Mark Oppenheimer: Can you tell me what the most severe penance you’ve ever given was, or maybe outsized in commensurate with the crime, or is it all just some number of Hail Marys the way it is on TV?

Matthew Schmitz: It’s pretty much like TV in my experience. I think on one occasion I was asked to recite an entire rosary, which might take 15 minutes, and I thought, “Wow, that is extraordinary and almost outrageous.”

MO: Hey friends, I’m Mark Oppenheimer, the host of Arc: The Podcast, better known, or lesser known, as Arc with Mark. Like many of you, I’m always looking for the next television show to binge watch, and in my case, there is a special requirement, which is it has to be a show that my wife doesn’t want to watch with me. We have our own shows that we watch together, so right now we’re excited for the next season of Nobody Wants This on Netflix. We always love Platonic, which I think has a new season out. I really love Shrinking, which I think is pretty much the best show ever. So we have the shows that we watch together, but then I also need a show to watch after she goes to bed. She tends to go to bed around 10 or 10:30. I’m up till midnight. I’m generally too zonked out on the day’s activities to do any meaningful work, or even any reading after 10:30, so it pretty much has to be TV and it’s good if I could pick a show that my wife wouldn’t be wanting to watch with me because I should save those for our time together.

What are the shows my wife doesn’t like? She’s not a big sports fan, but then again, neither am I and she doesn’t like stuff that has a lot of violence. So I basically look for really high quality, really violent shows to watch after my wife goes to bed. And this means I’ve watched The Wire by myself. I’ve watched The Sopranos by myself, I’ve watched Game of Thrones by myself. And the latest one that I found to watch was, this show that was on a few years ago and it ran for three seasons, and somehow nobody noticed it. And it’s called City on a Hill. It’s super pedigreed, as the critics say.

It’s executive produced by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, which means that of course it’s about Boston and there will be lots of wicked good Boston accents in it. And it’s basically The Wire as if it were transplanted to Boston and it were two thirds as good. So think of it as a junior varsity, or maybe a freshman team version of The Wire. Well cast, well-written, well-executed, well-directed, just not as well done as something like The Wire. And it’s in Boston instead of Baltimore. But it’s basically looking at a series of crimes through the eyes of the police, the district attorneys, the church, and sometimes the criminals as well. And it’s basically pretty good. The star is Kevin Bacon, who does a bang up job as a grizzled old Boston FBI agent. And of course he’s Catholic because in a show about Bostonians, all the white people have to be Catholic, except maybe the odd lawyer who will be Jewish, and sometimes they’ll throw in an immigrant who comes from a different ethnic and religious background. But basically this is American pop cultures opportunity to show ethnic white Catholics.

And so Kevin Bacon, who is Philadelphian by heritage but pulls off Boston pretty well, plays this Catholic FBI agent sort of corrupt, but also sort of with the heart of gold. You get the sense that he means well, but he’s been completely broken by the system. And somewhere around the middle of season one, I said to myself, there is going to be a scene in a confession booth, right there just is. Kevin Bacon as a Catholic guy with a lot on his conscience is going to end up confessing to a priest with that little grill where they can’t really see each other except in shadow. And the priest will have his own flaws and his own problems and there’ll be some tension there. And of course there’s that weird thing where one person knows the sins of the other, but it only runs one way, right? In a confessional relationship, the priest knows the sins of person confessing, but the person confessing presumably doesn’t know the sins of the priest.

And sure enough, it took until the beginning of season three, but we end up with that moment where Kevin Bacon is confessing to a priest, and this is a priest who has a lot of issues of his own. And I knew this was coming, I just knew this was coming because anytime you put identifiable religious Catholics, or even ethnic Catholics, in a TV show or in a movie, somehow you’ll end up in a scene where there’s confession, and there’s something riveting about it, right? And by the way, this has been true on The Wire. It’s been true on Law and Order. It’s been true in lots of movies like they’ve got to put people in the confession. And American non-Catholics have been riveted by the idea of confession forever.

It appeared in a lot of 19th century and early 20th century anti-Catholic literature as the site of sin. The idea was that the priest would use the confession to take advantage of girls or boys. It of course has an interesting ethical component because the priest will never break the seal of confession even to report crimes, or to stop crimes from happening. So there’s just a lot going on there. I’m not going to tell you how it turns out in City on a Hill. I think you should go watch it. It is streamable right now for those of you who have purchased Hulu subscriptions. But I was put in mind of it today, not only because the scene just popped a few nights ago when I was watching, but also because here at Arc, we recently ran a wonderful review of a new scholarly book about the history of confession.

We asked Matthew Schmitz, who is an editor at the magazine Compact and is a convert to Catholicism, if he would review the new book called for I Have Sinned just published by Harvard University Press. It’s by a Boston College historian, and it’s a history of the rise and decline of what Schmitz calls the Catholic church’s most distinctive sacrament. And of course, the review begins with a scene from a Hollywood movie in a confessional booth. It’s from the movie Hale Caesar, the 2016 Cohen Brothers movie. And given that there Catholics ,in the movie, there has to be a confessional booth

Kevin Bacon: Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

Priest: How long since your last confession, my son?

Kevin Bacon: It’s been what, 27 hours?

Priest: It’s really too often, my son. You’re not that bad.

MO: So you should go read the article by Matthew Schmitz, in which he reviews this book on the history of confession, which has fallen out of favor and isn’t practiced as much as it was say fifty or a hundred years ago.

But you should also listen because I called Matthew up and said, will you talk to me about confession on this podcast? And we’re about to have an interview with him. And then later in this episode I brought on Maggie Phillips, who also writes for Arc, and she had written me a letter after she read Matthew’s review of the book about confession, in which she said, I don’t think confession is declining. In fact, I go to confession all the time and so do a lot of my friends, and there’s always a long line for confession and what are you talking about, man?

So we decided to pull together a big confession episode. I want you to go read the article at arcmag.org. It’s called “How Many Hail Marys for a Lost Sacrament?” It’s by Matthew Schmitz. And then you should listen to my interview with Matthew, who is terrific, and you should stay tuned for an interview later in the episode with Maggie Phillips for a slightly more optimistic view about the present and future of confession.

Hey guys, I’m just a Jew. I’ve never been to confession, but I’m pretty intrigued, and I think a lot of you will be as well.

Matthew Schmitz, so good to talk to you. You wrote this terrific piece for us about the history of confession. I gather that you were raised Roman Catholic, yes?

MS: Actually I was raised as an Evangelical Protestant and came into the church in my teenage years.

MO: First of all, I should have known because everyone’s a Catholic convert, right? There’s actually no cradle Catholics. It’s like Unitarians. There’s no cradle Unitarian. They’re all, they were all born Jewish or something. Of course there are no cradle Catholics. But this totally screws over my next question, which was what was confession like for you as a little kid? What were you confessing at six, eight, twelve, fourteen? So now I have a different first question: what was your first confession like?

MS: Vague. So really confession as I encountered it was basically, it’s a very soft version. There’s no real hell fire preaching at this point in the church. But they said, look, if you give us the type and the type of offenses you’ve committed, just tell us in generalities, and if you have real contrition, that’ll be fine.

Now, I do think, and I mentioned this passingly in my article, that there is maybe a greater parallelism between Evangelical Protestantism and Catholicism on this point than is sometimes realized. So in the history of confession that I reviewed for you, and thanks for asking me to do it, O’Toole, the author, James O’Toole, the author–

MO: Right. James O’Toole of Boston College, yep.

MS: Talks about how the Catholic practice of confession in the United States was built up in part through these traveling preachers who would give hellfire sermons to maybe disperse rural populations, or just parishes. And there’s a parallel between that and American revivalism in its Evangelical Protestant mode. And whereas Evangelical Protestant revivals culminate with the altar call, everyone, come on down, give your life to Christ, or rededicate your life to Christ if you already have given it. The Catholic revival would culminate with a call to confession.

