When Rights Conflict: Sex Abuse Reporting & the Confessional
By Mark Michael, The Living Church:
As the United Kingdom considers implementing a mandatory reporting law for child sexual abuse, the Church of England’s eight traditionalist Anglo-Catholic bishops have publicly urged that an exemption be granted for disclosures made during sacramental confession, a proposal considered but formally rejected last year by the government-sponsored Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA).
In a four-page statement filed August 14 as part of a formal consultation, the Council of Bishops of the Society emphasizes the seal of the confessional’s healing role and suggests that disclosures of abuse in the confessional are very rare, while warning that an abrogation of the seal by law would be a violation of religious freedom.
“The loss of the Seal would take away from survivors a safe space for disclosure and would be doing so against the incredibly remote contingency, and unproven concern, that perpetrators will abuse the Seal. This will not make us a safer church. Rather it will take away from many victims and survivors a place in which a journey of healing can begin,” the bishops state.
“Confidentiality is an essential ingredient of Confession because we regard the conversation to [be] between Christ and the penitent and it must therefore remain ‘sealed’ by the sacrament. To qualify it in certain circumstances would be to undermine the sacrament altogether and would represent a major theological problem for us.
“We therefore regard the retention of the Seal of Confession to be a matter of religious freedom and conscience. We stress that these are deeply held matters of religious faith and conviction, based on many centuries of practice throughout the world.”
The bishops note their strong support for “all efforts to combat and eradicate child sexual abuse, including those being taken through the IICSA process,” and register a “deep revulsion at the many examples of child sexual abuse in the Church.”
Protecting the confidentiality of the seal would, the bishops state, stand alongside the IICSA-recommended exemption from mandated disclosures for consensual sexual contact between a child aged between 13 and 15 and another individual not more than three years apart from the child. A child in the U.K. is considered legally able to consent to sexual contact at the age of 16.
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