Pope bans confessions on phone, Web
The Coptic Orthodox Pope Shenuda III, that is. “Phoning it in” is, of course, slang for doing something halfway. According to an AFP news-service dispatch, the pope decided the faithful shouldn’t be phoning it in when it comes to penance. His objection was based on privacy grounds:
CAIRO (AFP) – Egypt’s Coptic pope has banned the faithful from confessing their sins to priests over the telephone because intelligence agents might be listening in, a newspaper reported on Friday.
“Confessions over the telephone are forbidden, because there is a chance the telephones are monitored and the confessions will reach state security,” the independent Al-Masri Al-Yom quoted Pope Shenuda III as saying.
The leader of the Coptic minority also said confessions over the Internet were invalid because they might be read by websurfers.
I always thought 1-800-FORGIVE would be a good number, if BXVI gave the go-ahead.
Very interesting! A couple of quick thoughts:
* I wonder if any techie security geeks would dispute the pope’s views that there is no reasonable way to ensure the privacy of communications over the Internet (or via digital telephones, for that matter). I don’t know enough about the technology, and understand that hackers break into places that they shouldn’t, but otoh istm that “bugging” a traditional confessional might be easier than hacking into emails or a chat session.
* The purpose of the “seal of the confessional”, I think, is to protect the sinner. If the penitant is willing to bear the risk of intrusion by confessing over the Internet, istm that the church authorities shouldn’t have a problem with it. In traditional confession, church authorities provide a reasonably private facility (e.g.a confessional in the church building) for confession to take place. Istm that commercially available security products can provide the same sort of reasonable “facility” electronically.
* I can’t think of a theological reason that using trechnology as the medium of communication for the sacrament of reconciliation would render it invalid.
I’d rather have intelligence agents listening to my confession than the Church Ladies.
In the local parish here, you can hear most of the confessions because the confessional door is not soundproofed, and the priests are deaf. Plus the confessional is located at the front of the church rather than off to the side and the sound carries back out into the sanctuary.
I pointed this out to someone on the parish council years ago, and she said that there weren’t enough people going to confession to worry about sound-proofing the door.
“In the local parish here, you can hear most of the confessions because the confessional door is not soundproofed, and the priests are deaf. Plus the confessional is located at the front of the church rather than off to the side and the sound carries back out into the sanctuary.”
In the church in Michigan in which I grew up (St. John the Evangelist in Jackson), the confessionals weren’t all that soundproofed, either. There were three compartments. The middle one was for the priest, and the other two, on other side of him, were for people confessing their sins. If you’d made it into the confessional but it wasn’t your turn yet, you’d kneel there in the dark until you heard a little panel slide back, then you knew he was ready for you. While waiting (as often as not in dread), you could *just about but not quite* hear what the other person was confessing – you could hear the murmers but not make out the words. But you could here the priest’s end of the dialogue perfectly. One was left to wonder, based on the priest’s remarks (some of them quite pointed and heated) just what the poor sap across the way was confessing. :-)
If an old-fashioned party line phone could be used, would that count as group reconciliation?
I would think that confessions-via-phone, or in an internet chat room, would have a more troubling (and less high-tech) vulnerability — they would be more susceptible to fraud. I suppose you can’t always be certain that the man who hears your in-person confession is an ordained priest, but most of the time you can be reasonably sure. And I guess you could be pretty confident if you were speaking via phone to a priest you knew well and whose voice you recognized. But you’d have no way of knowing who was on the other end of a hotline phone call or an internet chat. What if the absolution you received was invalid? Maybe it wouldn’t count against the penitent, but I wouldn’t want to take the chance.
I’m with you, Mollie – if the church outsourced the entire phone operation to Bangalore, how would we know? :-)
Re: confessing via the Internet (computer-to-computer) – one thing we’ve learned is that *anything* sent via email or chat gets backed up and saved somewhere. A written record of my confessions doesn’t bear contemplation!
This is a funny video about automatic confession:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgmQM9cDPHk