MO: So interesting. So you reviewed this book for us by James O’Toole about the history of confession. How old were you when you became Catholic?

MS: Yeah, I said teens, but actually I would’ve been 21. I was a junior in college.

MO: Now confession is one of the seven sacraments, right?

MS: Yes.

MO: Yeah. So it’s a big deal along with extreme unction, right? Last rites, marriage, communion. I used to know all these. Did you have a sense of it when you became Catholic? Were you looking forward to it? Was it a piece of what drew you, or was it kind of this add-on?

MS: I did look forward to it, and though I just mentioned parallels between Catholic practice and evangelical practice, my own perception at the time was that, and I think this has been born out in various ways, was that Catholicism would be a kind of spiritual relief for me because in my evangelical youth, I had had spiritual anxieties at points about whether I was really right with God, and I found it hard to know was I really dedicated to Christ? Was I really filled with the Holy Spirit? Was I in a regenerate position vis-a-vis God? And I thought, well, Catholicism, it has all these formalities, but I kind of like that. If you basically show up to place X and submit form y, if you do the sacrament, it has an objective reality. And I don’t have to consult my subjective experience of it to know whether or not God’s work is being accomplished in me.

MO: I love the candor of that answer. Of course, it does open up the question of just how instrumentalist this religion is for you. I think in all of our religions, there’s stuff that we say is true that in fact just we like to believe is true. It’s functioning really well in our lives. Do you worry, or did you worry, that perhaps it fit a little too snugly? The idea that, oh, I’m exchanging a religion where I never know if I’m right with God for one, in which if I perform this act and then cash in the chips the priest gives me, or take the report card to God and have him sign it and take it back to my teacher, I’m good with God. Did that seem a little too pat as if maybe it’s too close to the way we’d want our sins to be forgiven given?

MS: Yes. I think I came to realize with time, you can’t escape the spiritual life and the uncertainties that come with it. If you do believe in God and are trying to understand your relationship, you can’t escape the uncertainties and dramas and the personal element of the spiritual life simply by joining a more formal religion. And obviously in Catholicism, there’s a lot of writing on mysticism, and it isn’t just, they hand you a book and it says, alright, confess your sins, get the sacraments, and that’s it, baby, you can go to the beach.

MO: Well, except that one of the things I love about Catholicism is there actually is a book, it’s the Catechism. It’s about a thousand pages long, and I’ve seen it on the shelves at Barnes and Noble. I mean, it literally is the religion where they have put everything you need to know between two covers.

MS: Yeah, that was, they’ve had various catechisms, the most recent, of course, it was done under John Paul II, and it’s an impressive work. Yes.

MO: Have you read it all?

MS: No. No. But that was the textbook we went through when I was received into the church. So I’ve read large portions of it.

MO: I like to think your relationship to it. I hope it would be the relationship of a friend of mine who did his dissertation on Proust. When I said, have you read all of Proust? He said, “Well, no.” I mean he laughed. He said, “No, no, but I’ve meaningfully dipped into it.”

MS: Meaningfully dipped into it.

MO: He literally writes his dissertation on it, and it’s like I meaningfully dipped into it. I think that’s so interesting that you were looking forward to it. I have a friend who’s an Orthodox Jew who called me one time. I don’t remember if this was the occasion for the call, or if we just quickly segued into this. And he told me that at various points he had considered Catholicism. And I was shocked because I mean, this is a guy who doesn’t even consider my conservative Judaism. The only Judaism he’ll do is pretty hardcore. I wouldn’t have thought he was a candidate for anything else. And he said, well, Catholicism appeals to me. I said, “Why?” He said, because I’m so worried about my own sin. And he felt like Judaism had a thin, I think the term is soteriology theory of sin.

And do you feel like the Catholic sense of sin or theology around it is different from the Protestant sense of sin you came from?

MS: Yeah, that is a great question and it’s a little hard to answer because there are differing versions of Catholicism and sin. I guess my inclination is to say that they were more alike than I initially realized in their treatment of sin and of how one should examine one’s conscience. And I’ll just illustrate this with kind of funny anecdote. I became Catholic at college, and when I was at college, I met these guys who are Catholic, and they were nice and smart and they were helping me answer some of these questions. And it turned out that most of them, or even all of them were involved to one extent or another with a group called Opus Dei.

MO: Oh, I know Opus Dei.

MS: And so this was in 2006 or 2007.

MO: Where were you at college?

MS: Princeton.

MO: I was going to say, is this the John McCloskey era at Princeton?

MS: Yeah. So McCloskey was gone at that point.

MO: They’d run him out of town for being too Opus Dei basically.

MS: And we had kind of the sort of softer side of seers, a really nice priest there named Father Marty who’s at Opus Dei. And so Dan Brown was in the air, Bush was in office, and you remember the era as well as I do, Mark. And I thought, well, alright, well what is this Opus Dei thing? Whatever. Are they albinos? And as I got, I sometimes–

MO: I love that The Da Vinci code, a book I haven’t read, a movie I haven’t seen, if it leaves you with one impression, aside from the fact that it’s a big conspiracy, it’s that they’re albinos.

MS: What I eventually realized after going to Opus Dei, I used to at that time go to the Circle, sort of little spiritual meeting in the evening, and I never got more involved in that and eventually didn’t go at all. But I realized, okay, these people, the spirituality that they’re pushing is basically, have I fulfilled all my obligations? And I remember one thing, part of the examination of conscience was something like, have I through lighthearted talk, prevented myself or others from doing the work they should be doing? And it kind of helped me understand that some of the bourgeois morality that I had been raised in and small town evangelical Protestantism was replicated in Opus Deic. Obviously Opus is very different from Evangelical Protestantism and Catholicism is different, but there were more similarities there than I initially anticipated.

MO: You mean the sense that, for these Opus Dei characters anyway, not maybe for all of them, but at least for these cats, that part of doing Catholicism was the stamping out of fun? I mean that’s what I’m hearing you. Am I misinterpreting?

MS: I dunno. I did about that because my own inclination was to shoot the shit in the office or whatever. But I think what I really took away from it was they’re trying to help these young men to be good husbands and good employees. I mean, it wasn’t about some kind of high ideal that stood in total contradistinction to the familiar bourgeois morality of American Republican order. It was instead something that was very concerned with forming people who were regular citizens and productive employees. And that struck me as a bit of a surprise.

MO: That’s creepy as shit, productive employees. I mean, I read the recent book on Opus Deif and interviewed its author, and I found that book largely persuasive even if the flack from Opus Dei did not and sent us a long email. And I’ve written about The Heights, the high school in Washington where a lot of these people move to send their kids. Why would any religion be interested in people being productive employees? So basically it’s just the Chamber of Commerce religion.

MS: Yeah, that’s certainly not a phrase they would use. But yeah, I guess I maybe had just influenced by Dan Brown more of an idea of Opus Dei as being this Spanish reactionary embodiment of the Black Legend. And then I realized, well, they’re Catholic and their concerns are pretty familiar in quotidian in a lot of ways. And obviously I do want to be good at my job and do well and feed my family. I think I’m just not enough of a joiner to have joined Opus Dei. It’s just not really my thing. But I came away thinking this is a lot more legible and normal than I initially realized.

MO: I mean, I do want to circle back to confession, but why did you become a Catholic?

MS: Yeah, great, great question. Not because I had exhausted all other intellectual options, but really because I felt that I had reached a dead end and the form of faith I was raised in, which was evangelical revivalist, kind of young Earth, creationist, dispensationalist, sort of Left Behind series, whatever, that kind of–

MO: You traded Tim LaHaye for Dan Brown. You were just like–every mediocre popularizer with a bad ear for prose, you were on their train.

MS: I read, I dunno, I read about half that Left Behind series when I was a kid. I didn’t make it all the way through, but–

MO: I was once on an airplane. I was writing I think a column about Tim LeHaye and the Left Behind books, which if you’re under 30, you might not even remember–

MS: No, they probably don’t.

