Excerpts from California Catholic Daily:
The pope “is surely well aware of the sharp decline in the number of confessions over the past few decades,” wrote McBrien (the Sept. 21, 2007 Wall Street Journal reported that in 2005 only 26% of U.S. Catholics went to Confession.) But, McBrien wondered, is the pope aware of a “provocative article” on Confession in the Feb. 29 edition of Commonweal. In “The Empty Box: Why Catholics Skip Confession,” Franciscan Fr. Raymond C. Mann, a former missionary to Bolivia and currently at St. Anthony Shrine in Boston, described the tremendous decline in Confessions he has experienced over a 50-year period.
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For many of these Catholics, according to Mann, “sufficient knowledge and freedom [two necessary requirements for the commission of a sin] were no longer active parts of the equation. If you broke the law, you had to confess it. Confession before Communion became something akin to taking a Saturday night bath before going to Sunday Mass.”
