The Rite of Confession is, for Some, a Celebration of Mercy For Others, It Evokes Memories of a Scary Ordeal in a Dark Box

STEPPING nervously into St. Brigid's Church for the 7 o'clock weekday mass, Perri Caldera decided that the only suitable place to sit was the last pew. "I didn't feel like I belonged any closer," she recalled.

Her Catholic upbringing had provided the positive example of nuns, which had launched her on a long teaching career. But it had also contributed to her image of God as judge -- all-knowing, ever-lurking, recording every sin -- and of herself as unworthy. "I was very hard on myself," she said. She had reinforced her feelings of unworthiness by marrying a divorced man and divorcing him 11 years later. Religion had been absent from her marriage.

For years, she was what she calls an absentee Catholic. But then she worked as a campaign volunteer for Nassau District Attorney Denis Dillon, a committed Catholic who became her friend and began a gentle campaign to nudge her back into the life of the church.

One day, as she wrestled with some difficulty in her life, someone suggested that she go to a church and just sit there for a while in silence. She dropped in briefly at Sacred Heart Church in North Merrick and later started going to mass there.

At about that time, Caldera drove her sister, Josephine Beaudoin, to the Westbury railroad station, passing St. Brigid's Church. She was already familiar with the church, and on this morning she happened to notice people entering for the 7 o'clock mass. "I said to myself, maybe I should come to St. Brigid's."

Later that week, she walked in and sat in the last pew, feeling like an outsider, as the Rev. John White celebrated mass. "John was talking about God's love and God's forgiveness, and lift up your heart to God," she recalled. "I said, `This is a man I have to talk to.' " Her schedule and his didn't mesh right away. But she kept going to daily mass and finally decided that she should go to confession, even if it weren't with White. After her years away, she approached it with dread.

Even though she made her confession face-to-face in a reconciliation room, a far friendlier environment than the old dark confessional box, she was still nervous. "I looked like death," she recalled. "I think I cried through the whole confession." She hadn't yet finished her long, tearful self-accusation when the priest, the Rev. Robert Fulton, held up his hand and said gently: "That's enough." She had expected him to assign her some heavy penance to perform. But he didn't. "He said to me, `I want you to go home, and I want you to stop beating up on yourself.' I remember coming out of there and feeling this tremendous relief."

She wrote to White, thanked him for the impact that his words at mass that day had made on her life, and volunteered to work in the church's youth ministry. Later, she gave her time for three years to develop a garden behind the rectory, dedicated to Mary. Now, six years after that confession, she still travels often from her East Meadow home to take part in the parish's life -- as a lector, a eucharistic minister, and a member of the peace and justice committee, the liturgy board and the outreach advisory board.

During Holy Week this year, Caldera was asked to preach at one of three evening services called Tenebrae. Her homily, an emotional account of the events leading up to that confession, set off sustained applause and, at the end of the liturgy, an outbreak of hugs. "I was amazed at the reaction of people," she recalled. "They were so supportive, just accepting everything that I said."

For her audience that night, confession is still a vivid reality. In fact, confession flourishes at St. Brigid's -- despite a national decline in reception of the sacrament of penance, or the sacrament of penance and reconciliation, as confession is also called. Beyond the normal Saturday evening setting, St. Brigid's priests hear confessions every day after the 12:10 p.m. mass. At the Jesus Evening, a healing mass held on the first Friday of every month, long lines of penitents often occupy priests until midnight. And during Holy Week and just before Christmas, there is a day of morning-to-night confessions.

"I think we probably have far more opportunities to celebrate the sacrament than most parishes," said the Rev. Thomas Costa, who came to St. Brigid's last year. "I don't know any place that has the all-day marathons that we have."

That abundant availability is a key reason why confession still thrives at St. Brigid's. "People really do come if they see that you believe in it," said Msgr. Francis X. Gaeta, the pastor. "It sets a precedent that every single day anybody can just walk in and say something to a priest."

Another crucial element is the palpable sense of welcome and forgiveness that the parish radiates. "The whole theological atmosphere in this parish is one of: `God loves you. There's nothing you can do that will ever change that love,' " said Jack Graham, one of the parish's lay leaders.

