By Tim Wyatt
A proposed legal obligation to report child abuse — as recommended by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) — has reopened a bitter debate over whether priests must break the historic confidentiality of confession.
The headline recommendation of the seven-year £186m inquiry is that the government brings in a law enforcing the mandatory reporting of child abuse. This would mean anyone who is working with children, in position of trust (as defined by the Sexual Offences Act 2003), or a police officer, must report if they witness abuse or are told about it by either the victim or perpetrator.
If enacted into law, this would mean that a priest who hears a confession from either a child abuser or their victim in which they talk about the abuse, would be legally bound (under penalty of a fine or jail sentence if they fail) to pass it on to the authorities.
Here, civil state law would come into conflict with centuries-old religious law, as both the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church have strict rules that forbid a priest hearing a confession to tell anybody about what has been shared.
Church of England
The CofE has been racked in internal deliberations over this conflict. It has for many years imposed its own duty to report child abuse on all church workers and clergy, but its internal rules include an exception for any information received under what is known as the “seal of the confessional”.
Canon law dating from 1603 means that priests who hear a penitent’s confession have an absolute duty to not disclose it to anyone, ever. However, guidelines state the priest should refuse to give the abuser absolution — confirmation that God forgives their sin — until they have first reported themselves to the police.
Confession is not a common practice in the CofE, but it is cherished by the Anglo-Catholic wing of the church, which has strongly resisted any calls to soften the rules around confidentiality. Many argue that it is exceedingly rare for either victims or abusers to disclose during confession anyway, and that breaking confidentiality would make it less likely for victims to have the confidence to come forward and receive the pastoral care of a priest as well.
However, the suggestion that abusers never address their crimes during confession has had challengers, including an Irish academic who conducted a study of clerical offenders.
Eight of the nine priests she interviewed said they had talked about their abuse during confession. Several said the experience of being forgiven after confessing effectively “wiped the slate clean” and enabled them to minimise what they had done internally, making it much less likely they would stop in the future.
After the Robert Waddington case, the church set up a working group to consider the issue in 2015. Waddington was the dean of Manchester Cathedral in the 1980s and 1990s, and was also suspected of being a prolific child abuser. One of those who said they had been abused by Waddington had been told by him that he could not disclose his ordeal as Waddington had already been “absolved of sinful child abuse” through confession.
This working group reported back in 2019 that it had not been able to agree on whether the seal of the confessional should be lifted in cases of abuse and effectively handed back the issue to the bishops to decide. In response, the House of Bishops decided to not create any exemption to the seal, although they noted many Anglicans felt strongly about both ending and defending confidentiality. Indeed, the church’s own head of safeguarding and his team are on the record stating their support for abolishing confessional confidentiality.
Since then, a second committee has been established to look at the question. At least one diocese in the church has introduced guidelines that come close to creating an exemption: the Diocese of Canterbury in 2018 told its priests that they should warn anyone intending to confess that anything that affected the safeguarding of others would not be kept confidential. This prompted strong criticism from Anglo-Catholic groups, although the diocese insisted it was not breaching canon law.
Canon Rupert Bursell, KC, a prominent ecclesiastical lawyer — and victim of child sexual abuse — strongly backed breaking the seal in cases of child abuse but told IICSA he did not believe the church would ever get round to changing its canon law. Instead, parliament should force its hand by passing mandatory reporting nationwide, he argued. He also noted there were already mandatory reporting laws concerning money-laundering and terrorism that had de facto broken the seal of the confessional, just without anybody noticing or especially caring.
Other Anglican churches have tentatively tried to water down the confidentiality of confession, most notably in Australia which has introduced its own version of mandatory reporting. There, the Anglican church changed its rules to allow priests to pass on any confessions of serious offences to the police. However, IICSA also heard evidence that the Australian church’s new rules were confusing and subjective, requiring the non-legally trained priest to determine what did and did not count as a “serious offence”.
In response to the IICSA report, Jonathan Gibbs, the CofE’s lead bishop for safeguarding, said he strongly supported mandatory reporting in general. However, on the question of the whether this should include breaking the confidentiality of confession, the bishop said only that a new working party was already considering this and “will now include this recommendation in its work”.
Roman Catholic Church
The Catholic Church globally has for centuries had strict rules that prevent priests from ever disclosing what they have been told in confession. The church takes this so seriously it has at times even defrocked priests known to have breached the rule.
