The year is 1951. A Hollywood fixer named Eddie Mannix kneels in a confessional booth. “It’s been twenty-four hours since my last confession,” he tells the priest. “I lied to Connie—that’s my wife. I promised her I quit smoking … but I snuck a couple of cigarettes, maybe three.”
Every element in this scene, which opens the 2016 Coen Brothers film Hail, Caesar!, reflects its historical setting. Mannix, played by Josh Brolin, wears a double-breasted suit and holds a felt fedora. He checks the time on an art-deco wristwatch. But the clearest sign that this is a period piece is the fact that Mannix is a Catholic who frequents confession but doesn’t seem to think of himself as especially devout.
The greatest change in Catholicism since the 1950s has been not the introduction of the new Mass, nor the declarations of Vatican II, but the disappearance of confession as a regular part of Catholic life. Such is the argument of For I Have Sinned (Harvard University Press, 2025), a masterful history of the rise and decline of the Catholic Church’s most distinctive sacrament. Its author, the Boston College historian James M. O’Toole, sees no possibility that confession will return to its former prominence. He nonetheless laments the loss of a rite that once united the great majority of Catholics—rich and poor, educated and simple, fervent and lukewarm—in acknowledgment of their faults.
O’Toole marshals evidence from religious publications, diaries, and occasional surveys to paint a picture of steady rise followed by sudden decline—as traditional practices were buffeted by the spread of contraception, the rise of psychology, and a growing mistrust of the institutional church. Although society has hardly dispensed with self-accusation, Catholics increasingly felt no need to confess their sins to a priest.
Catholic doctrine holds that before Catholics can worthily receive communion, they must confess their mortal sins to a priest, receive absolution, and do penance (often a few short prayers, such as the Our Father and Hail Mary). In the early days of the American church, when priests only occasionally visited far-flung congregations, Catholics would line up for confession, and the Mass would begin only after all their sins had been heard. As the Church grew, these practices were regularized. Confessions were heard at appointed times, generally on Saturday, and immigrant populations not in the habit of frequent confession were encouraged to take it up.
Parish missions were the most important means of promoting the sacrament. Traveling priests associated with orders such as the Redemptorists, the Paulists, and the Jesuits would visit a parish, give a hellfire sermon, and encourage the parishioners to get right with God. Returning to confession was the first and essential step. As O’Toole observes, it was “the Catholic equivalent of the ‘altar call’ in Protestant revivals,” a way to rededicate one’s life to Christ.
One of the benefits of confessing to a traveling priest was that you wouldn’t have to meet him at the altar rail the next day, a fact that contributed to the missions’ popularity. But most confessions were made to parish priests, by Catholics who relied on the “confessional seal”—the priest’s grave responsibility never to disclose what he heard in the confessional—to preserve their privacy. Between July 1896 and June 1897, the ten priests at St. Francis Xavier Church in Manhattan recorded hearing 173,394 confessions.
The greatest change in Catholicism since the 1950s has been not the introduction of the new Mass, nor the declarations of Vatican II, but the disappearance of confession as a regular part of Catholic life.
All these secret exchanges aroused the suspicion of the surrounding Protestant society. Priests were accorded legal protections against breaking the confessional seal, but anxiety about the possibility that they exerted undue influence on penitents, perhaps even a corrupting influence, were expressed in anti-Catholic works such as the The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk (1836), a tell-all by a supposed former nun.
Acknowledging the possibility that confession could be an occasion for abuse, church law imposed severe penalties on priests who misused the sacrament. Church law further required that confessions be heard in loco publico et patenti in ecclesia, in a public and conspicuous place. The traditional confessional box also ensured the physical separation of priest and penitent, by placing each in a separate box, allowing communication only through a grille with narrow holes.
Confession’s place in Catholic life began to decline in the second half of the twentieth century. In 1951, the year in which the fictional Eddie Mannix unburdened his conscience, a study of a parish in New Orleans found that 79 percent of eligible adults confessed at least once a year. In 2008, a national study by Georgetown’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate found that three quarters of Catholics confessed less than once a year, or didn’t confess at all.
