| U.S. News

She says her childhood experience of the sacrament of reconciliation explains much of her adult attitude toward it today.

“When I was 7, 8 or 9 years old,” she said, “I found myself repeating the same sins over and over to the priest. It seemed to me they weren’t really sins but simply human nature. On the other hand, if I did something really serious, the guilt alone would drive me to confession.”

Woods’ opinion that confession is often meaningless seems an increasingly common one among American Catholics.

Over the past decade and a half, an increasing number of Catholic scholars and clergy in the United States have been seeking to understand the changing dynamics of confession, now called the sacrament of reconciliation, in the life of the American church.

Their inquiries are spurred by one undeniable social fact. Since the 1970s, the number of American Catholics making private acts of confession to their parish priests has, in the oft-quoted words of Boston College historian James O’Toole, “fallen through the floor.”

O’Toole made that dramatic statement at a 2004 conference on the “state of confession” held in Washington at The Catholic University of America.

Organized by Leslie Tentler, a professor of history at Catholic University, the conference has been widely cited in articles written for U.S. diocesan publications during Lent, the time when priests generally encourage more lay participation in the sacrament.

Despite such encouragement, however, American Catholic churches that in the 1950s and early ’60s were filled with people going to confession on Saturday evenings are now full of people fulfilling their weekly Mass obligation.

Catholic sociologist James Davidson of Purdue University says it is necessary to see such changes historically, as part of a “bell curve.”

“It is important to remember,” he said, “that at the turn of the 20th century the Catholic church in our country was characterized by a lack of vocations and a general lack of popular participation in the sacrament of reconciliation.”

Davidson observed that the social situation of 100 years ago was not very different from that of the present time, and that the church has come to a trough in a curve that was at its peak in the ’50s.

“In the 1950s, American Catholics banded together after experiencing decades of anti-Catholicism. You saw a great upsurge in vocations to the religious life and a tremendous public participation in private confession in the churches on the weekends,” he said.

Davidson’s perspective is informed by the research work he undertook with colleagues William D’Antonio, Dean Hoge and Katherine Meyer, which resulted in their highly respected 2001 study “American Catholics: Gender, Generation and Commitment.”

According to Leslie Tentler, issues of gender and generation have played a role in shaping popular participation in the sacrament, as have disagreements over what behavior constitutes a sin.

Take, for example, the issues around contraception.

Tentler, who has extensively studied North American women’s responses to Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical, Humana Vitae, says there is no doubt that reproductive issues have had an effect upon American women’s approach to the sacrament of reconciliation.

After interviewing parish priests around the United States and women who practiced birth control and still attended Mass, Tentler observed that “many women simply did not regard contraception as a sin, and so they simply stopped going to confession.”

Tentler also said that the response to that situation from American Catholic clergy in the field has been cautious.

“In general,’ she said, “most of the parish priests I interviewed said although they agreed with Humana Vitae, they did not bring it up with their parishioners because they did not wish to alienate them from the life of the church.”

Tentler’s study of women who stopped going to confession because they did not consider contraception a sin suggests that they did not wish to lie to their confessors or found it prudent simply not to confront their parish priests with their disbelief in contraception as a sin.

This tension between sincerity and prudence in the confession of Christian faith has existed since the Renaissance, notes John Jeffries Martin, chair of the Department of History at Trinity University in San Antonio.

In his book, Myths of Renaissance Individualism, Martin explores the crises of conscience experienced by some notable Catholics in mid-to-late 16th-century Venice, Italy, when they began to feel conflicted over whether they should publicly profess their new Protestant beliefs.

“The most famous of such cases was that of Francesco Spiera, a sophisticated lawyer from a town north of Venice, who had converted to Calvinism but, when called ...