There have been no meaningful voices within the church calling for change or serious exploration of whether an abuse exemption could be made. In his evidence to IICSA, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, said: “The seal is an essential part of the exercise of priesthood, as a nexus between my sinful humanity and the mercy of God. And I would defend the seal of the confession, absolutely.” He noted people in history have died to defend confessional confidentiality and added: “It might come to that.”
He said Catholic leaders would reject any effort through a mandatory reporting law to break down the seal in confession. This follows the practice in other countries, where mandatory reporting has already been introduced. In Australia, Catholic bishops have publicly attacked such laws as undermining religious freedom and insisted priests will ignore their new requirements and instead obey their own longstanding rules on keeping confessions secret. Similarly, in Ireland the official church safeguarding board’s own guidelines tell priests that they should only report disclosures when made outside of formal confession, in direct contravention of the law that has no exemption for confession.
A spokesman for the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales said they took the IICSA report very seriously, and any recommendations which “pertain to the Catholic Church, including mandatory reporting, will need to be studied and considered very carefully”.
Other responses
IICSA’s calls for mandatory reporting have been well received by most church abuse survivor and victims groups. Some have said the proposals do not go far enough because criminal sanctions for failing to report would only attach to those who had witnessed abuse or been told about directly by the victim or perpetrator.
Richard Scorer, a lawyer who has acted for abuse victims in dozens of cases involving the church, said mandatory reporting should also include when people have “reasonable suspicion” that abuse has occurred, even without any formal disclosure.
“If you look at the religious settings we see investigated in the inquiry, in most cases people within the institution had at least a reasonable suspicion that abuse was going on,” he said. “What we want is to create a strong reporting obligation around that, backed up by criminal sanction. That’s particularly weak when it comes to religious settings — you do have a lot of recalcitrance and reluctance to report, combined with strong cultural barriers for victims to disclose.
Alan Collins, another lawyer who works on abuse cases, welcomed IICSA’s recommendations. “Mandatory reporting will address the issue of clergy/penitent privilege and is a vital step towards mitigating the horrors survivors are experiencing behind closed doors,” he said. “Uproar” from religious groups trying to protect the sanctity of confession was to be expected, but must be resisted.
However, he also doubted parliament would properly enact IICSA’s recommendation, despite this amounting to a “gross failure of leadership and accountability”. The government had already held a consultation on bringing in mandatory reporting in 2016, but shelved the idea after only 12 per cent of respondents supported changing the law.
While Scorer said he expected the Catholic Church to continue its hard line of rejecting any weakening of the confessional seal, he thought it would be much harder for the Anglicans to resist the pressure a mandatory reporting law would create. This was partly because confession was a less significant part of Anglican faith, but also the church’s place as the established state church meant openly flouting the law in its own canons would be highly controversial.
The leading Christian safeguarding organisation Thirtyone:eight said it also backed mandatory reporting without any exceptions for confessional confidentiality. A spokeswoman said there needed to be consistency across institutions when it came to reporting abuse and noted this would be challenged for churches and other faith bodies.
“But we support measures and recommendations which ultimately put the welfare and safety of children above any practice that allows secrecy, basically. We have to listen to children’s voices and we are broadly in support of mandatory reporting in regulated activities, including in that context [confession].”
No other denominations or religions as large as the CofE and the Catholic Church have secrecy rules that clash with mandatory reporting. However, the issue does affect other groups.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses, a Christian-derived sect, also insists on its ministers having confidential encounters with believers. It has fought several legal actions in the United States — where several states already have mandatory reporting laws on the books — claiming a ministerial privilege exemption, with mixed results. Other groups, including the Mormons, also have their own versions of confessional confidentiality that may also come into conflict with a future mandatory reporting duty.
Scorer said it was possible a religious group might launch its own litigation along the same lines in the UK if IICSA’s recommendation was enacted by the government. But he thought such a legal challenge would be unlikely to find success, because mandatory reporting would not be singling out any religious group for unfair special treatment, simply requiring it to abide by the same set of rules as every other part of society.
For instance, mandatory reporting would also cut across well-established confidential relationships such as between a therapist and a client, or a doctor and a patient, making the argument the priest-penitent relationship be exempt hard to maintain.
