The Best-guarded Secret

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIV, Issue 7, 15 February 1906, Page 2

The Best-guarded Secret

A paragraph in the current issue of the ' N.Z. Grocer ' (Wellington) has set some sensitive Catholic readers asking themselves : 1 Are things what they seem ? Or is visions about ? ' Here is how the story, as lold by the ' Grocer,' runs :—: — ' A woman was charged at Greenwich with the unlawful possession of two Gladstone bags. A clergyman refused to give evidence which he had received from the woman "as a priest and in confidence," and which might have proved the woman's guilt. The magistrate informed him that for -this refusal he could be committed to prison for seven clays. He still declined to give evidence, and was accordingly removed to the cells. The woman was remanded. Subsequently the clergyman consented to give evidence.' A big percentage of the readers of the ' Grocer ' have probably taken this to be a case in which a Catholic priest revealed a sacramental confession, or part of a sacramental confession, to a civil court. But it was nothing of the kind. The clergyman in question was an Anglican. He described himself, in his evidence, as a ' priest ' of the Church of England. Only that and nothing more. No Catholic priest appeared in the case. The seal of sacramental confession never entered into dispute. And there was no violation of that sacred priestly trust. The substance of this correction has been sent for publication to our Wellington contemporary, and will, no doubt, appear in its columns in due course. It was said of von Moltke : 'Er konnte in sieben Sprachen— schweigen ' : he had learned the art of holding his tongue in seven languages. But the Catholic priest knows something better than the mere cunning that uses words to conceal thoughts. To him the seal of confession diners from every oiher form of human secret. 'Without the full and free consent of the penitent,, no revelation may — even to save the life of the confessor — toe made of any part of the matter of confession : of any mortal or venial sin disclosed in confession ; nor of the circumstances of any sin ; nor of any secret defect brought to light in the confession of sins ; nor of the sins of accomplices ; nor of the penance imposed ; nor, in brief, of anything that goes to make confession burdensome to the penitent. And this sigillum or seal of confession binds the priest not alone to the outside world : it binds him even towards the penitent, so that he may not by word, act, look, gesture, sign, altered demeanor, or in any other way, reveal to him outside of the sacred tribunal his sense or remembrance) of anything that he has heard within it. Moreover : the priest is bound never to disclose oven the smallest tittle of what comes under the sacred sigillum. No door— not a chink— is left open for the gradual entry of laxity into this relation of sacred confidence between penitent and priest. The silence is— apart from the full and free consent of the penitentabsolute and eternal. The old Spanish proverbial saying phrases it well : ' A secret known to two persons is God's secret ; a secret among three is all men's peoperty.' The secret of the confessional is in an especial way ' God's .secret,' for in a real sense it is less known than if it were never known. It is the figure of the sins of the truly repentant that are thrown into the deep and silent places of the sea, where they shall never again be cast up, either upon Ihc shores of time or of eternity.

History has furnished no instance in which a confessor has pToved unfaithful to this sacred trust. It has furnished many cases in which priests have faced imprisonment, and even death, Avhen occasion demanded it, rather than violate the obligation of perpetual secrecy. Thus, St. John of Nepomuk endured chains and dungeons rather than reveal the secret of confession to the tyrant Wenccslaus of Bohemia. And his lips were still sealed when the waters of the Moldav closed them in endless silence. But he is only one of many sufferers for the seal. Some of our Irish readers may, for instance, recall the long imprisonment of Father Gah an in a Dublin gaol for ' contempt of court ' arising out of Ins resolute retusal to disclose matters which could have come to his knowledge, if at all, only through the confessional. Precisely similar experiences befell Father McLaughlin, of Ayr (Scotland) many years ago, and Father Giles, of Notre Dame, Montreal (Canada), in 189(i. The locks of their prison-cells -opened at last. But the bolt was never shot that held the secrets committed to them, not as men, but as ministers of the Most High God. * The present generation has witnessed at least two cases of mo.re heroic mould. One was that of Father Kobylowlc/;, palish priest of Oranon, in Kiev (Russian Poland). In 1853 he was found guilty of murder and .sentenced to penal servitude in the mines of Siberia. Twenty years later (in 1873) the organist of his church lay dying. lie confessed that he was the murderer, that he had used Father Kobylowic/.'s gun to commit the deed of blood, and that, in a remorseful mood, he had confessed his crime to the priest. A ' pardon ' was made out. But the martyr-priest's soul had flitted before it arrived. lie had endured the slow martyrdom of the Siberian mines for twenty years. He had borne that far keener agony— the dread ceremony of public degradation, at Zhitomecr. And he spoke not. He carried his heavy cross with him in sacred silence to the grave. In 1891, Father Lutz, an American priest, endured in silence the shame of a conviction for robbery from a sick penitent, coupled with a sentence of ten years' penal servitude. But one happy day, a document was found among the papers of Father Lutz's supposed victim, then dead. It showed that the money .supposed to have been stolen had been entrusted to the priest to be restored to a third person. So Father Lutz was released. The romantic story of the Abbe Dumoulin is more recent still. It was told by us some years ago in full detail, partly from the French press, partly from an appreciative article ii* the ' Sydney Morning Herald' in the early part of 1898. It was briefly this : that the Abbe (a priest of the archdiocese of Aix, France), with the secret of the confessional locked up in his breast, allowed himself to be tried, convicted, and sentenced for a murder committed by another. For three years, Father Dumoulin wore the prison garb, and toiled under a tropical sun in New Caledonia, herding with the basest outcasts of society. Then the real murderer's remorse compelled him to present himself before the authorities and declare his crime. Even among the human Avccds that the Popes have thrown over their garden Avail, every form of human frailty has respected the ' still-born silence ' which guards for ever the portals of God's tribunal of mercy, the Sacrament of Penance.