Why the Traditional Rite of Confession Is Superior to the New Rite

Both are valid, but the old rite is richer in theological and devotional content

Sir David Wilkie, The Confessional (cropped; source)

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“Unbelievable and insane audacity”

Ever since the venerable Roman rite of Holy Mass began to be deconstructed in the mid-1960s and then replaced altogether in 1969/70, conversations among Catholics about liturgy have tended to focus almost exclusively on the Mass itself, nor is that surprising: the Mass is our greatest act of worship and the one we encounter every Sunday and Holy Day, if not more often.

Yet the violence that was done to the sacred liturgy in the postconciliar revolution was not limited to the rite of Mass. It extended to every sacramental rite, every pontifical ceremony, every blessing, and the entirety of the Divine Office or Breviary, recast as a “Liturgy of the Hours.” Everything to do with the Church’s life of worship was radically recast on the basis of now-exploded theories — and with the most atrocious results across the board. Nothing was left completely unchanged, and some things were changed almost past recognition.

Those who are new to tradition are, naturally, struck by the great beauty, theological density, and spiritual seriousness of the traditional Latin Mass, our central act of worship; but over time they tend to become aware that the same qualities belong to all the traditional rituals: baptism, confirmation, confession, marriage, holy orders, extreme unction, the eightfold round of divine praises (Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline), and so forth. In short, one becomes increasingly aware of (in Fr. Philippe Laguérie’s vigorous words) “the unbelievable and insane audacity” of Paul VI’s project of “reform,” which left behind a desolate wasteland.

Cartoon by Henricus: “Mockery of King Alfons XIII of Spain and the Catholic clergy” (source)

Agitation for change

Here I would like to focus on the sacrament of confession or penance, called by our Byzantine brethren “the mystery of repentance.” The first imperative of Our Lord and of His forerunner the Baptist was: “Repent” (or “Do penance”). The raison d’être of the sacrament of penance is to offer a “rescue after shipwreck” for those who have squandered the white robe of baptismal innocence, sullying it with mortal sin. The only way to overcome this true spiritual disaster of gravely offending God is to confess one’s sins with unsparing honesty and contrition — the act of will of rejecting the sin as offensive to God, contrary to the love we owe Him — and to make reparation by doing some form of penance or self-punishment. This is the realistic picture of the sacrament we can derive from the whole of Church history.

As it turns out, around the time of the Council there was a lot of agitation to change this sacrament. (If you’d like to read about the crazy ideas of the progressives back then, some of which are still with us today, you’ll find Phillip Campbell’s three-part series at NLM, “Concilium’s Attack on Confession,” an eye-opener.¹) For instance, it became fashionable after the Council to call the sacrament “reconciliation.” The renaming is symptomatic of the distortion that was introduced. Although it is true that, as a consequence of confessing our sins and receiving absolution, we are reconciled with God and reanimated as members of the Church, this is not the specific nature of the sacrament of Confession. It exists to give us an opportunity for confessing our sins and repenting of them, which is why its traditional names “confession” and “penance” are the most appropriate.²

In the end, the sacramental rite was not modified as radically as some had demanded, but it was still changed a great deal from what it had been — and, as French sociologist Guillaume Cuchet thoroughly documented, the change in the way the sacrament was named (“reconciliation”), presented in catechesis, offered (or not offered) at parishes, and so forth, did in fact create a massive change in the entirety of Catholic life, so much so that one can almost speak of a “post-confessional” Catholicism in a narrow sense, which even more recent upward trends in the use of sacramental confession cannot be said to have overcome. One need not blame the changes to the sacrament’s texts and rubrics for the departure from its use in order to argue that they were nevertheless most unfortunate — and that the traditional rite remains superior.

In this post, I will not attempt a point-by-point comparison of the old and new rites of confession. It’s a fair assumption that nearly all my readers are quite familiar with how the new rite of penance goes, and, if anything, it is the old that they may never have experienced “in the wild.” Those who assist at the TLM in a diocesan parish are not likely to hear the old prayers for confession the way those who assist at a Fraternity of St. Peter or Institute of Christ the King or Society of St. Pius X chapel will hear them as a matter of course.³ Here, I will simply present and comment on the traditional rite.⁴