In Colm Toibin’s latest novel, “Brooklyn,’’ the two lovers Eilis and Tony make love out of wedlock. They are Roman Catholic, it is the 1950s. They are in love and intend to marry - in fact, they do marry - but Eilis immediately insists they both go to confession and tell a priest they have sinned.
That was then. For a variety of reasons, including the reforms of Vatican II, the institution of Saturday evening Mass, and modern Catholics’ more catholic understanding of what sin is, the ritual of individual confession is disappearing in the modern church. Most Catholics over 60 remember lines of parishioners snaking out the church door, waiting to confess. “Practically overnight, the lines on Saturday afternoons vanished and the hours appointed for confession dwindled,’’ Boston College historian James O’Toole wrote in 2000, “as even the most ardent Catholics stayed away.’’
It may be coming back. Three years ago, Donald Wuerl, the archbishop of Washington, D.C., launched a Lenten program called The Light Is on for You, backstopped by a radio and subway ad campaign that the
With every church open for confession, parishioners could avoid the potential embarrassment of speaking with their local priest. In “Brooklyn,’’ the Italian-American Tony suggests, half-jokingly, to his Irish girlfriend that she confess at his church, where the priest will have trouble understanding her.
The Washington program succeeded, and several cities, including Baltimore, Toledo, Ohio, and Bridgeport, Conn., launched similar efforts. In late fall, during the four weeks before Christmas, the Boston Archdiocese will launch its own Wednesday evening effort to revive confession. As in D.C., it hopes to use lay media to broaden the message beyond churchgoers. “We’re targeting people that may have drifted away over the years,’’ says auxiliary bishop Robert Hennessey. “This is a ‘welcome home’ kind of thing.’’
Let me confess. I am not Catholic and the various Protestant denominations I have trucked with over the years use the General Confession, a collective prayer sandwiched in between parish announcements and passing the hat. It goes without saying that the once-gracious language, e.g., “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done,’’ has been awkwardly modernized.
If you are daydreaming about the Red Sox or Conan O’Brien, as I so often am in church, the General Confession is just a cloud of words. If you pay attention to them, well, it’s confession, a small but important step toward the forgiveness of sin.
Make no mistake: Confession works. Talking helps. No one really understands why “talk therapy’’ works as well or better than many pills for some psychological afflictions, but it does. The sacrament is freighted down by two millennia of church doctrine I would never claim to understand, but its effectiveness is embedded in one of our most common figures of speech: It felt good to get that off my chest.
What does the future hold? BC’s O’Toole isn’t convinced that confession is coming back. “I hear about these experiments in various cities,’’ he says. “I know they are having some impact, but they aren’t generating the kind of numbers that would satisfy a sociologist.’’
Individual confession, he points out, is only about a thousand years old: “Before that, there was public penance, where you stood on the church steps in sackcloth and ashes. Now we may be at a hinge point again, with the system of private confession losing its cultural purchase.’’
“What the church most needs is a new way of expressing what was the basis of confession,’’ O’Toole adds. “That we periodically need to say ‘We’re sorry,’ and have someone say, ‘That’s OK; God and others forgive you for that.’ We need a new sacramental expression for those insights about human nature.’’
Amen.
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com. 
