The Seal of Confession

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 28, 9 July 1903, Page 20

The Seal of Confession

Our exchanges by the last English mail (says the Tasmanian ' Monitor ') contain some interesting particulars relative to a Canadian priest's refusal to break the seal of the confessional. From these papers we leain that a strange legal argument has been caused at Montreal by the refusal of a village priest to tell wiliat a man, accused oi murder, had told him under the seal of confession. The prisoner is a wealthy farmer of the historical village of St. Eustache — historical because the abortive French-Canadian struggle for fieedomfrom England's rule began there in 1837. His name is Belanget. He was accused of the murder of his brother-in-law, named Sequin, another wealthy larmer, and after being arrested admitted to Chiel X P M'Caskill, of the Piovincial Detective Force, that he had committed the murder because the dead man had dishonored his twenty,H'«ir old daughter. After he had been in confinement for some days, however, he sent for the cure of the village. ihe Rev. H Cousineau, and told him in the presence of his son that he desired to retract the remarks he had made about hib daughter, as they were not true, and as he had simply made them because it was suggested to him that it he could make people belie\e sifich a story he would go free He asked the priest to tell someone who would be able to communicate with the newspapers of the retraction he had made After that he asked his son to lea\ c him alone with the priest. During the prelyninary investigation the priest w T as willing to tell word for word what the aceueed has said about his daughter, but refused to tell the remainder, which he claimed had been told him under the seal of confession, and after the law\er for the Crown had threatened Father Cotisme.w with prison for contempt of court the magistrate uphold the priest.

Theie is talk of cairying the question to a higher court St Eustache, which is situated in Deux Montagues County, in the archdiocese of Montreal, is a place of much more importance than the word ' village ' as used in Canada would coin ey to Tasmanians. Compared with our centres of population St Eustache would be a large town Father Cousineau, the cure, is assisted by another priest Schools with about 400 pupils afe conducted by the religious of St. Viateur and the Sisters of Notre Tame The Crow™ Prosecutor in the murder trial threatened to take the priest's refusal to break the seal of the confessional to a higher court, but that will be a futile course At e\erv risk to himself Father Cousineau must and will preserve that sacred confidence placed in him by the accused man as inviolate. The seal ot the confessional has never been broken, and before to-day priests have boon done to death and put in chains and cast into prison for refusing to obey orders which no human power can enforce.