UK government: Mandatory reporting law will apply to confessional
The government said Tuesday it was not considering any exceptions to a new mandatory reporting law.
The U.K. government said Tuesday it was not considering any exceptions to a new mandatory reporting law, including in the sacramental seal of confession.
In a May 13 letter, the U.K. Home Office — the equivalent of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — said it was not contemplating “any kind of exception to the mandatory reporting duty for religious institutions.”
It said: “The duty will apply to all individuals undertaking relevant activity with children, including within religious and faith-based settings. There are no exceptions on the basis of where disclosures are received, including confessionals.”
The government was responding to an April 25 letter addressed to the safeguarding minister Jess Phillips by the National Secular Society, an organization that campaigns to “end religious discrimination and privilege in the U.K.”
U.K. Catholics have expressed alarm that the Crime and Policing Bill, sponsored by the Home Office, would require priests to violate the seal of confession if a penitent admitted to or otherwise indicated direct knowledge of abuse during the sacrament of Reconciliation.
David Paton, a Catholic academic who submitted written evidence to a parliamentary committee scrutinizing the bill, told The Pillar May 14 that the government had not considered the legislation’s consequences.
“There is no evidence that mandatory reporting by priests from confession would do anything to reduce child abuse. If anything, it might make things worse by deterring someone who is willing to address their behavior from going to confession, a situation in which they might be persuaded to admit their crime,” he said.
“And in any case, priests will still be forbidden by canon law from breaking the seal, so there could be no practical benefit anyway.”
Paton, who is a professor of industrial economics at Nottingham University Business School but made his submission to the committee in a personal capacity, urged the government to change course and amend the bill.
“If the government goes ahead with targeting the seal of confession, all it will do is make priests and their bishops vulnerable to malicious accusations that would put their ministry at risk but to which they would not be able to offer any defense,” he commented.
Paton has previously said that the bill’s 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.
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, the Apostolic Penitentiary 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.”
Canon law states that “the sacramental seal is inviolable; therefore, it is a crime for a confessor in any way to betray a penitent by word or in any other manner or for any reason … A confessor who directly violates the seal of confession incurs an automatic (latae sententiae) excommunication reserved to the Apostolic See.”
Earlier this month, Washington state Gov. Robert Ferguson signed a law making clergy members mandated reporters, with no exception for disclosures in the confessional.
Other U.S. states include clergy members among mandatory reporters, but nearly all exempt information revealed in confession.
The U.S. Department of Justice said it was launching an investigation into “the apparent conflict between Washington State’s new law with the free exercise of religion under the First Amendment, a cornerstone of the United States Constitution.”
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.”
A human rights memorandum accompanying the Crime and Policing Bill addressed the situation in which a spiritual adviser hears a confession of abuse from a perpetrator.
The memo said 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 said: “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.”
A spokesman for the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales told The Pillar in April that it was studying the bill and “engaging with officials, ministers, and parliamentarians” over its provisions.
The May 13 letter, issued by the Home Office’s Tackling Child Sexual Abuse Unit, said the government would “continue to engage with the wide range of groups that will be impacted by the introduction of this important measure, including representatives of faith communities, to help manage the implementation of the new duty.”
Saint Edmund Campion, pray for us.
Do these same legislative bodies and members who support the legislation also favor priests reporting knowledge of other crimes like homicide, tax evasion, abortion in jurisdictions where it is prohibited, speeding that wasn’t caught, grand larceny, illegal dumping of hazardous materials…
I, like all people of good will, desperately want the end of child sexual abuse and justice for survivors. Attempting to legally strong arm the priest and penitent is not the way to achieve that.