iConfession

If confession is good for the soul, then the process of that unburdening has gotten easier. An aid to absolution is just a click away with Confession: A Roman Catholic App. Well, why not? The so-called “self-quantifiers” have created personal tracking apps to chart stress, memories, caffeine consumption, moods, fatigue, emotions, and exercise routines. And now, Catholics have an Internet-enabled conscience-tracking device. Need to be shriven? There is an app for that.

The Confession app, available from iTunes for $1.99, is not intended to replace the obligation to visit the confessional at least once a year. Rather, the app is designed to enable the penitent to “prayerfully prepare for and participate in the Rite of Penitence.” It does so by facilitating an examination of conscience, offering prompts for each of the 10 Commandments. Penitents can then take their iPhone or iPad with them to confession. The password-protected app includes a description of the confessional ritual, a calendar for keeping track of the time elapsed since the last confession, and is customizable by age, gender, and marital status. Sins not included in the 10 Commandments prompts can be added.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has endorsed the Confession app, giving it their official Nihil Obstat to indicate that “nothing hinders” its use: it is doctrinally accurate and poses no threat to faith or morals. According to the bishops, the app responds to Pope Benedict XVI’s call for Catholics to engage the digital world in “the service of their faith,” as a means of fostering “personal growth,” and better preparing themselves “to serve society.” The app is also intended to invite back those 45% of Catholics who, due to time constraints or uneasiness with the process, have lapsed in their confessional obligation. I think, however, it is unlikely to do so. Were it a flame, it would draw few moths.

The Confession app may expedite the audit of one’s conscience, but it does nothing to ameliorate the experience of confession, and that experience can be latticed with unease. For one thing, it is claustrophobic: to enter a confessional is to be cubicled in a cubicle, in the dark. For another, penitents must recount their sins, venial and mortal; must admit their grievous culpability, their offensive sordidness, their fall from grace and alienation from the community of the faithful; must make an act of contrition, be “heartily sorry,” and detest their sins, not from legal fear of losing heaven and suffering the pains of hell, but from offending an all good and loving God. And all this to a man behind a curtain, a man who is, indeed, all powerful, a successor to the Apostles upon whom Jesus bestowed prodigious authority: “If you forgive men's sins, they are forgiven them; if you hold them bound, they are held bound;” a man before whom one kneels as a powerless supplicant, all agency hijacked; a man free to probe and poke and prod and chastise the privative and interior, the exquisitely sensitive sense of subjective shame, one is expected to reveal. It is a piercing abjection, a thrown-downess, a belittling littleness, barbed and briared. No one wants to appear shameful to themselves; no one wants to confront the silhouette behind the screen attesting to their lack of integrity. Unless one has an app to surmount that, I’d guess few of that no-show 45% will view an iPoded device to chart their conscience as an occasion to renew their participation in the rite of reconciliation.


And yet, I think they should, we all should, in one form or another at least. Yes, there is a part of me, a snide and snarky part, perhaps the fallen-away Catholic part, that wants to ridicule the seeming incongruity of a sacrament instituted by Christ himself, an instrument of grace, being facilitated by a tricked-out mobile phone. I find, however, that I cannot, for I believe, whether in a religious or a self-examining secular sense, that confession enhances our well-being—that it promotes our foliation as human persons.

We need to be more penitent than we are. We need to more often pluck the string of self-reproach, be more aware of the wounds and wrongs we cause, the duties we leave unperformed, the responsibilities we leave unmet, the loyalties we betray, the what we owe to ourselves, families, communities, employers. Confession, however or wherever we do it, modifies us, allows us to see that we can be different, better. It exonerates and reconciles; it chamfers the keen-edged narcissism our fulfill-yourself culture urges us to adopt; it admits our kindredness, the tug of our shared humanity, the deep syntax that lifts us out of the loneliness of our overly reflexive individuality—and binds us together in a human community. We never fully inhabit our own lives. Always, always, we touch on and are touched by others--the truth of our human being.

If the Confession App hones that sensibility, if it enables us to shorten, even the least little bit, the chasm between what we are and do, and what we know we should be and do, it’s all to the good. It isn’t necessary though. Its capacity for recognition and absolution, its injunctions to “go, and sin no more,” is within our own repertoire of powers. It requires only the honest, inward look. Huck Finn, struggling with his own conscience, notes that “a person does a low-down thing, and then he don’t want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide it, it ain’t no disgrace.” In confession, wherever and however we perform it, we find the humility to suspend the game of moral peekaboo we too often play with ourselves.