MO: You know the way that there was a moment everyone was reading, Eat, Pray, Love, and then there was a moment when everyone’s reading the Sally Rooney novels, and there was a moment when everybody was reading these Tim LaHayet books about the end times.
I was on airplane, I had picked one up, just out of professional obligation, and the problem of course with them is, not even if you just treated them as fantasy, or sci-fi, or whatever, the prose, sentence for sentence, was so abominable. I mean it’s like Jerry Jenkins, who wrote the books for Tim LeHaye, it was a collaboration, had the anti-ear for musicality, right? Totally tone deaf. And I was on an airplane and I saw a young woman, an attractive young woman, I think I wanted to strike up a conversation with reading one of the Left Behind books. I think there were seven of them. And I just said to her, I said, “Oh, I just read a bit of that. What do you think of it?” And she said, “Well, I mean the plot’s not so believable, but I mean the writing is so good.” I thought, well, it takes all kinds. I mean there are people for whom this is fabulous writing, but I just remember thinking how is it possible that some people claim they’re being drawn closer to God through prose that’s so bad? That’s my memory of the Left Behind books.

But back to what you were saying, you had come through an evangelical world that put some faith in this dispensationalism, this version of what the end times would look like.

MS: Yes, absolutely. And I gained a lot from it and met a lot of good people in that world. But I’d come to find its account of the Christian faith insufficient. I’d come to suspect that evolution might be real and the earth might be older than 7,000 years old, and I was having trouble accounting for that within the religious paradigm I had been raised in. And so I began looking for something else, and then I was just drawn toward Catholicism almost by accident I’d say. It was something that I had always regarded as bad, Catholics aren’t Christians, and maybe some of that anti-Catholic baggage I had born set me up to be more open to Catholicism at a later point. Because once I realized that some of the things I had been told about Catholicism weren’t true, I started to ask, well, what else have I been told about Catholicism that isn’t true if they aren’t actually Mary worshipers? Maybe they’re right about this, or right about that.

But for me, finding that form of faith was more falling in love with someone than it was reaching the end of a mathematical proof. It was just a relationship where you might initially think, oh, I don’t like so and so, I don’t like this about what she does. But then you get to know her a little better and say, oh yeah, maybe she’s okay. And then all of a sudden you’re far down the road, you’re moving in.

MO: Do you look around contemporary conservatism and feel gratified by how many people who seem to have Trump’s ear are Roman Catholic? Is that a good thing for the polity? Is it a good thing for Christianity?

MS: Yeah, I guess on balance, I’m obliged to think it’s good because I’m Catholic, but maybe I know Catholics well enough to not think that their prominence or presence is automatically always and everywhere going to work for the good, so certainly it’s a notable feature of American life and certainly in the conservative movement, Jews and Catholics have long played an outside role relative to their demographic presence among conservative voters. And I just celebrate this as part of the crazy quilt nature of America. There have been various paleocon writers who have objected to it and seen that as a real problem with the conservative movement, a sign of its inauthenticity of its alienation.

MO: That’s so interesting. I mean, I’m thinking of someone like Pat Buchanan who I think saw the Jewish, well, let’s call it the Jewish influence for lack of a more elegant term as problematic. I think of him as that kind of isolationist paleocon, but he of course was a Roman Catholic. Who were the figures in say, Protestantism who regret the Catholic influence in conservatism? I mean, are we talking about people like Rushdoony? Are we talking about the real dominionist, or who’s that group of paleocons?

MS: Yeah, the one I have in mind specifically is Sam Francis who maybe did become a Catholic at the end of his life, I’m not sure, but it’s certainly something he noted and wrote about. Rushdoony, I wouldn’t be surprised if he had that view as well though. I mean, Rushdoony is himself a fun case because he’s an Armenian. So it’s kind of funny you have, maybe you have Jews, Catholics and Armenians all pointing fingers and saying you’re not a real American.

MO: I guess on some level it would’ve been people who objected to William F. Buckley, right? I mean, that would be the central Catholic figure who really mattered over decades. And I’m just trying to think, and I haven’t read Tanenhaus’s book on him yet, I’m trying to think, were there Protestants who were sort of suspicious that all of a sudden the number one conservative was a Roman Catholic?

MS: If you just think about what cultural attitude might find a Jewish and Catholic presence in the conservative movement repellent, maybe it would be a kind of someone who thinks of himself as an old money American and thinks, what’s all this obsession with Israel in the Middle East and with abortion, I don’t care about any of this stuff. That would be kind of the attitude.

MO: I once interviewed an Episcopal priest who was a kind of old money WASP. He was a liberal, but his distaste for Jews, he liked the Middle East, and he was a fellow semite for the Jews he’d never met. He liked the Jews of the Bible, but his distaste for contemporary Jews, I’m sure actually as I think about it, was married by a distaste for Catholics, precisely because he saw them both as conservatives, though. I mean, he saw Jews as neocons and he saw Catholics as sort of pro-life crazies. And so his country club Republicanism, or really it was a country club, I think Democratism, I think he was a sort of centrist Democrat, but he saw Jews and Catholics as equally given to conservative tendencies, one in foreign policy, one in sort of domestic control. Yeah, I mean it’s certainly right. I mean, there’s just been a big Roman Catholic presence in conservative circles.

One of the interesting things about the book you reviewed, and that you pulled out in your review was, and this also I think interestingly intersects with Jewish cultural currents, is that I guess O’Toole argues that psychology in some ways undermine–no, you argue, I think you feel O’Toole say this enough–

MS: Yeah, no. Well, I perhaps I didn’t make this clear enough in my review, but that is an argument of O’Toole’s as well, he may
accent it slightly differently than I do, but he does see that as a very important role, the rise of psychology, he sees as really undermining the authority of confession.

MO: Yeah, I mean, say a little bit more about that. I’ve thought about that. My brother’s writing a book on therapy, on marriage therapy in that case, but we’re a family that’s very, very interested in psychotherapy. It’s certainly for a lot of people, a lot of Jews became a replacement religion, that the authority of the rabbi and the rabbinics, the rabbinic ages declined precisely with the rise of Freud and analysis and other kinds of psychotherapy, that it was a really almost one-for-one trade. It’s interesting that O’Toole sees something similar as going on Catholicism as well.

MS: Yeah. So O’Toole does see that same dynamic playing out. The rising prestige of therapeutic and psychological conceits diminishing the cultural centrality of confession for Catholicism. But in his account, it’s not simply a dynamic where bad psychology emerges and eliminates good confession. I mean, he describes a somewhat more complex story where you could see the prestige of confession being weakened by maybe too quick, a Catholic rejection of certain psychological conceits, exaggerating the opposition between the two in some cases, or maybe in others, a too ready acceptance of it. But Catholics had a hard time figuring out to what extent they should incorporate that. And eventually, most of the Catholic figures he describes did end up say, look, there’s something to these psychological conceits. They have a certain place, but we also need confession. And he seems to think that that’s a reasonable place to arrive at. But perhaps because it wasn’t arrived at sooner too much belief in confession, or a lot of belief in confession, just vanished in the interim.

MO: I was talking with our contributor Maggie Phillips, who wrote me a letter about your piece saying that she goes to confession. A lot of her friends go to confession pretty regularly. And I was talking to her about the fact that it’s, you’re not supposed to take communion if you have a mortal sin on your conscience, right?. And a lot of people have, there are enough mortal sins that a lot of people probably do have one on their conscience given the fall of confession, a lot of those people are probably unconfessed.

Is this something that Catholics talk about? I mean, or do priests give homilies on it? I mean, it just strikes me that there are probably in every communion line, almost necessarily, lots of people who according to the church, shouldn’t be taking communion because they haven’t been to confession recently enough. As somebody just looking at the rules of the Church, it would strike me that that’s a tremendous fault line or even hypocrisy, but it’s not my fish to fry. It’s not my dog hunting, so not my problem. But how do people process that? How could confession have fallen so far and yet so many people still be taking communion?

