“The Seal: A Priest’s Story”

by Brian Kelly August 27th, 2009

This is a very interesting interview that Zenit News had with a priest in Oregon whose hearing of a confession in prison was secretly taped by order of the local DA. The issue being challenged is the seal of the sacrament between confessor and penitent, a privilege that was always protected in this country both by common law and the freedom of religion guaranteed in the First and Fourth Amendment. What the DA did here was not only an egregious violation of natural justice and respect for religion but it was illegal, ergo criminal.

SALEM, Oregon, AUG. 26, 2009 (Zenit.org).- When Father Timothy Mockaitis heard inmate Conan Wayne Hale’s sacramental confession on April 22, 1996, he had no idea it was being recorded.

He also didn’t know that the event would spur an unprecedented legal case that attempted to demonstrate that a violation of the seal of the confessional was an infringement on the free exercise of religion guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Father Mockaitis details these pivotal events in his new book, “The Seal: A Priest’s Story.” Read the full interview here.

Tags: seal of confession

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 27th, 2009 at 9:42 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Dan Guenzel

There is a great and unjustly-forgotten film from 1962 called THE COUNTERFEIT TRAITOR, with William Holden and Lilli Palmer which has a most interesting sequence in it.

Taking place during the second world war the heroine, played by Miss Palmer, has pangs of conscience about the information she has been secretly giving American and British agents, who have been using that information to drop bombs on targets where civilians are living. She visits the Church in the little German town she is living in and decides to go to Confession, not knowing she has been followed by the Gestapo. One of the two gestapo men contrives to sneak his way into the confessional to hear her confession.

It’s a brilliant scene from a brilliant movie. And in light of what happened to this priest and penitent in Oregon, very prophetic.
Thomas Donnelly

Thank you, Dan, for your comment, and for remembering the title of the movie, which I had forgotten.

That scene has always puzzled me. As I recall (and my memory may not be fully trustworthy here after the passage of 47 years), in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday, with nobody else in the church (except for the secretly lurking Gestapo agent), Lilli enters a priestless confessional and presses a buzzer to summon a priest. Is that the way they did Confession in Germany? And if so, why didn’t a real priest respond to the buzzer? Also, did small-town German churches have access to buzzer technology in those days?

It certainly was a morally complex movie (it also featured excellent cinematography and was filmed in Technicolor, which was not common in those days). Purporting (correctly, I think) to be a true story about a Swedish businessman (an armaments salesman played by William Holden), the film opened with a voice-over by Holden explaining that since Sweden was neutral in the War, he was morally justified in selling arms to both the Axis and Allied powers. I don’t remember that that issue was ever fully explored or resolved.

A fascinating movie, indeed, although William Holden did not project a particularly Swedish persona. He was, after all, William Holden.

And yes, the incomparable Lilli Palmer. Has a more beautiful or charming woman ever graced the American cinema?

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