal.

On this point the Church has never wavered, and her firmness is older than any constitution. The priest who hears a confession "holds the place of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and [...] is bound by the most sacred laws to the most inviolable silence," teaches the Catechism of the Council of Trent. The faithful, one reads there, ought "in no wise to fear that the Priest [...] will ever reveal to anyone the sins" they have confessed. And the Council of Lateran, cited by that same Catechism, leaves no way out: "Let the Priest tremble ever to betray the sinner by a word, by a sign, or in any other manner whatsoever."

There is the measure. The seal is not a privilege the State grants and could withdraw: it is a divine law the priest keeps even against the State, to prison if need be, because what he heard, he heard not as a man, but in the place of God. A ruling that protects the seal does not found it; it merely recognises, for once, what the Church already held to be absolute.

There remains the objection, the only one that counts: and the abused? It turns back on itself. The seal binds the confessor's tongue without; it does not bind his word within. The priest can, and must, press the penitent to give himself up and to repair the wrong, and refuse him absolution so long as there is no firm purpose of amendment. The secret covers the sin confessed to God; it does not cover the crime the guilty man refuses to set right. One does not redeem a soul by breaking the one place in the world where the worst of men still dares to tell the truth.

Sources. Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the sacrament of Penance, Confession, and its inviolable secret; Fourth Council of the Lateran (1215), canon "Omnis utriusque sexus," on the sacramental seal.