MS: It’s a great question, one that does trouble conservative Catholic commentators and some spiritual writers, but you don’t hear a lot about confession from the pulpit. And I think my guess is that sometimes priests think that they would just rather not trouble the consciences of their parishioners, and maybe even reason that any culpability that their parishioners have for receiving communion, unworthily lessened by their ignorance of Catholic teaching on this because one, you have your Catholic converts who have whatever been to the Opus Dei house at Princeton University and argued their way into the church and they know all of this stuff. But if you just talk to any Catholic on the street, he or she may or may not have a very distinct notion that one should confess before receiving communion. There’d be a wide range of opinions or knowledge of that.

MO:You guys are the shock troops. You’ve got to educate the cradle Catholics about the importance of it.

MS: They will greet us as liberators.

MO: I once heard a story that I hope isn’t apocryphal about an editor or writer at some alt weekly, I dunno if it was the Village Voice, or the Boston Phoenix, or the real paper Chicago Reader, one of the classic old alt weeklys who was Catholic, who decided to go confess the same sin at every church in town and see what penance he was given at different ones, so he could rate who had the strictest penance all the way down to the easiest penance, which is, if he did it, a totally brilliant bit of gonzo journalism. Can you tell me what the most severe penance you ever given was or maybe outsized in commensurate with the crime, whatever the crime may have been, and also the silliest or most featherweight pendants you were ever asked to do? Or is it all just like some number of Hail Marys the way it is on TV?

MS: It’s pretty much like TV. In my experience, I will, you don’t even have to do penance per se. You might just be asked to say your active contrition. So I’ve had that, and then I think on one occasion I was asked to recite an entire rosary, which might take 15 minutes, and I thought, “Wow, that is extraordinary and almost outrageous.” But no, usually it’s say three Hail Marys, one Our Father, or can you meditate on the Psalm?

MO: How often do you go? Do you go pretty regularly?

MS: It varies. I mean, I think when I’ve been at my best, it’s been about once a month and others would do it much more frequently, but I do not go that frequently at this point. I’ll admit, I won’t confess, but I’ll admit.

MO: Is that because you’re in a kind of seasonal ebb of your faith or just the confession practice? Are you not feeling so Catholic these days?

MS: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think my Catholicism has changed a little bit with time, and I felt myself losing some of the enthusiasm or maybe nerdiness I had when I was younger because I think I was just for two reasons. One, I had more time to just go to different masses or liturgies, but also I was sinning in ways that were more spectacular back then. Now that I am a just dad with four kids, my life just takes place within this slightly more boring plane.

MO: I mean so much less cocaine and goats than there used to be. I’m there with you.

MS: I feel maybe that I’m sending less and maybe receiving less grace all at once.

MO: Does being a dad make you feel, how does it make you feel about your own Catholic practice? Do you feel on the hook to model more, or does it just mean you have so many diapers to change you can’t get to church?

MS: It’s mostly taking care of the kids and trying to keep them quiet during Mass. And then for me, as far as modeling the faith, I really think it’s going to come down to just how well I treat my kids and how much they’re able to respect me. And so it’s not so much that I think need to, my kids need to know that I’m doing x Devotion, but more can I just treat them with the basic patience and consideration that I should.

MO: I always love when I read those stories that you’ll see occasionally of judges sentencing people to unusual things because judges actually can sentence you to more than just jail, or parole, or a fine, or whatever. They can sentence you to wear a pink bib for a week. And so sometimes you’ll see a creative, some idiot will commit some horrible act that humiliates someone else, and the judge will subject them to some act of humiliation, like having to walk around the block screaming out, “I’m so sorry,” every 10 steps or something.

Can penance be anything? I mean, does it have to be various mixtures of Catholic prayer and meditation? Could it be like Matthew, you have to wear a silly bow tie for a month? I mean, and every time someone mentions your bow tie, think of your sin. And I ask this in all seriousness, can it get creative? And does it ever?

MS: I’d say it gets creative very rarely, but there have been important historical cases where it has gotten creative. O’Toole discusses one case in his book from early in the American Republic, when a parishioner, it became clear that a man had confessed a crime to his priest. And that became clear because the priest arranged for him to make restitution to another parishioner that he had stolen money from. And there were worries in the early American republic about the confessional being a cover for dark secrets. This kind of space insulated from scrutiny of good, honest people in this political order we’re all supposed to be equal in.

And so restitution might be part of it that I remember reading once years ago about a Dominican in Kentucky. The Dominicans had an important mission field there, and they still have a strong presence in the state. And one man, I don’t know what his sin was, but he was assigned to dig a hole in the ground as though he were digging a grave and then to lie in it for a period of time and to look up. And I thought, “Now that’s a good penance.”

MO: It’s so dark. I would be such a fricking maestro with creative penances if I were priest, I got to tell you. It would be totally wackadoo.

Friends, if you’re enjoying this episode, please make sure to subscribe and to rate and to review us on whatever platform you most endorse. Coming up on the podcast we have Leah Libresco Sargeant, who’s author of a new contrarian take about feminism; the great Oliver Berkman, author of Meditations for Mortals and also of the book Four Thousand Weeks; and Paul Kingsnorth whose book Against the Machine promises to be the most provocative book by an Eastern Orthodox convert living in western Ireland, published in America this year. I promise you, I promise you that is the case. Also, we’re still holding for another couple of weeks, my interview with the other Mark Oppenheimer, the one from South Africa, and we’re going to put him in an episode with interfaith activist Manu Meal.

And for these folks and lots of other writers and lots of other great stuff, please go check us out at arcmag.org. That’s arcmag.org. And now back to my interview with Matthew Schmitz.

So I got to ask you before you go, as a Catholic conservative of some repute, or at least high word count, how do you feel Trump’s doing?

MS: I think he’s doing well. It’s maybe not a universally shared view, but the places where he’s succeeding, just in terms of the promises he’s made to his supporters on immigration, border crossings are way down. He’s not delivering on deportations to the extent that he has promised or that his supporters want, but he has really brought the flow of illegal immigrants across the border to almost zero. So that’s one place he’s delivering tariffs. I mean, the jury is still out. It’s too soon to make definite declarations, but it’s not disastrous yet. And I think that’s a big, this is one of the big areas where Trump’s presidency could fail because he at once wants to be a tariff man, while also I think his appeal just to normal voters is really closely connected to the idea that he’s a businessman who can deliver growth in a good economy.

So if there’s not a good economy, I think Trump has no legitimacy. His support just evaporates if the economy gets bad. So right now, he’s still threading that needle. And then the other place I’d say where he’s having success to an extent that I never could have imagined, and I would say that not everything he’s accomplishing here is good, but he’s certainly succeeding in achieving his aims is just his war on the university, which I didn’t anticipate anything like this.

MO: But you’re pleased by it.

MS: Well, no, I’ll be frank as possible. Often when I see these things, Trump receives fifty million payout from this university. There’s this populist in me, just I think as someone who came from–

MO: Princeton.

MS: Yeah, well, I grew up in a small town in Nebraska, no one in my famil had gone to college, or had a college degree, and then I was basically this redneck affirmative action admit. In the speech welcoming our class campus the university president said, “We have students from Kathmandu, Nepal and O’Neill, Nebraska.” That’s where I was from.

MO: Wow. He really named you. He called you out, the O’Neill Nebraska guy.