What happened to Catholic guilt? Writing at midcentury, a Redemptorist priest associated with a more lenient style of Catholic piety identified 220 different mortal sins and 147 venial sins a Catholic might commit. At some point, the piling up of potential infractions came to seem absurd—perhaps around the time the Church declared that Catholics were no longer barred from eating meat on Fridays, meaning that what had been a mortal sin in 1965 was perfectly fine in 1966. Many Catholics hoped that the Church would undertake a similar reversal on contraception, which an official commission had been formed to study. When Pope Paul VI reaffirmed the Church’s rejection of contraception in 1968, many Catholics simply tuned out.
The notion that the counting and confessing of specific sins was infantilizing and unmodern was promoted by the increasing popularity of psychology. Psychology encouraged a more deterministic view of human action, undermining the sense of individual culpability that undergirded confessional practice. As O’Malley notes, the effect of psychological concepts on Catholic life was “subtle but enormous, transforming the outlook of Catholics, lay and clerical alike, and preparing the way for a steep decline in the practice of confession.”
Catholic guilt has not diminished. It has been transferred from the individual to the institution.
Any prospect of a revival of confession, O’Malley argues, was eliminated by the reports of clerical sexual abuse that culminated in 2002. Abuse of confession featured in some allegations, seemingly confirming earlier American fears concerning the sacrament. Ironically, the abuse had been enabled by changes intended to bring the practice in line with modern ideas. Church authorities had hoped that face-to-face confessions, with priest and penitent in the same room, would promote a more open and adult attitude. But, as O’Malley notes, the departure from the traditional separation made it possible for fondling to “proceed unimpeded.” Under such circumstances, even a spurious accusation might undermine a priest’s credibility.
O’Toole traces the rise of clerical abuse, which peaked in 1970, to “the theology of the Catholic priesthood,” which holds that priests perform the sacraments in persona Christi, in the person of Christ. But the existence of this centuries-old teaching cannot be the reason that abuse peaked at a particular moment in the twentieth century. Nor does this explanation accord with the fact that abuse rates among priests track with those of the population at large, a fact O’Toole notes. A better explanation can likely be found in the fact that, at this moment, old-school Catholic deference to clerical authority continued to operate, even as a new tendency to discount sexual sins—including grievous forms of abuse—took hold.
It is telling that O’Malley’s discussion of the decline of confession ends with a discussion of clerical abuse. For even as Catholics have lost their sense of personal wrongdoing, they have become alert to the wrongs committed by their Church. Catholic guilt, in this sense, has not diminished. It has been transferred from the individual to the institution.
Far from being confined to Catholic circles, the tendency toward collective self-accusation has become a common element of culture—evident not just in the depiction of the Catholic Church as an extended criminal conspiracy, but in descriptions of American history as one long effort to uphold white supremacy. Though these narratives may be seen as natural responses to uncritical forms of ecclesial and national triumphalism, they have a cost. Their cumulative effect is to discredit institutions and communities, shrinking the possibilities for collective action and the realization of public goods.
Hail, Caesar! can be taken as sly defense of the big institutions and common projects that our populist moment is prone to dismiss. Eddie Mannix, while keenly aware of his own failings, turns out to be a staunch defender of the institutions that give his life its meaning. A Lockheed executive who hopes to hire him away denigrates his work at the studio. “It’s all make-believe,” he says. His corporate cynicism is echoed by a Hollywood star, a fresh convert to Communism who disparages the movies as a “tool of capitalism.” But Mannix sees something worthy in this meaning-making institution. “The picture has worth,” Mannix says. “And you have worth if you serve the picture.” At the end of the film he returns to the confessional booth. “I snuck a cigarette,” he tells the priest. “Or two.” Despite his persistent faults, there is progress.