Confession is a sacrament in which we confess dark deeds, shameful sins, cowardly compromises, repeated rifts. It is something we often wish more to be done with than to do; we know we must go, that it is “good for us” as a visit to the dentist’s or the doctor’s is good for us. It might seem as if the place where we fess up, red-handed, and receive the cleansing bath of the Redeemer’s Blood should be a discreet, hidden, almost unnoticed spot, somewhere over in the corner, perhaps fused into the surrounding architecture like a broom closet (indeed, some confessionals were turned into broom closets after Vatican II, though the brooms had surely done nothing to deserve an environment reserved to rational animals).
Yet the designers and builders of Catholic churches and of their furnishings operated under a very different mentality. They made confessionals beautiful works of art (sometimes even extravagant), put them in prominent places where no one could miss them, and multiplied their number, so that you couldn’t avoid seeing them.
This, at least, was the Catholic (Counter-)Reformation’s way of reaffirming what the Protestants denied: that the Lord had, in His great mercy, provided the Catholic Church with an efficacious means for blotting out post-baptismal grave sin, a “second plank after shipwreck.” Contrary to some early heretics, grave sin after baptism, even including apostasy, could be forgiven; no sin permanently barred the penitent soul from grace. Contrary to the more recent heretics, faith alone was not enough, but faith must be faith in the Blood of Christ applied to souls by the ministry of the Church, at His bidding—ultimately, so that we could be rightly humbled and utterly certain of our having been forgiven.
These are some of the thoughts I had on my mind as I explored churches in Sicily in February and started taking pictures of the lovely Baroque confessionals that nearly every church contained. I will not try to label exactly which church each one belonged to, as that is somewhat beside the point; I doubt anyone will ever make a trip to a church just to see a confessional. Rather, one can marvel at the artistic creativity employed, and the strong, silent, steady love of this sacrament that such furnishings convey.
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| A curious detail of this confessional |