In many American parishes, however, the practice has declined. Only four decades ago, weekly or monthly confession was the norm. But in a 1990 report by a committee of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, only 4 percent of the laypeople surveyed said they go weekly, 5 percent monthly, 17 percent every two or three months, 55 percent once or twice a year. Almost one Catholic in five surveyed, 19 percent, said that they never go to confession.

What makes that survey more striking is that the respondents seem not to be alienated from the Catholic Church itself -- just from confession. Of those surveyed, 86 percent reported going to mass weekly, and 82 percent said they receive communion weekly.

The roots of the sacrament of penance lie in the preaching of Jesus. He scandalized religious leaders by offering forgiveness of sins, a prerogative that they held to be reserved for God. Nonetheless, Jesus forgave bounteously and gently: the frequently married woman at the well, the woman caught in adultery, the men who nailed him to a cross. And he told his apostles: "Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven; whose sins you shall retain, they are retained."

The Catholic church teaches that the sacrament reconciles penitents with God and with the church itself. Even if a penitent has only minor sins to confess, the Catechism of the Catholic Church says regular confession "helps us form our conscience, fight against evil tendencies, let ourselves be healed by Christ, and progress in the life of the Spirit."

In the first five or six centuries of the church, when people received baptism late in life, if a person committed a serious sin after baptism, penance was available, but usually only once in a lifetime. It was a public event, reserved for serious sins such as murder, adultery and heresy. Those who committed lesser sins sought forgiveness through such practices as almsgiving or fasting.

The practice of private confession grew up in Irish monasteries by the Seventh Century, and it later became the norm for laity. At the Council of Trent in 1551, the church's leaders adopted a theology of the sacrament that has lasted four centuries. It required the penitent to be sorry and determined not to sin again, to present all serious sins to a priest, and to perform some kind of penance to make up for the sins.

The sacrament is based on a mystery truly to be celebrated: the endless mercy and compassion of God, made visible in Jesus. But many Catholics approach it not as mercy to be celebrated, but judgment to be feared. To many it has been the scariest sacrament: a sweat-inducing ordeal in a dark, closetlike box, where the sinner kneels and waits for the sound of a small panel to be slid back, revealing behind a screen the fuzzy outline of a priest who may or may not act with compassion.

This accretion of dread around a sacrament of mercy has created a whole narrative genre for Catholics of a certain age: Confession Stories.

Take Maggie McCartin, a theologically sophisticated woman who serves on a committee that plans the weekly family liturgy at St. Brigid's. She can still recall a confession that she made three decades ago, in fourth grade. For the first time, she and her younger sister, Eileen, had made chocolate chip cookies. They'd eaten a lot of the batch as cookie dough, and when the cookies had come out of the oven, they'd set upon them voraciously. That night, their mother, Agnes, asked them to produce the dessert, but they had nothing to show for their labor.

"My mother sat us both down and explained to us that this was a sin of gluttony," McCartin said. It was already too late that Saturday night to go to confession, but the following Saturday Agnes drove them to Notre Dame Church in New Hyde Park and sat there, to make sure they went into the box. "My knees were shaking when I was standing on line," McCartin recalled. "This was the worst sin I ever had to confess in my life." When they reached the confessional, Eileen went in on one side of the priest and Maggie on the other.

"I went first," McCartin recalled. She recited a thin litany of pallid childhood sins, then mentioned the gluttony. "He said, `Wait a minute, wait a minute. What was that?' He said, `How exactly did you do that?' " And when she explained, his reaction was swift. "He burst out laughing." At that moment, she might have been a bit humiliated, but he had helped her to put it into perspective. "It didn't harm me. I wasn't scarred by that. That's the way the church was."

But some people do carry away scars. "I can remember having a very bad experience as a child going to confession," said Mary Kennedy, a co-coordinator of the parish's small Christian communities, who still goes to confession three or four times a year. "It upset me terribly, and it was a long time before I could really go to confession. The priest was extremely nasty, and he screamed at me and yelled at me. He complained I was not speaking loud enough, and he couldn't hear me, and didn't I realize he had a war disability."