MS: Yeah, so I was seen as this kind of exotic person, and I think when you’re kind of taken from the margins to the center in that way, it can often inspire resentment. And that’s something that you see in people as varied as JD Vance, who has a somewhat similar story to mine in that regard, but also coming from a different political angle someone like Danelle Padilla Peralta, who was a year ahead of me at Princeton, he came from the Bronx. He was a dreamer classicist. He’s now a professor there. And the right wing media became angry a couple of years ago because he gave a talk saying to–I want to teach my students how to deconstruct Princeton and tear it down. And that was around the same time that JD Vance said, professors are the enemy, which was celebrated by the same right wing media. And I thought, I kind of get where both these guys are coming from.

MO: Man, you should have written that piece. Would Rusty have run that piece?

MS: I was too busy, I think.

MO: But yeah, you should have written that piece. That actually would’ve been an interesting piece to hear from you is in praise of Danelle Padilla Peralta.

MS: But though I have that instinct, that response, I do, I also am able in my more rational moments to ask questions, is it really advantageous to withdraw all science funding? And clearly it’s not.

MO: Well, look, sometimes you should have me on your podcast and you can ask what it’s like to be from the group that’s been weaponized to do all this, the Jews, right? Have you thought about that? What it must be like to be Jewish as Trump uses the specter of anti-Judaism to destroy the

MS: University? Yeah, it’s very strange for me to see. I haven’t thought about it in those terms, but it is strange to me. I think I was at the university in just a very different moment, and it was between the moral passion of 9/11 and whatever was eventually going to become wokeness. I was kind of between those moments, and it’s been quite remarkable to see where the university has gone since.

MO: Well, so I actually have a question. I don’t think you and I probably have different takes on the Trump presidency, though. I don’t think you’re entirely wrong. I’m probably 43% with you there, but mostly against you. But I would trust, and I imagine you won’t agree with me here because nobody ever says the obvious.

I despair of getting conservatives just to say, Trump is obviously a bad person. I mean, here he is on his third marriage, he clearly was no kind of father, he clearly had shoddy business practices, and conservatives who deep down know that he’s just a bad dude and I think would say it to their spouses, will never go on the record saying it. And I assume it’s because it’s bad for their careers, or they retreat into some sort of, “I don’t judge people, I judge ideas,” even though in other cases they judge people.

I’m going to pause it and I’m not going to put you on the spot to say Trump is just a really shitty human being. I think professionally you won’t do that. You can tell me if I’m wrong, allowing for the fact that he’s a shitty human being in some of the ways, I think he’s obviously a shitty human being.

What does that say about the nature of leadership that this kind of person, who by the way also is intellectually shoddy, doesn’t read books, would not know the significance of 1783 in American history, or 1948 in Middle Eastern history. If he’s right, it’s not because he’s done the work. What does it say that somebody you think is a terrific leader can be that deeply, profoundly flawed? Does it say that leadership is really just a gut level, instinctual, mystical thing? Does it say that he’s just a terrific delegator, the right people end up having his ears? What does it say about leadership that you think this guy that if he’s a great president or a pretty darn good one, what does it say about all the things we think we know about leaders?

MS: That’s a great question. I think my own instinct would be to say that Trump’s relative success on certain points, great leader. Yeah, I don’t think I’d go there in terms of Rushmore, but his success probably–

MO: You were on the record saying you shouldn’t be on Rushmore. We can put that on the social.

MS: I know that’s a very out there position for a hardcore right wing writer.

MO: Right, right. Just want to get the little bit that I can.

MS: You can actually make a much stronger argument. I think if you compare him to someone like Andrew Jackson–

MO: Are going to, I want to get this detour, but then you are going to answer the question about leadership though, right?

MS: I’ll answer, but Jackson is so much, and I’m trying to answer it here, Jackson is so much greater and a much, much better man. People talk about Trump, about Trump as having a kind of Jacksonian foreign policy. Well, Jackson’s foreign policy dictum was suffer nothing that is not right and do nothing, do nothing that is wrong, basically sort of like suffer no insults and also do no wrongs. Trump doesn’t have that view at all. So that kind of Jacksonian honor was actually tied to acting justly toward others.

Trump does not have that view. So he is not Jacksonian. He has a much more degraded moral outlook, undoubtedly. And I’m not saying that Jackson always lived up to that ideal, obviously, but there was an ideal there, and it simply isn’t present in Trump. So yeah, I think you can definitely see Trump as coming at the end of a pretty staggering moral decline, which is probably in my account, and this is where I’m beginning to absolve a little bit about the country’s decline as a whole, and not just about Trump as a person.

MO: But I mean, okay, but you and I are writers. You’re not looking for a political office, I presume. I mean, now that you said Trump shouldn’t be on Rushmore, the MAGA people never let you done.

MS: I’m done.

MO: You’re done.

I mean, wait, I want to dig in here. We can exhort, you could write a piece and your colleagues at First Things could have written a piece saying, and they didn’t, to my endless frustration, because I hold a lot of you in high regard, saying this is a moral cretin. The person who’s been such a bad dad, such a bad spouse, such a bad business partner, has been caught in so many lies, said, “Grab them by the pussy.” Let us say that he can’t be president because it degrades us to have him as president, even if we agree with him on policy X, Y, or Z. And you’ve never run that piece. Nobody seems to believe it. I believe it. I thought Clinton should have resigned because he degraded the office. And does none of you think that? Does none of you feel like it’s gross that this is where we’ve ended up? Cause I do.

MS: Yeah, well-

MO: By the way–

MS: I did write the piece.

MO: Okay, my apologies.

MS: No apology needed.

MO: But wait a second. And by the way, you could say all that and then still say, however, the Democrats are so perfidious that we have to vote this way anyway, Flight-93, yada yada, cliche. But you don’t, there is not a drumbeat from the right of it breaks our hearts to continue supporting this man. The alternative is so bad, but let’s keep in mind that we are degraded by the fact that he’s our president. And if our children behaved in the way he does, we’d be ashamed. I mean, if any of my children behaved toward their nuclear families the way he has behaved towards several consecutive nuclear families, I’d be ashamed. I’d feel like a failure as a man, wouldn’t you?

MS: Yes. I’ll just answer directly. Yes, I would.

But to recount my own journey on this, which is one of shifting responses, before the 2016 election, I wrote an essay for first things, which got a lot of readers, and it was called “Donald Trump: Man of Faith.” And I’ve talked–

MO: Oh yeah, you did.

MS: I talked about Norman Vincent Peale and the power of positive thinking and the sort of identification and Peale’s thought of Christianity with worldly success. And I think that Trump’s own outlook represents some of the shadow side of that, that if you’re a failure or a loser, you’re just absolutely contemptible. And that was me at my most anti-Trump. And since then, I’ve become more pro-Trump over time, so there’s just an admitted evolution there. And one of I, I think I became frustrated because some of what I feared would happen with the Trump presidency didn’t come to pass. And so I felt that I had maybe bought too much into a certain moralism, or too hysterical an outlook, frankly, that didn’t bring me around to thinking Trump is a great guy. But I felt a little, I think I began to feel that I needed to be less precious and moralizing in some of my political judgments and more willing to accept that there might be something to this man and the movement behind him.

MO: But back to my question about leadership, then it turns out that it doesn’t matter. Your personal qualities don’t matter at all if what you’re saying is right. Let’s say that in the Matthew Schmitz world, he’s a B-plus president, maybe he’s A-minus, maybe he’s B. It turns out that you can be an adulterer, a liar, somebody who speaks incredibly crudely about women, and minorities at various times, though I don’t think that racism is actually among his central qualities. And I’ve always said, I don’t know if he’s an antisemite. I don’t think the evidence is out there that he is though he cozies up, but we know enough about the way he’s treated his own children, women, wives. He’s certainly been an adulterer.

It turns out that doesn’t matter. It turns out that you can be a really good president and be that kind of person, hence fourth, we have to suspend talk, any talk of personal qualities when evaluating whether to vote D or R?

