If the priest no longer hears sins confessed,
he ends up as a simple dispenser of
anonymous grace to people with anonymous sins.

General Absolution
diminishes the priest

By Daniel C. Conlin

n Lent and Advent seem to be the most common seasons for celebrations of sacramental general absolution. Often parish missions and retreats will feature a general absolution penance service. There are even rare parishes where first reconciliation for children is general absolution.

In the 1983 Code of Canon Law, Canon 960 reads: "Individual and integral confession and absolution constitute the only ordinary way by which the faithful person who is aware of serious sin is reconciled with God and with the Church. Only physical or moral impossibility excuses the person from confession of this type, in which case reconciliation can take place in other ways."

Canon 961 teaches:

1. Absolution cannot be imparted in a general manner to a number of penitents at once without previous individual confession unless:

1. The danger of death is imminent and there is not time for the priest or priests to hear the confessions of the individual penitents.

2. A serious necessity exists, that is, when in light of the number of penitents a supply of confessors is not readily available to hear the confessions of individuals within a suitable time so that the penitents are forced to be deprived of sacramental grace or holy communion for a long time through no fault of their own. It is not considered a sufficient necessity if confessors cannot be readily available only because of the great number of penitents as can occur on the occasion of some great feast or pilgrimage.

2. It is for the diocesan bishop to judge whether the conditions required in 1, n. 2 are present. He can determine general cases of necessity in the light of criteria agreed upon with other members of the conference of bishops.

This article will examine the specific role of the priest in the sacrament of penance and how his priesthood is diminished by presiding over and encouraging attendance at general absolution services which do not fit the criteria enunciated in Canon 961.

The priest carries the cross of sin

The priest in the individual celebration of the sacrament of penance absorbs the terror of the individual penitent's sins and the concomitant tear in marital, familial and parochial life caused by those sins. In one-to-one individual auricular confession the priest simultaneously confers God's mercy upon the penitent and in exchange receives the cross of their sins.

The priest in the confessional, who acts in the place of Jesus Christ the merciful soul physician, will be judged by our Lord as to how his sacramental service in the confessional corresponds with our Lord's treatment of sinners. For example, nowhere do we see our Lord granting mercy to crowds precisely as crowds. Rather, his way of healing is to forgive people one-by-one.

If the priest is impatient with the penitent who is always confessing impatience or if the priest is harsh toward the father who confesses harshness toward his children, will not our Lord eventually hold those priests accountable for their failure to lighten the burden of sin from the lives of their faithful and humble penitents? If the priest unjustly withholds the absoluteness of absolution or assigns an excessive penance, will he not ultimately be responsible to our Lord for his failure to imitate the Lord?

The burden of the confessional, even in the old days of long lines of penitents, has never been the amount of time spent in cramped unheated confessionals or dimly lit, overheated sauna-like confessionals. Rather, the blessed burden and the profound joy has always been to hear, absolve and then to carry the many multi-faceted crosses of parishioner's individually confessed sins, without being able to share this burden and this joy with anyone because of the confessional seal. The penitent shares his sins with the priest and is thereby joyfully unburdened. The priest shares with no one the penitent's sins and is thereby joyfully burdened.

The penitent enters the confessional with his sins and exits the confessional without them. The priest enters the confessional with all the sins he has ever heard and exits the confessional carrying even more sins. The holy mystery here is that both penitent and priest are much happier when they leave the confessional than when they entered, the penitent delighted to have found the priest waiting there, the priest called by God to gladly wait there for the penitent.

The shepherd knows his flock

The priest in the confessional knows the hurts of his people. He knows their unending attempts to live justly, their dogged perseverance to live in the full splendor of truth. The priest in his confessional is constantly and powerfully reminded that his parishioners try to live this way, fail to do so and yet once again are determined to try again. The priest knows this way of following Christ is possible only because of God's overwhelming grace working through the guaranteed mercy of this sacrament celebrated by this priest for this penitent in the name of Christ and his Church. The priest knows this because by virtue of his ordained mission to imitate Christ's example of reconciling sinners, the priest is inserted into the very heart of Christian conversion wherein he is the one who generously bestows and announces God's eternal forgiveness toward those who have sinned and subsequently sought reconciliation.

How can a priest who rarely hears individual confessions carry the cross of sin away from his people so as to precisely carry the cross of sin for his people? How can he absorb their sins as they absorb God's mercy when he does not even know what their sins are? Is not the salvific value of carrying your cross significantly clearer when you know exactly what your cross is, as compared to carrying an unknown cross? Why would a priest not be interested in knowing exactly what the crosses of his parishioners are?

