When was confession started

Less proves more. He nixed the Magna Carta and recentralised power to Rome away from the bishops, preferring them to properly train confessors in more rigorous extraction techniques. Confessors were encouraged to interrogate penitents about their sins and not merely leave confession to the volunteering of information.

This interrogation of penitents would later ricochet because it led some to take advantage of penitents, once weakness was exposed, and facilitated confessors to invert information and resort to flagrant sexual badgering.

Another problem with the forensic probing of sin was that it could tempt penitents to commit sins they had never previously heard of. We need to back up a few centuries also and enter the maze of decrees to understand how we ever ended up inside the box. We owe the physical confessional to Cardinal Charles Borromeo, in Borromeo became an abbot at the age of 12, aided by the fact that his uncle was Pope Pius IV.

He invented the wooden confessional box to thwart physical contact between the confessor and the penitent. We owe the practice of seven-year-olds making confession collectively to Pius X, who took office in ; he sliced the age at which children would commence confession and communion. Pope Pius X was an anti-intellectual, robust restorer of Christ and martinet for the vocation of priesthood.

He was a practical, anti-pomp pope, who demanded near military discipline and deference to superiors from priests and penitents alike. He banned newspapers and radio in seminaries, restricted access to secular education for seminarians and cut out community engagement.

His approach emulated the earlier example of a bizarre French country priest, Jean-Marie Vianney. Vianney practised a rare form of self-flagellation to clear his parish of the devil. This included spending chunks of the night sleeping prone on a cold floor, whipping himself until his blood decorated the walls and living off a single pan of potatoes per week.

Much later, after Pius X, came birth control, which evidently drove a wedge between the faithful and confession. When we consider the breadth of the history of confession, it resembles a series of complex clumps floating, submerging and reconstituting down a river of centuries.

But it could be a long time before spiritual consolation comes to the minds of those psychologically scarred by its earlier iteration. Subscribe now! Mike Aquilina is the author of many books. Visit fathersofthechurch.

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Improve this answer. Pavel Pavel 3, 2 2 gold badges 22 22 silver badges 53 53 bronze badges. This account seems implausible given that the Eastern Orthodox practice of confession is essentially the same as the Roman Catholic. What exactly is implausible? If it's the origin of individual confession in Ireland, I'll try to find some other sources, preferebly some explaining how it spread throughout Europe.

I've read at least two books on this topic, one of them written by an Orthodox priest unfortunately, the books were in Czech, so I can't just link them. BenDunlap By all accounts I've heard, this is one of the few practices which the East learned from the West. Those have happened you know. Alypius Good point.