MS: Yeah, I would not go that far. I would instead say that there have to be some identifiable good qualities. And that Trump’s, I think Trump’s vices do matter for the country that his inconstancy, his lack of attention has led to worse outcomes for his presidency. So what are some of the virtues then that I can see, or that I would identify? I see Trump is representing a diminished and troubled form of family values where he seems to be very invested in his children, and he has managed to keep most, not all of them, close to him.

What he fails to do and seems to be incapable of doing is remaining faithful to a woman and keeping that woman close to him. And that’s something we see a lot of in American life. People have trouble forming lasting relationships with sexual partners, but for many people, especially in lower class communities, there is still a real valorization of motherhood and people want to be good fathers. So I think that was a level on which people connected with Trump and something that you can see in him that’s recognizably human. That’s good. His valorization of work and American industry, that’s a limited cultural ideal, but something that is good in him.

But yeah, I think–

MO: But he hasn’t done any of the reading. You think this is, and he doesn’t really, I mean, let’s face it, he didn’t throw a ball with Barron. I mean, I wrote a piece about this. I said, it’s time to say that Elon Musk, Donald Trump, these are bad fathers. If we believe in fatherhood, we have to say, you have to actually change diapers. You have to spend time with your children. You have to go to a parent teacher conference. And who’s able to do that? Billionaires. They can do anything they want. The idea that very successful men are off the hook for that is actually exactly wrong. They’re on the hook for it because they can do whatever they want. They’re the boss. They can show up for every meeting. The factory worker, the wage laborer can’t. But Donald Trump could actually be a hands-on dad.

And you and your movement don’t care that he’s not a significant strike against him. And that’s a huge problem for me because I actually think we have to shame him for not, I mean, he’s an utter failure as a dad. It doesn’t seem like he knows, He once said, I don’t change diapers. He doesn’t know anything about his kids. He can’t name their teachers or their pediatricians the stuff that makes us goods dads we’ve decided he doesn’t have to do. Maybe because he’s rich, I don’t know. But haven’t we just lost the narrative entirely?

MS: Yeah, I mean, would’ve a different account of, I mean, for me, this was a surprise because I did not vote for Trump in 2016, and I remember going home to Nebraska, talking to my family, and I was very, back then I had an attitude closer to the one you have now, Mark. And I was very confused because my parents were voting for Trump and everyone in my family, and I thought, why are you voting for him? He’s just this immoral New York guy who doesn’t care about anything we care about. And remember my parents saying, well, he’s a good father. His sons are respectful.

And I thought about that, and I actually, I wrote a much hated column for the New York Times about this called Trump’s Purple Family Values, which I’m sure holds up even better. It’s probably aged like fine milk over time. But that really struck me. And so I don’t know what exactly Trump’s parenting habits are, how he engages with his children, but I think at least some of his supporters were struck by the fact that his kids seemed to be willing to associate with him and were often in his presence and involved in his own projects and weren’t strung out on drugs or embarrassing. And they thought, that’s the outcome we want for our children. And so they thought, that’s one sign that he’s a really solid guy.

MO: Wow. I mean, so kids with no identifiable skills, no religion, no sense of community with billionaire dad who’s willing to take them into the family business, go into the family business, and are not otherwise coed out or in prison. Therefore, he’s a good dad. I mean, it’s pretty thin, isn’t it? I mean, I’m not saying, and by the way, I have relatives with equally bizarre views, but the bar’s pretty darn low and presumably should make us all rethink how we thought of Clinton, Barney Frank, all sorts of other people in history. If that’s the bar, billionaire kids will sign up for dad’s gravy train, then we’re not really serious about any of this stuff, right? The church stuff.

MS: Yeah. Well, I think it’s very hard to reconcile the rights attitude toward Trump with its attitude toward Clinton during the impeachment really clear. So there’s a huge inconsistency there. I was struck–recently, the conservative writer, Helen Andrews, highlighted on social media a quote from a book written by Neil Freeman. Neil Freeman is a longtime figure at National Review, and he was talking about the Clinton years, and he said, the only conservative writer I knew who thought that the Clinton impeachment wasn’t a big deal, the hold Lewinsky thing, was Christopher Caldwell. And I thought, yeah, Caldwell has probably been relatively consistent on these things over time.

But you mentioned Mark just very briefly, Trump’s antisemitism. And I have to say, I saw this on your Substack, which is excellent. I remember his Shylock comment. I saw news reports of that, but I never saw the follow-up, where he said something like, Shylock, that’s antisemitic? I’m hearing that for the first time. I just thought it meant a usurious banker who bleeds you dry. And I thought, “Ugh.”

MO: Anyway, I mean, okay, so just to pull this all together, I mean, we are agreeing that there’s actually no breeding or training for values for presidential leadership, whatever it was, he didn’t get, I mean, there used to be a thinking in the sort of conservative, I want to say great books maybe Tory community that I came up with. There was big on Ivy League campuses when you and I were both there, that there was a kind of refining of the mind that if you read certain books, and were apprenticed to certain people, and had kind of mentorship, and had, if maybe it came from your family, maybe it came from your church, maybe it came from your university, that certain people were fit to lead. And it actually turns out that none of that is required and that in fact, we’re perfectly happy to have leaders who don’t care about any of that.

Trump doesn’t care about the humanities. He doesn’t care what his attacks on the university is doing. He’s not saying, I’m trying to have at the universities and make them pay attention to important things. But of course, we want to ensure that people keep reading Milton, he doesn’t know who John Milton is. It turns out none of it matters, and I just want a theory of leadership. It turns out it’s accidental. I mean, what I’m hearing, what I’m intuiting is, it turns out that certain people got it and certain people don’t.

MS: I think it’s still possible to just offer a more kind of minimal and disillusioned case for Trump, which is better than the alternative. My own notion is that the finest leaders just, and I speak not for conservatives, but for myself, the men that I would be most inclined to look on as great leaders would have Marshall accomplishments, would represent high principles and also ideally would, and this would have a certain literary achievement, and none of our leaders really accomplishes all of them. The most distinguished martial men would be Washington Jackson, arguably Eisenhower. The most distinguished literary men would probably be Grant and Lincoln. And the one who stood for the highest principles would be Lincoln. I think in terms of the way that those principles defined his career as a president and all those men just cast Trump absolutely into the shade, I think.

MO: But you voted for him this time.

MS: Yes.

MO: And did you vote for Biden or, oh wait. Who’d you vote for in 2020?

MS: Trump. I’m a two timer.

MO: You’re two timer. You’re two for three. You’re two for three. Look, the important thing is you saw the light eventually, right?

MS: Absolutely, absolutely.

MO: Listen, you’ve been a sport. I really appreciate it. I know I said confession and then I threw all these curve balls at you. Just so you know, the proper dog whisper for is not Trump’s usurious banker, but just New Yorker with New York values it. It’s just he didn’t have to go that far. He just could have said New Yorker. It used to be neocon, right? But he doesn’t know what a neocon is, so…

MS: No, absolutely. Yeah, you got a little bit of that. Remember, Ted Cruz tried to kind of pull the New Yorker with New York values thing against Trump a little bit. It was a funny moment.

MO: Well, I’m pushing O’Neill, Nebraska values. That’s my new dog whistle for a great podcast guest.

MS: Well, you know, Tim Walz grew up, his farm was just a few miles from my family’s farm. So it doesn’t matter where you’re from, it doesn’t determine your politics.

MO: If he’d gone to Princeton–it turns out Princeton doesn’t turn people into lefties. It turns out that’s all that’s needed to turn them into conservative Catholics.

MS: It probably helped.

MO: Listen, thank you for your time. This has been really great. And by the way, I want to say somebody in the Catholic intellectual circle said, how did you get Matthew Schmitz to review that book? That was an amazing score.

MS: Oh, that’s really kind. Well, no, I love doing it for you. Thanks so much.

MO:Thank you. Alright, take it easy. Thanks Matthew.

MS: Bye, Mark.

