Recently, LifeSite News published disturbing news: “The Washington state Senate passed legislation to throw priests in jail for almost a full year for maintaining the Seal of Confession. Senator Noel Frame, a Democrat, is on her third attempt to force priests to divulge what they hear during Confession if it concerns abuse.”
Notice the last four words above: if it concerns abuse... Keep in mind we in the traditional Catholic world have been fighting clergy-abuse of children. That means those of us who defend the seal of confession are not looking for a “work-around” in hiding child-abuse when the predator is lay or clergy. In fact, in past articles, I have been highlighting the fact there has been 5–10x under-reporting in dioceses regarding the priest-on-child scandals, as seen in the official reports of Pennsylvania and Illinois with mountains of pages of research and names of abusive clergy.
Although the traditional world has had some horrible clergy-scandals, we find that 99% of the time it is the leftists covering-up and covering-for the abuse of children. We see this in both Church and State cases.
That is why I can confidently write what I think is really happening in Washington State: Democrats are executing a feigned-notion of being “anti-abuse” just to break the seal of confession in every case the courts desire. Why? Because if you can get priests to break the seal, then those priests go to hell. Furthermore, the lay folks lose their hope in the sacraments altogether. That is the goal of the leftists. They have never been interested in protecting children.
Like abortion, the notion of breaking the seal of confession only in cases deemed “safe, rare and legal” (as in, stopping child abuse) will again be the devil’s foot into the door to completely destroy priest-penitent privilege which has historically been as strong as lawyer-client privilege even in Protestant countries like our own United States. (Obviously, I would be against the breaking of the seal of confession even if it was to be proposed to be eliminated only in cases of abuse. As much as I might tell the abuser to turn himself into the police, I would never break the seal.)
And neither would most priests. I know that I often compare neo-con non-trad priests to us trad-priests on this site and on my podcasts. But I’m happy to report to you today that both conservative and traditional priests stand as a united-front against the breaking of the seal of confession, even for the most seemingly-justified cases. I know of no good priest who would break the seal.
The reason almost no priest will ever break the seal of confession is first of all because it is Jesus’ information—not mine. Secondly, we are under oath not to break that seal. Thirdly, we almost always forget confessions. Fourthly, we are excommunicated if we ever break the seal, even to the point we have to fly to the penitentiary in Rome in order to get our penance and re-communicated if we were ever to break the seal.
This means that even a harsh law like what we’re seeing develop in Washington State will land good priests in prison before we break the sacred seal of your confessions. In fact, even mediocre priests would rather go to prison than be excommunicated and go to hell. Yes, we really do take the seal of confession that seriously. Again, it is Jesus’ information, not mine the priest’s.
So Washington State can do their best. They’ll only persecute us which will make us grow stronger.
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