Page:Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897).djvu/122

116 common practice of missionaries. Such commentaries, however, are carefully restricted to sacerdotal circles: there is no doubt that any departure from the policy of unqualified secrecy would deeply impair the fidelity of the laity, and tend to withdraw them from that greatest focus of sacerdotal influence, the confessional.

And there is another reason why confessors have not thought it necessary to enter into the controversy to any important extent. The attacks upon the confessional have usually defeated their own object by emphasizing too strongly the accidental rather than the inherent and essential evil of the institution. Dark stories—which may quite possibly be true as exceptional cases—are circulated in connection with it, and the impression is at once urged that such practices are a normal, or at least a large, part of what is hidden under the veil of secrecy. The generalisation is fatal, for the Catholic apologist has little difficulty in pointing out the impossibility of such a state of things; besides, the days are happily gone by when the Catholic priesthood as a body could be accused of systematic and conscious immorality. The main contention of the critic having been thus met and answered, attention is diverted from the real evil of the confessional, which is not sufficiently realised by those who are unfamiliar with it.

The structures which are found in every Catholic