Page:Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897).djvu/134

 the majority of Catholics are unaffected by the confessional. They are bound to confess once every year; if they wish to pass as men of ordinary piety they confess every month or oftener; but in the whirligig of life the confessional is forgotten and has no influence whatever on their morality.

That the institution is a source of great power to the Church at large is easily understood: it creates a vast gulf between clergy and laity, and considerably accentuates the superiority of the former. But to the large number of individual priests the function is, naturally, very distasteful. Apart from the obvious unpleasantness of the task it is much more fatiguing than would be supposed. Three or four hours continuous hearing I have found very exhausting, and a missionary has frequently to spend seven or eight hours per day in the box. Still there are many priests who manifest a positive predilection for the work, and they will sit for hours in their boxes waiting—one could not help comparing them to patient spiders—for the arrival of penitents.

The obligation of confessing commences at the age of seven years and is incumbent upon every member of the Church, clergy and laity alike, even on the pope, who has a simple harmless Franciscan friar serving him in that capacity. The theory is that the obligation of confessing commences when the possibility of contracting grave sin is first developed, and in the eyes of the Church of Rome the average child