The Catholic Church and the federal government have vehemently reacted to new legislation in the state of Washington which forces priests to report the abuse of children or to neglect the police after having learned crime from confessions.
Governor Mike Ferguson signed the controversial bill last week, which makes it compulsory for all members of the clergy to report the abuse of children, without exemption from information disclosed during the confession. Confessions were previously considered to be privileged.
The Archdiocese of Seattle – which was made up of 160 priests and 90 permanent deacons in 2024 – declared that this would excommunicate the priests who comply with the legislation. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Justice described the “anti-Catholic” law in a statement announcing an investigation into politics, just a few days before the Vatican chose the first pope of the United States.
The archdiocese of Seattle in a press release warned that the breakdown of the confidence of the confession is a reason for a priest to be expelled from the Church, essentially reiterating the rules already established for the Catholic clergy.
“The Catholic clergy cannot rape the seal of the confession – or they will be excommunicated from the Church,” said the archdiocese. “All Catholics must know and be assured that their confessions remain sacred, safe, confidential and protected by the law of the Church.”
Too many victims
The US Ministry of Justice said it had opened an investigation into civil rights in Washington law, focusing on how it was developed and finally adopted. He suggested that the legislation could be in contradiction with the first amendment, the assistant prosecutor Harmeet K. Dhillon affirming that the legislation “requires that Catholic priests violate their deeply retained faith in order to obey the law”.
In the text of the Washington notification law, the “clergy” collectively refers to all religious ordinated in any religion, but confession as a practice is distinguished because of the secrecy that surrounds it.
The Ferguson office addressed the federal investigation in a statement to CBS News.
“We are impatient to protect Washington’s children from sexual abuse in the face of this Trump administration” investigation “, the statement said.
Washington legislators are not the first to try to impose members of the clergy to report the abuse of children, especially since the Catholic Church has been in front of public calculations on sexual crimes since the beginning of the century. Although the majority of American states already have reports to report abuses in place for religious leaders, each of these laws includes a provision exempting the information learned by the confession.
California tried in 2019 to propose a bill which would have forced the clergy to report abuse without this exemption, but the church fought And the legislator finally suspended it.
The legislation was initially proposed by the senator of the state of Washington, Noel Frame, whose jurisdiction includes Seattle. After two previous attempts to adopt this bill failed due to disagreements as to whether the confessions should be exempt from declaration mandates, the final version was adopted during the legislative session this spring.
“Too many children have been victims of abuse,” Frame said in a statement once the last bill was adopted in the State Senate. “The legislature has the duty to act and end the abuse cycles which can repeat the generation after the generation. When children ask for help, we must be sure they get help. It is time to adopt this bill once and for all.”
The confession seal
Thomas Plante, a psychologist and professor who has worked with the Church for decades and has written a lot about sexual abuses on children among clerics, said that the abolition of confession exemptions could have involuntarily negative effects.
Plante told CBS News that “absolute” confidentiality understood to apply in Church confessions, according to his experience, encouraged people who committed crimes to clean up a priest who then referred to a psychologist like him.
He said several patients had been referred to him in this way during his career, and then reported the situation to the authorities as a healthcare professional.
“The seal of confession, which is in a way a global thing that has happened for several thousand years, is essentially that everything you say under the seal is confident, and that gives people a place where to talk about things that they cannot speak anywhere else,” said Plant. “It is an advantage. People who are involved in a crime or abuse or anything else, they have a place in the Catholic Church to talk about it with 100%confidentiality.”
Without this insurance, Plante said that it suspected priests in Washington would stop offering a confession and asking people to ask for this service in the churches of neighboring states.
“And I think it would be a terrible tragedy,” he said.
Confession is a fundamental principle of Catholicism. It requires private conversations where the faithful or the laity disclose their misdeeds to a priest and, in turn, receive forgiveness in the name of God. Everything that is said during the exchanges is kept secret.
Technically, priests, through their religious oaths, are linked to a confidentiality seal after hearing confessions, and the Church prohibits them from sharing the information learned during these sessions with others. Catholic doctrine explicitly prohibits notify the authorities even after someone has confessed to a crime.
The archdiocese of Seattle said they agreed “in order to protect children and prevent children’s abuse” and undertake to report them, as long as the information is acquired in a framework outside the confession. He also accused the state of Washington of having violated constitutional protections for the religious establishment and the free exercise of religion.
“With this law, the state of Washington specifically targets religious conduct by inserting the government in the Catholic tradition, namely the highly defined ritual of the sacrament of reconciliation,” said archdiocese. “The State now requires that the absolution of the absolution of sin is offered.”
Washington’s new law forces priests to share information from the confession that if the admitting person admits having abused a child.
Last year, when the current governor of Washington, Ferguson, was still the attorney general of the State, he pushed to investigate the leaders of the Catholic Church in Seattle, Spokane and Yakima for having allegedly used charity to cover the allegations of sexual abuse on children by the clergy. But the investigation was faced with challenges because the church refused to cooperate, arguing that it did not need to obey the assignments for its files.