MO: That was Matthew Schmitz, editor at Compact Magazine and host of the podcast Against the Grain. He’s the author of “How Many Hail Marys for a Lost Sacrament?” which we ran in ARC on July 17th, 2025. You can find it at arcmag.org.

And now a little bit of Maggie Phillips. Maggie is a Roman Catholic. She’s a journalist. She is an Army spouse, something she’s written about a lot. And she reached out to me after she read Matthew Schmitz’s piece and said, “Mark, I have a different take on confession.” And because Maggie is always a treat to read as well as a treat to talk to, I called her up and we had this conversation.

Maggie Phillips, how are you doing?

Maggie Phillips: I’m fine, thank you. Thanks so much for talking to me today.

MO: Sure. So we ran Matthew Schmitz’s piece about a new book on the history of Confession, and you sent an unusually long email filled with your feelings about Confession, and I just wanted to get straight what your story was with it. I gather that you were responding to my newsletter in which I said none of my Catholic friends go to Confession anymore. And you were raising your hand saying, wait a second. I do. So tell me, first of all, how long have you been Catholic? How Catholic are you, and what’s the story of Confession in your life?

MP: So I’m 38 years old. I was think baptized not long after my birth. So about 38 years I’ve been Catholic, cradle Catholic. Jim Gaffigan has the joke about how he’s a practicing Catholic because he needs the practice. And I would say that’s me mass on Sundays, holy Days of obligation kids in Catholic school, the whole thing I would say I would categorize myself as a confession fan, but I’m a millennial, so I was raised by Vatican II Catholics who went to mass one day and everything was in Latin and people had to wear, women had to wear head coverings. And then the next day it was happy clappy guitar masses with priests who spoke English facing the congregation. And I was not raised going to Confession really. My mom made sure we went on Easter and Christmas, which I think are the bare minimum for when you’re sort of obligated to go as a Catholic. But beyond that, it really wasn’t until probably in my thirties, so within the past decade that I started going to Confession with any irregularity.
And I love it. I love it. It’s really nice to hear someone say out loud that your sins have been forgiven. I mean, that’s a great feeling. It’s worth it just for that I think. Totally. Even if you don’t believe in the absolution. So I am not only a regular Confession goer, but I just came from a parish in North Carolina, which had a lot of young families and where the priest would joke at mass, “Wow, you guys really like going to Confession, huh?” And if you didn’t show up probably like a half hour before the state of Confession times, which father offered four times a week, there was a good chance you weren’t getting seen in that time period.

MO: So at a certain point the door closes, there’s no more entry for the night. It’s like the club closes down, there’s last call?

MP: There’s no bouncer. But the way it worked at our last parish is he would offer it before Mass, I assume, because you can’t go to communion if you haven’t been absolved of any mortal sins. So this was your chance to go and still go to communion afterwards. So he had to go because he had to go to the sacristy and suit up. That was why. But he would sometimes hang around afterwards for anybody who really needed to go after mass, I know that there are priests who will kind of hang around. It was a time constraint. He had a hard exit time.

MO: He had a hard out. Okay, so let’s go back a second here. This is all super fascinating to me as a Jew. So growing up, you were Catholic, you were raised Catholic. What was the message that was being conveyed to you as a young Catholic when you know that it’s one of the sacraments? I think there’s seven, it’s a big deal, but you only went twice a year. What was the thinking?

MP: There wasn’t a sense that it was a big deal. It was something that our mom dragged us to, and it wasn’t, I never really felt that way about going to mass. I never really felt that way about any of the other stuff we did, but confession, it was awkward. And usually what they would do, and they still do it at a lot of parishes is so during Lent or during Advent, they’ll have what they call a penance service, and they’ll have some sort of liturgy where they’ll read from usually the Old Testament about feeling bad about something. And then they’ll sing and the guitar people will come out again, and then they’ll bring in priests from all over and you’ll have kind of your pick of priests. So that way presumably it’ll go more quickly. And so yeah, already it’s awkward already. It’s someplace you don’t want to be.

Everything feels made up and weird. And then you have to wait in line with all these strangers who talk to a priest you don’t even know usually. And often they would be face-to-face. And I hate face-to-face confession, even though I just came from a parish where my priest definitely knew me, he knew who I was, but behind the screen you felt like you could both pretend that you didn’t know it was you. And so yeah, you had to go face to face and talk to this guy. And as a kid, everything about that just felt icky and weird and you didn’t want to, and it was a thing your mom dragged you to. And it wasn’t even something, almost all of my friends had parents who dragged them to church growing up. Not all of my friends’ parents dragged them to the pennant service. And so that just felt like it was my mom’s weird thing that we had to do. My dad didn’t even go. And so I was like, well, how important can this really be? Dad comes to mass, but he doesn’t come to the pennant service.

MO: Okay, but wait, back up a second here, because you’ve said, and this is one of the few things I know about confession, just from American culture and the movies, I guess that you’re not supposed to take communion unless you are confessed, but you’re taking communion pretty much every time you go to Church and you’re only confessing twice a year and people like your dad who are going to Mass are not confessing at all. So there’s a lot of communion taking going on that by all rights shouldn’t be happening because the people are not fully confessed up, right?

MP: Well, listeners are free to contradict me, but my understanding is, and I think this is correct, you can’t go to communion if you have a mortal sin on your conscience. You can have committed venial sins and as been internally, sorry for those or whatever, but immortal sins cut you off from being able to go to confession.

MO: What are the mortal sins?

MP: The mortal sins are a grave sin committed with full knowledge, full consent, and full awareness of the gravity of the sin. So it’s actually with all of those conditions in place, kind of hard to actually commit a mortal sin, if you think about it.

MO: Okay. Yeah, I’m looking on Wikipedia right now. It looks like there’s maybe a couple dozen of them. It’s like abortion, adultery, apostasy, blasphemy, contraception, detraction, which is disclosing another person’s faults to people who don’t don’t knw them, it’s like gossip, I guess. Divorce, envy, fornication, heresy, incest, lying. It’s masturbation. It’s like the heavies. It’s not, it’s a few dozen.

MP: It’s the heavies. But you have to know how serious they are and you have to do it with full knowledge that they’re bad and that they’re serious for them to fully count as you could do any one of those things and not really know how bad they were. And still, again, listeners are free to come, but that’s my understanding.

MO: Got it. Got it. So what brought you to, I was going to say back to confession, but I guess it’s to confession really in your twenties.

MP: Yeah, I always was good about going at Easter. That was just a habit that was raised to me. That’s the only time I think you have to go, go at Easter, everyone’s obligated to go at Easter. Again, I don’t know how well communicated that is post Vatican II. That was something I was raised with, but I don’t know how well communicated that is to most cradle Catholics my age. It got to be something I was more serious about. I don’t really know. I think I became kind more religiously aware as mass stopped being something I just went to out of habit and became something that I became more curious about my faith and wanted to learn more about it and became more knowledgeable about the why behind the things that we did. Confession just became something that my brothers likened it to, going to the gym where he’s like, you hate going to the gym.

But the more of a habit it becomes when you’re done, you’re like, wow, I’m really glad I went to the gym. And so it became something, the more I did it that it stopped feeling weird, and now it just became kind of a habit. And so even if I didn’t have a really serious sin on my conscience, even if there’s something I’m kind of working through in my life, a problem or a question or an ongoing kind of issue that’s maybe led me to lose my temper with my kids or my husband or be disrespectful to a family member, I’ll go and confess that even though it’s not necessarily a mortal sin, because usually there’s a section where the priest will counsel you a little bit, but also there’s a belief that the absolution that you get, it’s not the priest giving you the absolution, it’s God.

