Liturgy | 2019
Confessing Sin, Proclaiming Reconciliation in Contemporary U.S. Catholic Liturgy
Abstract
While to this day in American culture the predominant image of sacramental reconciliation in Roman Catholicism is the individual penitent kneeling in a dark booth, recounting one’s sins through a screen to the priest sitting in profile on the opposite side, in actual practice the ritual words and symbols for the forgiveness of sin are quite something else. Whether in bigscreen romantic comedies (Cher in Moonstruck, 1987) or thrillers (Colin Farrell, In Bruges, 2008) or television action dramas (Charlie Cox, Daredevil, 2015), portrayals of the conflicted Catholic wrongdoer seeking counsel and forgiveness from the priest sustain “going to confession” as a primary symbol of Catholicism in the popular mindset. Rigorous studies by sociologists, historians, and theologians, however, document how U.S. Catholics in overwhelming numbers abandoned the sacrament of penance in the late 1960s, with no significant recovery in practice since. The older and baby-boom generations did, in contrast, strongly embrace the reformed ritual of the Mass, with clergy and laity widely giving the post-Vatican II Sunday ritual a distinctly American character that maintained strong numbers in the pews through the turn of the new millennium. Even as decline in regular Mass attendance has accelerated in the past two decades, however, the fact that large percentages of all generations of Catholics go to church for at least Christmas and Easter, whereas nearly three-quarters never go to confession (or say they do so less than once a year), make the Mass the primary form of sacramental-ritual practice. Thus, to get something of an accurate portrayal of confession and reconciliation in contemporary U.S. Catholicism, one must turn primarily to the popular practice and official theology of today’s Mass of the Roman Rite (1970/2002), while also giving ancillary attention to the three rites comprising the Rite of Penance (1973). That the Mass, especially the Sunday liturgy, functions as the predominant form of sacramental celebration in Catholicism certainly fulfills Vatican II’s teaching on liturgy, and most centrally the Eucharist, as the source and