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The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession, by John Cornwell
PDF Ebook The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession, by John Cornwell
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Confession is a crucial ritual of the Catholic Church, offering absolution of sin and spiritual guidance to the faithful. Yet this ancient sacrament has also been a source of controversy and oppression, culminating, as prize-winning historian John Cornwell reveals in The Dark Box, with the scandal of clerical child abuse. Drawing on extensive historical sources, contemporary reports, and first-hand accounts, Cornwell takes a hard look at the long evolution of confession.
The papacy made annual, one-on-one confession obligatory for the first time in the 13th century. In the era that followed, confession was a source of spiritual consolation as well as sexual and mercenary scandal. During the 16th century, the Church introduced the confession box to prevent sexual solicitation of women, but this private space gave rise to new forms of temptation, both for penitents and confessors. Yet no phase in the story of the sacrament has had such drastic consequences as a historic decree by Pope Pius X in 1910. In reaction to the spiritual perils of the new century, Pius sought to safeguard the Catholic faithful by lowering the age at which children made their first confession from their early teens to seven, while exhorting all Catholics to confess frequently instead of annually. This sweeping, inappropriately early imposition of the sacrament gave priests an unprecedented and privileged role in the lives of young boys and girls—a role that a significant number would exploit in the decades that followed.
A much-needed account of confession’s fraught history, The Dark Box explores the sources of the sacrament’s harm and shame, while recognizing its continuing power to offer consolation and reconciliation.
- Sales Rank: #443440 in Books
- Published on: 2014-03-04
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.25" h x 1.05" w x 5.50" l, .95 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 320 pages
From Booklist
Cornwell was raised Catholic and began studying for the priesthood at an early age. While in seminary, a priest attempted to seduce him during confession. Although Cornwell subsequently left the church, he occasionally wonders whether his journey masks a search for the lost abusers of one’s childhood. Read as a personal odyssey, his book is quite interesting. Cornwell is less successful proving in any rigorous historical or social-scientific manner his provocative claim that the church’s 1910 decision to lower the age for confession from 14 to 7, and increase its frequency, eventually resulted in the sex-abuse scandal that plagues the church today. That said, he asks important questions about confession’s potential to inflict lasting psychological damage on children with the concept of sin and evil, especially as they concern one’s physical body and natural urges, and the requirement to confess transgressions are introduced at too early an age. Cornwell’s book also underscores the sad fact that some priests used the cover of the confessional for their evil purposes. --Christopher McConnell
Review
Financial Times
“A meticulously researched, carefully wrought and quietly furious anathema upon the Catholic Church.”
Guardian, UK
“[A] powerful, persuasive, and disturbing book....The Dark Box is a major contribution to the Catholic church’s examination of conscience about the roots and circumstances of sexual abuse.”
Sunday Times, UK
"[An] absorbing history of the confessional...forceful."
Observer, UK
“The Dark Box is a powerful, impassioned treatise about the dangers of confession.”
Times Literary Supplement
“A short but explosive book which is part religious history, part autobiography, part journalistic expose, and part manifesto for change...The Dark Box is a book that anyone concerned with the future of the Catholic Church should take seriously.”
Irish Independent
“A powerful and disturbing addition to the literature on the subject, and lays bare the dysfunctional nature of a church which has still come nowhere near to facing its own self-inflicted demons.”
Buffalo News
"This book, perhaps threatening to some, performs a signal service. It is an examination of conscience for the Catholic Church about what it has done and what it has failed to do in the matter of helping Catholics come to terms with forgiveness.”
The Spectator, UK
“I have a confession to make. I really enjoyed this book...smartly, smoothly written.”
National Catholic Reporter
“Cornwell uses his formidable talents to reveal the sacrament in a complete, compelling and original way.... His writing is informed by faith and unfaith as well as intellect and passion.”
U.S. Catholic
“A lucid and honest history of the development of sacramental confession, plus some rather balanced observations on its uses and abuses…this book delivers what it promises: a good history of the development of the sacrament of confession and its uses and misuses in the Catholic world.”
Commercial Dispatch, Ohio
“There may have been those who benefited from confession, and even more who found it a mechanical process, compared to those who found themselves thrown into sexual guilt and confusion because of it. Critics will say this book depicts only the darker side of the dark box, but Cornwell's church would be better off understanding the issues expressed in this thoughtful and heartfelt book.”
Kirkus
“A haunting study, both scholarly and personal, that situates the practice of confession as the source of the Catholic Church’s clerical abuse.... Enlisting a legion of voices attesting to their ‘soul murder’ by confessional priests, Cornwell offers another strong indictment of the church.”
John Heilpern, contributing editor, Vanity Fair
“With his brilliant The Dark Box, John Cornwell, a most fair-minded hammer and conscience of the Catholic Church, has gone to the terrifying roots of clerical sexual abuse throughout Catholicism's history. He has made the nightmare link between sacramental confession and the abuse of children, while anticipating the future of a church pre-occupied with sex, sin and damnation. I cannot imagine a more timely book than The Dark Box in Pope Francis' brave new inclusive age of love, reconciliation and social conscience.”