Priests themselves condemn that kind of behavior. "If I'm a priest and I'm supposed to be there continuing the mission of Jesus and receiving sinners the way Jesus would receive them, how could I possibly yell at someone?" Costa said. "I also think it's a tragedy that people would deprive themselves of the benefit of the sacrament because one priest had a bad day and yelled at them."

The seriousness of the offense itself is no excuse for yelling. It would be a rare sinner who could present a priest with a sin so heinous that it hasn't come up before. "Within the first year I heard everything," Costa said.

The Rev. Claude D'Souza, who came to St. Brigid's last year after serving in three other parishes since his arrival from India in 1983, approaches the sacrament as a healer -- appropriate for the author of a book on Indian country medicine. He likes to tell penitents: "God is our father, not a tyrant.' " And when people come in after being away from the church, he reminds them about a Francis Thompson poem, "The Hound of Heaven," which depicts God as a relentless, loving pursuer. D'Souza tells them: " `God has caught up with you today. He is the one who has brought you to confess.' And they begin to weep."

In the past, whether a priest was gentle or sharp, the penitent still faced another stumbling block: the notion that people had to go to confession every week in order to receive communion on Sunday.

That was the attitude of Jack Graham's late father-in-law, Andy Eschmann. One Saturday Eschmann had not made it to his own church, St. Joseph's in Garden City. His daughter, Graham's late wife Marilyn, told him that he still had time to get to confession at St. Brigid's chapel in Carle Place. So he went. The priest, the Rev. Basil Ellard, greeted him by asking how old he was, and Eschmann said he was nearing 80. Ellard asked him why he was there and what an 80-year-old could do that would separate him from God's love. Eschmann insisted on confessing. Ellard heard his confession, told him that he really hadn't done anything to lose God's friendship and assigned him an unusual penance: Go out and walk the dog and think of God's love.

Weekly confession could be especially excessive for small children, who had few real sins of any importance to confess. "I always found out that I told the same sins over and over again, like stealing out of the refrigerator and taking the black-eyed peas out of my grandfather's bin," said Anne Josey, who grew up Catholic in heavily Baptist Georgia.

Between the old approach to confession and the current practice, the great divide was the Second Vatican Council. Its Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, promulgated at the end of 1963, contained a sentence that led to major change: "The rite and formulas for the sacrament of penance are to be revised so that they give more luminous expression to both the nature and effect of the sacrament."

In 1974 the church published a new document outlining the rites of the sacrament. Among other things, it provided a setting for face-to-face confession, leading to the development of reconciliation rooms, where penitents can either kneel and confess through a screen or sit in a chair facing the priest.

"I think some of those changes were made for people like me," McCartin said. "I always had difficulty going into the little black box and not being able to look at somebody. I'm more relational than that. I see confession and the sacrament of reconciliation as part of my whole relationship with God and my brothers and sisters in Christ. I need to be able to look at another person in the eye."

Once, after going face-to-face with a confessor in another parish regularly, she went at Easter to her own parish at the time, Our Lady of Loretto in Hempstead. Expecting to find the confessional altered to allow face-to-face confession, she was shocked to find the traditional dark box. She knew the priest, the Rev. Thomas Coby, but she couldn't see him through the screen. She said: " `Tom, it's me. It's Maggie. I can't do this in here." So they both stepped outside, and he heard her confession face-to-face, as they sat in the pews.

The face-to-face approach does not appeal to everyone. At first, it seemed like a good idea to Linda McGowan, editor of the parish newspaper, The Spirit of St. Brigid's. Now she's not so sure. "When you talked to that screen you were focusing in on a relationship between you and God," she said. But for her, face-to-face confession changes that emphasis. "It's so much more a person-to-person situation now, rather than a person-to-God situation."

Nationally, about half of the penitents choose face-to-face, and half prefer anonymity, the report to the bishops said. Whatever setting penitents choose, and whether they go to priests in their own parish or are so active in the parish that they prefer to go elsewhere, they now find priests handling the sacrament differently.

"The old approach was very juridical; the new approach is much more relational," Gaeta said. Formerly, the priest's role was primarily to determine whether the penitent had made a good confession and whether to grant absolution. "No longer is the clergyman a judge and jury dispensing sentences," Jack Graham said. "Today they seem to focus on bringing the person closer to God through the actions of their lives."

