Confession: Catholics, Repentance, and Forgiveness in America

Confession is a history of penance as a virtue and a sacrament in the United States from about 1634, when Catholicism arrived in Maryland, to 2015, fifty years after the major theological and disciplinary changes initiated by the Second Vatican Council. Patrick W. Carey argues that the Catholic theology and practice of penance, so much opposed by the inheritors of the Protestant Reformation, kept alive the biblical penitential language in the United States at least until the mid-1960s when Catholic penitential discipline changed. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American Catholics created institutions that emphasized, in opposition to Protestant culture, confession to a priest as the normal and almost exclusive means of obtaining forgiveness. Preaching, teaching, catechesis, and parish revival-type missions stressed sacramental confession and the practice became a widespread routine in American Catholic life. After the Second Vatican Council, the practice of sacramental confession declined suddenly. The post-Vatican II history of penance, influenced by the Council's reforms and by changing American moral and cultural values, reveals a major shift in penitential theology; moving from an emphasis on confession to emphasis on reconciliation. Catholics make up about a quarter of the American population, and thus changes in the practice of penance had an impact on the wider society. In the fifty years since the Council, penitential language has been overshadowed increasingly by the language of conflict and controversy. In today's social and political climate, Confession may help Americans understand how far their society has departed from the penitential language of the earlier American tradition, and consider the advantages and disadvantages of such a departure.

About the Author :
Patrick W. Carey is Emeritus Professor of Theology at Marquette University. He was the William J. Kelly Chair in Catholic Theology, the former Chair of Marquette's Department of Theology, a past president of the American Catholic Historical Association, author of over thirty articles on American Catholic life and thought, and the author or editor of twenty books, including his 2010 intellectual biography, Avery Cardinal Dulles, SJ: A Model Theologian.

Review :
"Dr. Carey in a wise and learned study reveals the historical dynamism inherent in the American Catholic community as it has intersected its penitential and sacramental practices with Protestant-Catholic relationships, the public debates over religion, society and privacy, new knowledge engendered by history and psychology, and the social and ecclesial changes of the 1960s. This is a landmark work by one of Catholicism's most astute observers."--Joseph P. Chinnici, President Emeritus and Professor of History, Franciscan School of Theology "With vast learning and meticulous research, Patrick Carey traces the momentous changes in the idea of sin, the sacrament of penance, and the practice of confession and absolution over four centuries. It's a story of priests and theologians, prelates and psychologists, and the earnest men and women who once lined the walls of churches waiting to confess their sin. It's also a story of loss and recovery, a masterly work by a distinguished historian."--E. Brooks Holifield, author of Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War "Originally conceived and highly readable, Confession ranges ecumenically and with encyclopedic rigor over four centuries of the theology and practice of penance in America. Patrick Carey has written a book that historians of Catholicism in America, ethicists and moral theologians, liturgists, and scholars of American religious history will have to read. There is nothing else like it."--William L. Portier, Mary Ann Spearin Chair of Catholic Theology, University of Dayton