Garry Wills, author of Why I Am a Catholic
“A maxim often cited from the fifth-century theologian Prosper of Aquitaine is Lex orandi lex credendi -- the way we pray is the way we believe. In accord with this norm, the fact that Catholics have by and large given up going to confession means that they have stopped believing in it. Cornwell tells us why we should.”
Gary Kearns, Maynooth University College, Ireland
“An elegant and profound reflection upon what turned out to be a tragic experiment in church discipline.”
David Lodge
"A brilliant book, and an important one. Confession turns out to be the key that explains so much that is discreditable in the history of the Catholic Church, especially over the last 100 years. You show that "Saint" Pius X created a kind of spiritual totalitarian state similar to the secular dictatorships of the same period, complete with a loyalty oath to the leader. The practice of frequent confession and communion which he initiated, instilled in Catholics from an impressionable early age, combined with the moral theology of mortal sin, ensured a cowed obedience, or encouraged an Orwellian double-speak, until, with John XXIII and Vatican II, Catholics suddenly started thinking for themselves and deserted confession in droves. Interesting that it was a sexual issue, contraception, not a doctrinal one, that caused the old
consensus to collapse."
About the Author
John Cornwell is a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. The author of the New York Times bestseller Hitler’s Pope, he lives in Draughton, England.
Most helpful customer reviews
29 of 35 people found the following review helpful.
Catholics should know what they are subscribing to!
By Gerard P.
What would you think of a person who takes an emetic, vomits and then eats her own vomit? And also eats the vomit of colleagues? Seriously disturbed, you might say? But this is St. Theresa of Avila, practising 'self-mortification'. And she is revered precisely FOR such acts, not in spite of them. What would you think of a man who cuts down his apple trees in order to protect hungry children from the sin of stealing apples? Weird you might say? But this is the Cure d'Ars, who as recently as 2011 was nominated by Pope Benedict 'Patron of the Year of the Priesthood'. In the context of confession, and the role of the confessor throughout history, the book runs through a number of such 'saints' - and their histories sound very much like the case histories that psychiatrists and psychotherapists deal with. Why are they highlighted in this context? Well, it is all about SIN. Indeed, for long periods of its history, and arguably today, the Catholic church has been obsessed about sin. Not about doing good, let it be noted, but about the avoidance of sin. And an aspect of this sin-culture is the business of SCRUPLES, which induced some alleged saints to do very weird things indeed, like sleeping on stone floors in churches, practising self-flagellation and so on. Or eating vomit.
Reflectively read, the book gives us many insights on recent Catholic history. Why was the Catholic church so concerned for the welfare of child abusers, for instance, and not for the welfare of the victims? Because confession was all about the damage done to the soul of the perpetrator, with scant heed paid to the the victim. Why is the sin of masturbation considerably higher in the scale than the sin of rape? In cases of rape, the seed at least ends up in 'the appropriate vessel'. Any we learn, en passant, that the main victim when a virgin is raped is not the girl but her father, because rape damages his daughter's chances of a good marriage... Which again shows a more or less complete indifference to the actual victims of sin: traditionally at least, it was the sinner who was more important.
Cornwell upturns many stones and discovers some sleazy things under them: well-documented use of the confessional to solicit sex, for instance. Although younger than Cornwell, I can confirm a lot of what he writes from personal experience in the confessional; as does field research done by Cornwell. He emphasises the 'casuistic' attitude of Catholic 'moralists', who sound much like the Pharisees that our Saviour condemned. But their teaching became official church teaching. (Don't worry about technical terms such as 'casuistic' if you are not familiar with them: they are explained in context.)
We have freedom of religion nowadays - rather unique in western history, actually. Anyone can choose to be a Catholic today but practising Catholics should take care to be informed on what they are committing themselves to: this book serves that purpose with regard to confession.
Let me finish with a word of advice to any potential Cure d'Ars out there: GIVE your apples to impoverished village children. That would prevent them from sinning and at the same time prevent them from going hungry... That is what true Christian charity implies, loving, caring for, giving. Not cutting down trees...
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
A most informative work. "Confession", now know as "Reconciliation", very different in the past.
By D L Keleher, MD
In antiquit� th� Father, St John Chrysostom, according to Quasten, frequently called on the people to seek forgiveness by partaking in the Eucharist. There is no trace to suggest that he was aware of one on one, in private, with a priest, outside of Mass, for the ordinary Christian to regularly seek absolution for daily transgressions. In monasteries and other religious houses there developed what was called "chapter" where the community would gather at various intervals to hear self accusation as a spiritual exercise. That might have been what gradually leaked out into the general community. Anyone from the first millennium would be puzzled by the little closets that are in churches today.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Exposed!
By John M. Gravois
As someone with an extensive background in Catholic studies, i learned a lot by reading this book. It makes a well documented, carefully constructed case for how a sacrament intended to bring peace and comfort to weary souls, later became an instrument capable of causing much psychological and at times even physical harm. The book maintains the scholarly high ground, when it could easily have descended into pure sensationalism. It deserves to be widely read and studied.
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