In that spirit, priests don't just assign a few Our Fathers or Hail Marys as penance. "I have told people to tell each person in your family that you love them," Costa said. "I have told people to do something nice for yourself."

Anne Josey recalled a similar penance from another priest. "Once, one told me to go out and the first stranger that I saw, to walk up and introduce myself to them and just say something about God to them." Never hesitant to proclaim her faith, she found a suitable stranger. "I said, `Hello, my name is Josey. I just want to say to you, God bless you, and I hope you have blessings all the time.'"

In te face of changes that make the sacrament seem less fearsome than before, the level of participation has still been declining. In 1983 the world's bishops held a synod on the sacrament, and the following year Pope John Paul II issued an apostolic exhortation based on their work. In that document, he acknowledged a statement frequently made during the synod's work: "The Sacrament of Penance is in crisis." Among other things, he cited a "lessening of a sense of sin."

It isn't that people don't like talking about themselves -- with talk-show hosts or bartenders. "There is a phenomenon in our society of people wanting to `confess' to lots of other people," said Rev. Philip Murnion, director of the National Pastoral Life Center in Manhattan. "There seems to be no diminishment of the need to have a forum for being able to voice one's weaknesses and failings."

So why do so many people go to psychotherapists, at the same time fewer people are going to confession? "Psychotherapy explains why you're not responsible for the way you're behaving," Murnion said. One expert, the Rev. Peter Fink, who teaches sacramental theology at Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Massachusetts, said: "There's a growing cultural dispersion of responsibility. It's, `The devil made me do it.' " He also pointed to the spread of the victim mentality, which allows people to feel they are not individually responsible.

It is one thing to hear a paid professional or a friend affirm your worth. But Catholics believe that a priest, for all his faults, is acting as God's representative. "It's the priest as another Christ, alter Christus, standing in for Jesus, saying you are valuable, you are worth something in God's sight, you are precious," Costa said. "We have the opportunity as priests to say that in a way nobody else can say it."

For priests, even though it can be tedious to listen to the same grubby sins over and over, and to sit alone for long stretches between penitents, confession can be a powerful experience when they witness the relief of someone returning to the church. D'Souza recalled hearing a little girl's confession in preparation for her first communion. Her father, waiting outside, saw the smile on her face as she emerged from confession and was stricken by it, because he'd been away from the church. Minutes later, he came to D'Souza and told him: "I don't have that joy in my heart." Then he made his confession.

Though the quantity of confessions has declined, there are some good side effects. "What we call the quality of the confession is vastly improved," Gaeta said. Instead of simply listing a "scorecard" of sins, he said, people are taking a more relational approach, examining more deeply how they have fallen short in their relationships with God, with the people in their lives and with themselves.

With shorter lines and more use of face-to-face, priests can give more spiritual direction and guidance. "What's happening, I think, is that the rote confession for many people is a thing of the past," Fink said. "With the numbers diminishing, the context is becoming more and more conversational. I, as priest, can react to you according to your needs, not according to the line that's waiting outside."

Even for those who still find it difficult, it has real benefits. "You say `confession' and I squirm," McGowan said. "On the other hand, confession itself, intellectually I think it's a very good thing. It makes you stop and seriously think about what you're doing."

It could be better, of course, and in a 1987 volume of the "Alternative Futures for Worship" series, Fink and others tried to imagine new ways of celebrating the sacrament.

The church already has a public penitential rite at which people also confess individually. But with a shortage of priests, that is difficult. So Fink's book imagined a public penance service that would let people confess individually to specially trained laypeople, who would then present the penitents to the few priests present for absolution. He also imagined a ritual based on the Jewish feast of Yom Kippur. Catholics could atone for the social sins that don't come up in individual confessions -- including the sins of the church. "If the model only allows you to pin down personal responsibility, all of those larger things remain untouched," Fink said.

Whatever it looks like in the future, Fink imagined confession as playing a significant role in a world where forgiveness is in short supply. "The real challenge and the real need of the sacrament is only secondarily that we be forgiven but primarily that it become a school of forgiveness, that we be formed into reconcilers," he said. "The only way I can forgive you is if I'm humble enough in my own life to feel as if I have been forgiven."