Patrick Carey came up with a truly charming idea for a book—and then he wrote that book with the peculiar combination of skill, humility, familiarity, and critical distance that has come to characterize his extensive research on the history of the American Catholic Church.

The subject of Carey's latest book is a sacrament—specifically, the sacrament of penance—and its life and development in the United States. At times, the book reads like a biography; occasionally, it reads like a lament. Always, it is a sophisticated exploration of the Christian imperative to “seek and yearn for peace and reconciliation” with God in two different and sometimes antithetical contexts: a Catholic context that emphasizes tradition, ritual, authority, and repentance and an American context that has, at various points, stressed the idea that the “failings of humanity and society . . . can be overcome” not through prayer and participation in the sacraments, but through “education, science, technology, effective social reforms, and/or psychological counseling” (1).

Carey begins by explaining to readers what the Tridentine understanding of penance was in the sixteenth century, not just because this understanding was probably the understanding that the first Catholics in North America brought over with them from Europe but also because the Council of Trent's insistence that the confession of sins was a practice instituted by Christ was a notion strongly contested by Protestants in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. Indeed, John Henry Hopkins's History of the Confessional (Harper, 1850) was an effort to thwart Anglican reformers who wished to restore Catholic confessional practices to the Anglican Church. Hopkins's strategy was to show that “auricular confession and the assertion of priestly absolution . . . were unwarranted innovations and departures from the biblical record and primitive Christianity” (70). This idea, then, that penance was a historical innovation was picked up by some “progressive” Catholic scholars in the early decades of the twentieth century (136).

The extent to which American Catholics honed their understanding of the sacrament of penance by defending it against Protestant criticism is a thread running throughout this book. The first time an American Catholic attempted to publicly explain penance to a non-Catholic audience, for instance, was in 1813 when law enforcement officials in New York tried to get Father Anthony Kohlman, pastor of St. Peter's Church, to testify about something a parishioner had told him in the confessional. When Kohlman was called before the court, he explained that “secrecy flowed naturally from [the sacrament of penance], and the sacrament would be abandoned without such secrecy” (33). Catholic leaders in New York had actually encouraged the city's prosecutors to push Kohlman to testify, because they wanted a judge to determine that the secrecy of the confessional was a religious “right” protected under the mandates of New York's constitution. In the end, the Catholic leaders were correct, and the case of People v. Phillips established the inviolability of the confessional seal.

In the decades that followed, discussions of the theology underpinning the sacrament of penance became popular in the American Catholic press. Bishop John England, for instance, who edited the United States Catholic Miscellany in Charleston, South Carolina, worried that Protestants and Catholics alike thought sinners simply needed to “confess in the ear of a priest” in order to be forgiven. Confession was, in fact, a far more complex exercise than that—a difficult combination of contrition, repentance, and amendment that could be accomplished only “through the merits of our Lord Jesus Christ” (91).

In the four decades preceding the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), Carey tells us, “the rise of empirical psychology, Freudian psychoanalysis, and the psychiatric profession” presented serious challenges to the “Catholic understanding of sin, guilt, forgiveness, and the practice of confessing sins” (199). One gets the impression that Carey thinks some Catholic leaders did not do a very good job of navigating this new landscape. Monsignor Fulton Sheen's decision, for instance, to criticize psychiatry in a Lenten sermon he delivered at St. Patrick's Cathedral in 1947 created a conflict between the church and the medical community that alienated numerous Catholics who worked within the medical profession. Sheen “feared that the confession of sins was being eclipsed by . . . a modern approach to neuroses and psychoses that tended in the popular culture to dismiss traditional notion of sin and guilt.” By the mid-twentieth century, Sheen's audience had become “primarily people in the pews, not the academic or professional class,” and increasingly, his sermons about the sacrament of penance “provoked a negative reaction from professional psychiatrists, Catholics as well as others” (208).

“Dramatic changes in the sacrament of penance” occurred at the Second Vatican Council, according to Patrick Carey; indeed, that council constituted a “major paradigm shift in theology” (225). It is an assertion that I happen to agree with, but one that conservative Catholic scholars who believe Vatican II was a rapprochement between the Catholic Church and modernity—a “renewal” of traditional theology, rather than a change or “paradigm shift”—are likely to take issue with (see, for instance, Matthew L. Lamb and Matthew Levering, eds., Vatican II: Renewal Within Tradition [Oxford University Press, 2008]).

Since the Second Vatican Council, there has been an undeniable and “precipitous decline in the confession of sins” among Catholics in the United States (225). Carey believes this decline has been a consequence of not the “paradigm shift” that was Vatican II but rather developments that immediately preceded the council—such as the advent of the birth control pill, which touched off a “larger moral transformation in American society and contribute[d] to a more general questioning of the Catholic Church's moral teachings that affected the practice of confession” (223). Carey thus argues that the “loss of the sense of sin in American culture,” and not the reforms of Vatican II, is the reason fewer and fewer American Catholics are seeking the sacrament of penance (229). Indeed, Carey suggests the “communal” approach to penance adopted by some theologians in recent years—an approach that “emphasize[s] penance as a form of community worship” and “reflect[s] continuity with the Second Vatican Council”—probably offers the best hope for renewing the sacrament of penance within the American Catholic Church (259, 257).