The priest who performs general absolution in non-emergency situations will be less aware of the individual persons who comprise the flock and their trials and tribulations, their explorations and forays into the cul-de-sacs and dead ends of sin. To not want to hear or be deaf to the individual sinner is to lessen the innate importance of that person. Are the penitents individuals or are they mere components of the parish conglomerate?

Priests are to be burdened

In general absolution the priest takes the undifferentiated burden of sin off of those assembled, but he does not carry their burden in any way that resembles how he carries the burden of individually confessed sins. How can a priest who presides over general absolution carry his peoples' burden of sin when he does not even know what burdens his people carry? Guess? Have the people anonymously written down their sins and then turned them in so that the priest can read them?

In individual absolution the penitent receives sacramental absolution from the priest and the priest receives the specific burden of the penitent's sins. In general absolution, the assembled penitents receive simultaneous sacramental absolution from the priest. But what does the priest receive?

He becomes unburdened of his priestly sacrificial responsibility to carry his parishioners' crosses of sin in imitation of the Man of Sacrifice who carried for us the cross of the world's sins. In fact, the priest may not even be burdened to begin with and thus his unique role, taking on the sins of his people as Christ took on the sins of all people, is utterly diminished. Thus, the priest simply becomes a dispenser of God's grace without being filled by the totality of his parishioners' individually confessed sins.

General absolution causes the people to receive God's mercy without explicitly giving away their sins, and the priest to give away God's mercy without explicitly receiving the penitents' sins. In individual absolution, penitents humbly empty themselves of their sins to the priest who gladly receives their sins and then graciously fills their individual emptiness with the fullness of God's mercy.

Is a priest necessary?

Theologians may start to wonder if the role of the priest in general absolution might not even be necessary. For if the built-in duality of this sacrament, which so clearly represents Christ's kenotic example of emptying his self in order to be filled by our sins is absent, then the next step is to say that the priest need not be present.

If the priest no longer hears sins confessed, he ends up as a simple dispenser of anonymous grace to people with anonymous sins. The Christ-like personalistic approach of the shepherd sacrificing for, knowing, caring, loving, and thus forgiving his sheep is supplanted by that of the figurehead lord of the manor appearing before his people to pronounce God's mercy upon them during a moment of communal liberation from individually caused sins. Why have an ordained priest preside over general absolution, if the unique priestly role in the sacrament of penance (receive, forgive and carry your people's sins) is whittled away to presiding over a penitential service from which you will carry away nothing because you have not been told what to receive, forgive and carry?

It is quite rare to ever hear about a priest who shatters the priest-penitent bond by divulging something he knows but is never supposed to divulge due to the confessional seal. Any priest who sundered such a sacred trust would have to face our Lord and thereby be held accountable for his grave error. All priests are rightly held to defend the inviolate integrity of confessional secrecy, even to the point of martyrdom.

But what about a priest who never or rarely hears the confession of sins? He has no sins of others for which to die. What seal is there for him to protect of sins which have never been confessed to him due to his promotion of general absolution? Our Lord might say to a priest violator of the seal of individual confession: "You broke the bond between yourself and your penitent." Our Lord might also say to a priest who prefers general absolution: "You never even had a bond between yourself and your penitents. You gave them my graced mercy en masse, but they gave you back nothing specific or tangible. You rarely, if ever, knew the specific sadnesses of your people caused by their own sins. How could you call yourself their pastor?"

Priest saints as role models

Saint John Vianney's faithful service as the Curé of Ars and the 20th Century Italian Capuchin Saint Leopold of Castlenovo (d. 1942, canonized October 16, 1983) who spent 40 years in a Padua confessional are just two examples of holy priests who devoted their ordained lives to the sacrament of penance in its individual expression, and thereby willingly received the burden of thousands of confessed sins upon their own shoulders. Would the Church ever have thought of canonizing these priests if they had solely or usually presided over general absolution? How would those priests, in that hypothetical scenario, be seen as examples of heroic, sacrificial sanctity?

We know there has been in the United States a decrease of individual confessions which seems to coincide with the rise in the use of general absolution. We know there has also been a decline in the number of priests. Might there not be some kind of causal correlations between and among fewer individual confessions, more general absolution and fewer priests?

