The Oireachtas is currently debating Government legislation which will require priests to break the seal of confession if they hear about child abuse in the confessional.
But experts and commentators have dubbed the proposed law “daft” and “pointless and gratuitously insulting to practising Catholics”.
The proposed mandatory reporting law will not explicitly mention confession because it doesn’t have to. The Seal of Confession will be automatically caught up in the mandatory reporting requirement by not being explicitly exempted.
But one of Ireland’s leading criminal barristers has said that the law is “one of the daftest ideas to come out in recent years”, and that it might be unconstitutional.
Mr Paul Anthony McDermott said on Frontline last year that the idea of breaking the Seal of Confession made little sense when confession was “anonymous; you don’t have to give your name, you don’t give your address, you don’t give your PPS number”.
Mr McDermott said: “So if that law was passed as it is, it would almost certainly be found unconstitutional, because the first thing a court would say to the Government is, why are you breaking the Seal of Confession for child abuse, but not murder?”
Meanwhile, the political editor of the Irish Times, Stephen Collins, has condemned the proposed law as “both pointless and gratuitously insulting to practising Catholics”.
“Attempting to legislate on confession would bring the law into disrepute as it would be unenforceable,” he added.
Here are some brief points on the issue we believe are pertinent:
1. This is a religious freedom issue par excellence because it involves the State setting down conditions on when Catholics can and cannot access a sacrament they believe to be divinely instituted.
2. In effect, the Government is proposing a law that no Catholic priest can obey without breaking his vows. In other words, it is passing a law that priests are duty-bound to break. It must know this.
3. The law, even on its own terms, will do no good and is likely to be counter-productive. Offenders are extremely unlikely to confess to a priest if they fear the priest will then go to the civil authorities. This will prevent priests persuading offenders to seek amends.
4. In any case, the law will be unenforceable because there is no lawful way for the State to discover what is said in the confessional and priests frequently do not know the name of the person confessing.
5. For these, among other reasons, such a move is almost without precedent in democratic countries. Historically, attacks on the seal of confession have been associated with the most anti-Catholic countries
6. It may be unconstitutional under Article 44 of Bunreacht Na hEireann which guarantees freedom of religion.
Significantly, former Supreme Court Justice, Catherine McGuinness, who is a member of the Church of Ireland, has also expressed reservations about the proposal.
Justice McGuinness, one of the first people to advocate mandatory reporting of child abuse as one of the authors of the Kilkenny incest report, said on the same Frontline programme that her report team never considered the issue of the Seal “because it didn’t seem to create a problem, it was an irrelevance”.
She said that since the Government weren’t going to mention the Seal of Confession in the legislation, she believed that the Constitutional provision relating to the protection of religious freedom would protect the seal.