It’s Jesus giving you the absolution in the person of the priest. So there are graces conferred on you when the priest gives you absolution to kind of equip you to deal with whatever it is that you’re going through. And sometimes even there will be sins that I don’t, hadn’t thought about in years, and I’ll remember from my teens or my twenties and Oh, we all have those things right in 3am in the morning and be like, oh my gosh, I can’t believe I. And so it’s great. You can go and verbalize it to a priest and get absolved and it’s like, “Hey, it’s not so bad.” And you can kind of exercise that thing from your conscience or the cringe flashbacks you get at 3am.

MO: It’s funny, I do get cringe flashbacks. I don’t think mine are at 3:00am. Mine are usually sometime middle of the day, my 3am, anything I think about 3am, it’s usually a movie plot line or a dream that I’m not sure was a dream, or something like that. But I know what you’re talking about.

It does occur to me that within Catholicism then, especially if you’re regularly confessing to a priest who knows who you are, recognizes your voice, there is this extraordinary intimacy, some might say power that they have over you. I assume you trust that they’re not going to do anything bad with the knowledge, but your priest knows a lot more about you than my rabbi knows about me. Is that ever weird?

I mean, I’ll just cut right to the chase. So let’s, hypothetically, you’re coming in every week confessing to masturbation, or contraception, or I’m just looking at the list here, contraception. The church must be filled with people confessing contraception all the time, and presumably with the promise that they’re not going to do it again, knowing full well they’re going to do it again. And the priest knows this every time he sees you, is there no weirdness there?

MP: So there can be, oh, yeah. Especially with repeated sins. Yeah. We call those habitual sins, things that is like, oh, I did it again, father. So yeah, it’s a little embarrassing, but there’s two things there. So first of all, there’s the seal of confession, which the priests are not allowed under pain of basically excommunication of ever saying anything they’ve heard you say in confession. So they can’t say anything.

MO: I know this because of every Law and Order episode where a priest can help the police solve a crime, or in some cases prevent the murder, or the molestation of someone going forward if they break the seal of confession, and they do, but they lose their soul along with it. And it’s very–as the audience, you’re not supposed to know what to think, but go ahead.

MP: Yeah. Yeah. So Mariska Hargitay got that one, right. That’s true. But yeah, so that’s one thing.

The other thing is, and I’ve heard this from more than one priest, is that one of the graces of confession is that they just forget it as soon as they walk out of the confessional. They’re like, honestly, it’s pretty boring. You hear the same people, it’s really boring to hear. They’ll say this, sin is ultimately very boring. The devil is not very creative. So you’ll hear a bunch of people come in confess contraception, masturbation, pornography. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, okay, okay, I hear you. They get kind of bored with it. So that’s the other thing. And then I would like to hone in a little bit on the power dynamic there, because that’s true. You’re putting yourself in a very vulnerable position and there does, you’re telling all of your secrets to this man behind a screen.

I acknowledge that’s a very weird setup, and I tweeted about it. I tweeted about the article, and I did have an abuse survivor say, Hey, confession is how my abuser got me, basically. And I said, look, I’m really, really sorry, and I have no answer for that. I’m not going to sit here and defend it. Your lived experience. And I totally see how a manipulative person could use this dynamic to abuse someone a hundred percent. And so that’s one of the themes that I pursue in my writing. I’ve written a couple of times at Arc now about different ways that Catholic leadership kind of has responsibility. I wrote about embezzling problems in the Catholic church for Arc, and I’ve written for tablet about how the bankruptcy proceedings in New York diocese are causing a lot of issues for abuse survivors and lay people. I mean, I make no secret of the fact that as a Catholic, I think that Catholic leadership in the U.S. still has a lot of work to do to reestablish credibility with people.

And I think to Matthew Schmitz’s credit, he does bring that up in the book review. The abuse scandals were a reason why people stopped going to confession. And I think one thing that happens when you hear people in Catholic circles lament about how people stop going to confession, you don’t see as many people in the lines in confession, which while not my experience definitely happens places, obviously they sort of overlooked the fact that, well, gosh, do you think there might be a reason why people might not want to lock themselves in a room with a priest and tell ’em all their secrets? So that’s real.

MO: What’s the most difficult penance you’ve ever been told to do? I mean, my impression again from the movies is it’s always some number of Hail Marys, or Our Fathers, or rosaries. But I have to think sometimes the judge who usually comes up with a very creative sentence and says, you have to go paint the house of the person you defamed or something. Have you ever been given anything that sticks out as particularly difficult or creative?

MP: Oh my gosh. I don’t want to sound like too much of a goody two shoes, but I don’t think I’ve ever really gotten a really serious penance. I’ll tell you an awkward experience though, which is that I haven’t really gotten really difficult. But I’ve had friends who’ve gone to the same priest and say, oh my gosh, father so-and-so is a real hard ass. And I’m like, oh, really?

MO: What are you doing?

MP: I have questions.

MO: Maggie Phillips, thanks so much for confessing all to us, and for writing for Arc.

MP: Anytime. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

MO: That’s Maggie Phillips. You can find her work at Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera, online@arcmag.org.

Alright, time for the religion calendar. So you remember a month or two ago, I was really hard up for religious holidays. There’s a period in the summer where there are no Jewish holidays, really no Christian holidays of great note, at least across all of Christianity. There are always Saints days for Catholics, but there wasn’t a lot going on, no significant Muslim or Hindu holidays. But guys, we are back in the thick of it. It’s like the Gods knew that they wanted to wait until the kids were back at school, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, and then they were going to just drop holidays on us.

So September 3rd, already a little bit in the rear view mirror, but that was the holiday of part of, which is a devotional observance that relates to Lord Vishnu’s transitions between reclining postures. So it’s a Hindu holiday and devotees, they fast, they perform pujas and they stay up all night and honor and observe this holiday.

September 4th and fifth was also Mawlid an-Nabi, which is a Muslim holiday that honors the birth of the prophet Muhammad. So it could also fall on other dates throughout the world. The calendar, it can be a little bit fuzzy, but it honors the birth of the prophet Mohammed.

A big fricking deal is September 11th is the holiday of, which is observed by Coptic Orthodox Christians. It commemorates martyrs and saints.

What else? God, Rosh Hashanah is coming up, begins the night of September 22nd, goes through the night of September 24th. That’s two days. They only observe one in Israel. If you have questions about that, drop me an email. I’ll cycle back to that.
And then also September 22nd, a holiday I hadn’t heard of, but it’s Mabon, which is the equinox celebration in Pagan and Wiccan traditions. And this year, guess what? It falls on September 22nd. So Equinox, September 22nd. Cambodian Buddhism has a holiday also, September 22nd and 23rd. It’s just holidays upon holidays upon holidays.

And if you don’t observe any of them, if you’re totally secular and totally outside the religious world, and you’re not observing any of these holidays, well, I mean, if nothing else, you’re just missing a lot of fun. I mean, there’s food, there’s good times, there’s interesting dress in a lot of our traditions. So I don’t know, you might want to get with it.

And celebrity birthdays, we just missed the birthday of Beyonce, September 4th, but we’re a little more on the ball for the birthday of Pink, which is September 8th. Adam Sandler, September 9th, Michael Buble. I know a lot of you were wondering when Michael Buble was born, September 9th, Colin Firth, September 10th, and the great Jennifer Hudson, September 12th. So a lot of stuff coming up, a lot of birthdays.

And if you go out past that, you got Nick Jonas on September 16th, Jimmy Fallon on September 19th, and the great Serena Williams on September 26th. Oh, and the fact that on September 23rd, this is interesting. Bruce Springsteen and Jason Alexander from Seinfeld share a birthday. So send them cards, send them notes. Don’t be a stranger to them.

Arc: The Podcast is a production of Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera. The magazine, which is at arcmag.org, but also of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. The show is produced and edited by David Sugarman with consulting from our intern Caroline Coffey at the Danforth Center. We are supported by Debra Kennard, Mark Valeri, Abram Van Engen, and all the rest. Our music is by Love Cannon. Our web design is by Cause and Effect online at causexeffect.com. Until next time, I’m Mark Oppenheimer.