A priest who has less direct experience of being a reconciling priest, "I absolve you" (plural) as opposed to "I absolve you" (singular) will give fewer direct reasons to a prospective seminarian as to why that man ought to dedicate his life to being a priest. When the prospective seminarian eagerly asks his pastor, "What is it like to hear confessions?", his pastor would have to honestly respond, "I don't know because they are so rare. I prefer general absolution." The young man who looks to the priest as the physician of individual souls, and aspires to become that living sacramental embodiment of reconciliation, will be discouraged from looking further.

Matrimony mirrors Penance

The priest acts in persona Christi. When dealing with an individual penitent, the priest clearly carries the glory and burden of following Christ's example of receiving sin by being emptied of mercy. We see a similar reality in Christian marriage wherein husbands and wives mutually take into their lives their spouse's sins, defects and failures while at the same time mutually pledging to give themselves to their spouse in a self-emptying way until death.

The priest confers God's mercy (what more can a priest confer?) and receives the sins, defects and failures of the penitent. Christian husbands and wives give the totality of their own personhood to their spouse and receive back the totality of their spouse. Christ gave himself completely for us on the cross and received in return the full impact of our sins.

To accept non-emergency general absolution as a normal and suitable celebration of the sacrament of penance is to tamper with the kenotic meaning of the priesthood, the necessity of frequent spouse-to-spouse reconciliation and the power of Christ's paschal sacrifice. The priest is a merciful sacramental shepherd who willingly knows his flock's sin by name, just as sacramental spouses intimately know each other's faults by name and just as Christ mercifully calls us by our names to deeper conversion.

It would be strange if spouses acknowledged to each other their pettiness, selfishness and so on, but would apologize to each other only in the presence of other people, whether that be a marriage counselor or their bridge group, without telling those people anything at all about the specific spousal setbacks. Something of the God-given goodness of marital integrity (spouses acknowledging their faults and apologizing to each other in private) would be lost if intra-marital reconciliation became extra-marital reconciliation without any kind of disclosure about what needs to be reconciled.

In the sacrament of penance a penitent confesses to a priest specific sins, receives a specific penance and is personally granted God's absolution. The God-given architectural integrity of our human dignity is maintained best through the divine dialogue of Christ and the sinner, the priest and the penitent. Individual absolution preserves and enhances our personhood in a way which general absolution obscures. Canon 962 1., the third of the only three canons from the 1983 Code of Canon Law which deal with general absolution, teaches this very point:

For a member of the Christian faithful validly to enjoy sacramental absolution given to many at one time, it is required that this person not only be suitably disposed, but also at the same time intend to confess individually the serious sins which at present cannot be so confessed.

The individuality of the sacraments

It is nearly impossible to imagine simultaneous sacramental action in six of the seven sacraments. For example, at best, an ambidextrous priest could baptize two persons at the same time only if they had the same name. How could one priest anoint his sick and confirm his catechumens without anointing them individually? How would a priest give first Holy Communion to the class of communicants without giving each child Communion individually? How could a priest responsibly witness several couples simultaneously reciting the consent of their matrimonial vows? How could one bishop lay both of his hands on the heads of multiple seminarians and ordain them simultaneous priests?

There seems to be a one-to-one built-in order as to how Catholics normally celebrate the sacraments. The sacrament of penance, however, is the only sacrament with the capacity to confer sacramental grace simultaneously to more than one recipient. In order to safeguard the unique dignity of this sacrament (its easy ability to be quickly conferred upon many people simultaneously) and the personal dignity of those participating in this sacrament, general absolution is permissible only in extraordinary emergency situations as outlined in Canons 960-962.

The individual celebration of the sacrament of penance will regain renewed use only through the grace of God and the patience of priests. Lazy priests unwilling to spend hours in the confessional will not attract penitents. Priests who are rarely penitents themselves will place little value on promoting the sacrament of penance as an assured means of growth in holiness. Rather, priests need to faithfully and frequently preach the powerful and liberating truth of God's abundant mercy. The gospel truth must be proclaimed that to live forever is what we live for now and that the sacrament of penance enables us to live holy lives now. Priests need to be regular penitents receiving from a brother priest our Lord's mercy. Priests need to always be for the penitent the good shepherd seeking the lost sheep, the father of the prodigal son welcoming him home, our Lord with the adulterous woman mercifully sending her home. When general absolution is used only as it is intended in emergencies, individual absolution will once again be the privileged and promised location of authentic and integral Christian conversion, one reconciled sinner after one reconciled sinner, with one priest giving that one penitent undivided, singular attention. n