New York Times Op-Ed: A Future for Confession, by Ross Douthat (Author, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (2025)):

In “The Guilty Vicarage,” an essay on detective fiction, W.H. Auden argues that the most successful detective novels take place in an apparent Eden (the cozy village, the ivied college, the country house at Christmastime) that’s tainted by a hidden thread of evil, and “the job of the detective is to restore the state of grace.”

In “Wake Up Dead Man,” the latest installment in Rian Johnson’s series of “Knives Out” whodunit movies, Auden’s religious analysis is literalized: The setting is a rural Catholic parish, the key action revolves around the confessional, and the climax of the story sees the skeptical detective deferring to a youthful Catholic priest, who induces a confession that both resolves the mystery and — more important — delivers absolution to the repentant killer.

I watched the movie, coincidentally, just after taking my children and myself to confession, a few days before Advent gave way to Christmas. This is the sacrament’s most crowded time of year, when you need to arrive 10 minutes early if you want to be shriven before noon, and we experienced a novelty: After hearing our sins the priest offered no advice at all, just moved straight to the act of contrition, dispensing absolution and keeping the line moving. …

That the sacrament of confession might have any place in 21st-century religion is barely considered in O’Toole’s otherwise illuminating history, which traces how frequent confession became deeply embedded in Catholic life and then how the practice dissolved under myriad pressures — the aftereffects of the Second Vatican Council, the sexual revolution, the priest sex-abuse crisis, American culture’s therapeutic turn. His story is told as though the ending is settled: Confession is a “ghost sacrament,” practiced only by a “tiny minority of Catholics,” sufficiently anachronistic that the faith clearly awaits some entirely “new form” of self-scrutiny and repentance to make its moral vision stick.

This seems wrong to me.

Yes, the particular role that frequent confession played in the intense pre-1960s Catholic culture is unlikely to return. But the sacrament itself is more resilient than ghostly, and “Wake Up Dead Man” is as good a window as any into why it’s likely to endure. …

Johnson, the strident political liberal, seems to want from his virtuous, non-MAGA Christian cleric is a sacramental and mystical vocation, carrying with it the special capacity to hear confessions and forgive sins, to bind and loose.

In my experience, this impulse is common among younger religious believers, Catholic or otherwise, who are alienated from Christianity’s Republican or Trumpian expressions: They may want a more liberal form of religion, but they don’t want a more secularized form, and they’re much more interested in the mystical and sacramental than their 1970s antecedents were. They may not have a rite like confession integrated into their lives in the routinized weekly or monthly pattern that once prevailed in American Catholicism, but they don’t regard such things as obsolete or unimportant, and they want sacramental possibilities to be there when they really need them. …

I tend to think that what the doubter and the seeker and the Hollywood director expect of Catholic priests still matters, and the artistic power of the moment when Father Jud whispers to a dying murderer, “I absolve you of your sins, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,” is an indicator that the sacrament of penance still has a long life ahead.

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