Vatican to rule out online confessions

June 7, 2001 Posted: 12:51 p.m. EDT (1651 GMT)

By Philip Willan

(IDG) -- While businesses
fight to keep commercially-sensitive
information from leaking across the
Internet, the Catholic church is
preparing to ban traffic in
information of a more personal
nature: online confession will be off
the menu for connected members of
the congregation.

The Internet is an excellent instrument
for evangelization and religious dialogue,
but it cannot be turned into an online
recycle bin for sins in place of
traditional face-to-face confessions, a senior Vatican official said Tuesday.

The red light to online confessions is contained in a document being prepared by the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Social Communications, which broadly
welcomes the Net as a powerful instrument for evangelization, the Milan daily
newspaper Corriere della Sera reported Tuesday.

The sacrament of confession, by which the Roman Catholic faithful receive
pardon and absolution for their sins, must always take place in "the sacramental
context of a personal encounter," Archbishop John Foley, the president of the
Pontifical Council for Social Communications, told the Italian Catholic news
service SIR on Monday.

"Internet offers the church the opportunity to make the saving message of
Christ accessible throughout the world," Foley told the agency. "In societies that
don't allow the presence of priests, nuns, religious or lay missionaries, Internet
can offer people undertaking a spiritual quest, or even just the curious, a chance
to obtain information or find an inspiration that would otherwise be impossible."

Internet, like all communications media, offers more opportunities for good than
temptations for evil, Foley was quoted as saying by Corriere della Sera. "It depends on how you use it," he said.

The American-born archbishop cited the spread of pornography, violations of privacy and forms of dependency among the young as some of the negative aspects of the Worldwide Web. Some young people, he said, "spend hours in front of their computer screen in search of endless diversion."

The Vatican document will discuss the problem of unequal access to the Web and warn against it becoming a resource reserved for the developed world's elite, the Corriere
della Sera said. "Internet must not become an
Intranet for the most developed countries," it
quoted Foley as saying.

Foley's statement is simply an update of
church regulations to keep pace with
technological progress, said Father Paolo
Floretta, a Franciscan friar who runs a
Website allowing the Catholic faithful to send
prayers to Saint Anthony of Padua from all
around the world. "The sacrament of
confession requires the physical presence of
the priest and the penitent," he said in a
telephone interview. "Privacy is absolutely
not guaranteed on Internet, and there is no
certainty as to the identity of the two parties
to the communication. You can't have
confession by e-mail, any more than you can
have it by telephone or letter."

Father Floretta's site (http://www.carosantantonio.it/) has received thousands of
e-mail prayers since it began operating a year ago, he said. The prayers, which
could contain appeals for help with health or other practical problems, are saved
onto a floppy disk and delivered every day by the friars to the tomb of the saint
-- Saint Anthony evidently doesn't need a PC to read them -- in Padua Cathedral,
Floretta said.

The faithful have been seeking the intercession of the saint, whose speciality is
the finding of lost objects, for hundreds of years, Floretta said. "People used to
send their requests on parchment, then it was paper, and now it's floppy disks.
The medium has changed, but the symbolic significance remains the same."

Floretta's Website is not the only one to put the faithful in contact with
sanctuaries devoted to the Madonna and the most popular Christian saints, but
the amount of Internet traffic generated by such sites is limited, Floretta said.
"It's a niche initiative, but I wouldn't call it a market," he said. And with online
confessions ruled out by the Vatican hierarchy, there is unlikely to be a
significant boom in religious messaging.