Page:Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897).djvu/128

 confessions and communions for months, even years, without confessing it. Now each such confession and communion, she has been taught, is as vile a sin as murder or adultery. She goes through life with her soul in her hands and the awful picture of a Catholic hell burning deeper into her; until at last, in an agony of fear, she crouches one day in the corner of the box and falters out the dread secret of her breaking heart. And it must be remembered that the subject of so much pain is often no real sin at all. The most unavoidable feelings and acts are confused with the most pernicious practices, and often regarded as ‘mortal sins.’

But a yet sadder category is the large number of girls who are actually corrupted by the practice of confession. Girls who would never dream of talking to their companions, even to their sisters or mothers, on certain points will talk without the least restraint to the priest. They are taught when young that such is the intention of Christ, that in the confessional every irregular movement (and to their vaguely disciplined moral sense the category embraces the whole of sexual physiology) must be revealed: they are reminded that nothing superfluous must be added, still that the sense of shame in the confessional must be regarded as a grave temptation of the evil one. So they learn to control it, then to lay it aside temporarily, and finally to lose it. They begin to confer with each other on the subject, to compare the impressibility,