UK bill ‘threatens’ confessional seal
A Catholic academic said the bill was a ‘serious attack’ on religious freedom.
A U.K. government bill poses a threat to the sacramental seal of confession, a Catholic academic said this week.
David Paton told The Pillar April 2 that the Crime and Policing Bill “represents a serious attack on the seal of confession and freedom of religion for Catholics.”
Paton, who submitted written evidence to the parliamentary committee scrutinizing the bill March 31, said that two clauses impinged on confession.
The first is Clause 45, on the duty to report suspected child sex offences, which requires adults in specific roles to report suspicions of child abuse to the authorities when informed by a victim or a perpetrator.
A human rights memorandum accompanying the bill addresses the situation in which a spiritual adviser hears a confession of abuse from a perpetrator.
The memo says the new bill could limit the perpetrator’s freedom of religion by deterring them from seeking spiritual guidance and the advisers’ religious freedom because “they could be conflicted between their legal obligations and their religious or spiritual convictions after hearing a confession.”
The memo says: “The Government is satisfied that any such interference is justified and that confessions made in the course of seeking religious or spiritual guidance do not enjoy absolute protection under the ECHR [the European Convention on Human Rights, which applies to the U.K.].”
“The social need to combat child sexual abuse is strong, and it is proportionate to apply the duty to confessions made in a religious or spiritual context.”
Paton, who is a professor of industrial economics at Nottingham University Business School but made his submission to the committee in a personal capacity, said the memo made clear that the duty to report applies to information revealed during a sacramental confession.
Paton explained that Clause 45 would require priests to report abuse revealed in confession to the relevant authorities. If they failed to comply, they would not be committing a criminal offense, but they could be included in a database of individuals not permitted to work with children, effectively halting their normal ministry.
He argued the clause would be ineffective in combating abuse, as priests would remain bound by canon law to uphold the confessional seal, and victims and perpetrators would be less inclined to reveal information in confession.
In his written evidence to the parliamentary committee, Paton called for Clause 45 to be amended to say that the mandatory reporting requirement does not apply to sacramental confessions.
The second problematic element in the bill is Clause 52, which creates a new criminal offense of engaging “in any conduct with the intention of preventing or deterring” a person from complying with their duty to report suspected child abuse.
“This seems to put Catholic bishops and others in authority over priests at risk of criminal prosecution if they seek to enforce the seal,” Paton commented.
“Indeed, use of the term ‘any conduct’ suggests that even a general statement by a bishop to his priests that the seal applies even in cases child sexual abuse could arguably constitute a criminal offense.”
In his written evidence, Paton appealed for changes to Clause 52, making clear that it does not apply to bishops encouraging priests to preserve the confidentiality of sacramental confession.
A spokesman for the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales noted that the body was currently engaged in a battle against a bill that would legalize assisted suicide.
“In terms of the Crime and Policing Bill, all I can say at this point is that we are studying it carefully and engaging with officials, ministers, and parliamentarians about this [the possible threat to the confessional seal] and other aspects of the bill,” the spokesman told The Pillar April 2 via email.
The U.K. government has faced pressure in recent years to introduce a mandatory reporting law with no exemption for priests hearing confessions.
The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse in England and Wales called for a change in the law in its final report, issued in 2022, after seven years of investigations and public hearings.
The IICSA report recommended that the government “introduce legislation which places certain individuals — ‘mandated reporters’ — under a statutory duty to report child sexual abuse.”
It insisted “that mandatory reporting as set out in this report should be an absolute obligation; it should not be subject to exceptions based on relationships of confidentiality, religious or otherwise.”
The Vatican has stressed that the secrecy of confession is inviolable, in response to a rising number of mandatory reporting laws around the world.
In a 2019 note, it said: “Any political action or legislative initiative aimed at ‘breaching’ the inviolability of the sacramental seal would constitute an unacceptable offense against libertas Ecclesiae [freedom of the Church], which does not receive its legitimacy from individual States, but from God; it would also constitute a violation of religious freedom, legally fundamental to all other freedoms, including the freedom of conscience of individual citizens, both penitents and confessors.”
In an appearance before the IICSA inquiry in 2019, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster and president of the English and Welsh bishops’ conference, said the sacramental seal was “an essential part of the exercise of priesthood.”
Asked how the Church would respond if the inquiry recommended breaking the seal of confession, he said it “would not be well received” and “would be rejected.”
Catholics previously raised concerns about a last-minute government amendment to the 2023-2024 Criminal Justice Bill seeking to impose up to seven years in prison for engaging “in any conduct with the intention of preventing or deterring” a person with a duty to report child sex offense from complying with the duty.
Critics said the amendment would apply to most parish priests, without any exemption for secrets disclosed in confession. But the bill’s progress was interrupted by the U.K. general election in July 2024.
After the Labour Party’s landslide victory, the new government unveiled the Crime and Policing Bill in February 2025. The bill contains some elements from the earlier bill.
Paton expressed surprise that Catholic leaders have not highlighted the bill’s threat to the confessional seal. He suggested this may be due to the lack of an explicit mention of confession in the legislation and the government’s silence on its applicability to priests hearing confessions.
“That’s understandable from the government’s point of view — they don’t want a battle with the Church over such a sensitive issue, but it is hard to know why prominent Catholics don’t seem to be aware of the threat,” he said.
1.) For the sake of peoples' peace of mind, these laws that "threaten the seal" almost never have a practical situation in which they could feasibly be applied. Seriously, what am I going to do? Hear a Confession, absolve the penitent, run to the sacristy, grab my phone, call the police, and try to apprehend the perp? Yeah right.
2.) On a less-facetious note... I've found in my [admittedly few] years as a priest that the one thing that unites every priest of every stripe--from the most hardened traditionalist to dudes who only own Hawaiian shirts--is the sacrosanct nature of the Seal of Confession. It's actually quite edifying.
The trend of "a rising number of mandatory reporting laws around the world" is, I have to suspect, partly a consequence of the aggressive atheism which is increasingly openly brandished by elites, such as elected officials (or possibly IICSA panel members). But, undoubtedly, another major factor is the Church's loss of moral authority as a consequence of its serial and continuing clergy sex abuse scandals.