In mid-June, a petition calling for a ban on children’s confession was submitted to the Sejm of the Republic of Poland. Rafał Betlejewski (facebook.com/rafal.betlej.betlejewski), the petition’s author, stresses that the practice of children’s confession deprives them of the right to respect and dignity and causes traumatic experiences. He pointed out that priests’ behavior toward children is not subject to any oversight.

A priest can, under the authority of the Church, question a defenseless, gullible, embarrassed child about their “impure thoughts.” Is there a better opportunity for a perverted priest to identify victims? 

I recently discussed this with participants at an anti-violence conference in Słupsk. Dominik Nowak, director of the New Theatre, noted that if he had come up with the idea of questioning children about their sex lives in a closet at his own theater, the police in balaclavas would have led him away in handcuffs, Telewizja Polska would have had material for a month, and the minister of culture would have closed all theaters pending an investigation into how widespread the practice was.

You do not need the opinion of a theologian or psychologist to see that this is a pathological situation. An adult man living in forced celibacy hears a child’s confession without parental supervision. Under the threat of God’s vengeance, he is entitled to question the child about intimate matters.

An excerpt from Rafał Betlejewski’s interview with Gazeta Wyborcza: https://wyborcza.pl/7,75410,29197822,spowiedz-dzieci-to-dobra-okazja-dla-ksiezy-zboczencow-do-wylowienia.html

Members of the Zieloni party supported Rafał Betlejewski’s petition calling for a ban on children’s confession.

– To me, it is not normal that a 17-year-old cannot visit a gynecologist without parental consent, while a 9-year-old can confess without any consent to a stranger, an adult man, which often traumatizes them for the rest of their life. I think that introducing at least mandatory parental consent for confession would already be a step in the right direction – MP Klaudia Jachira said in the Sejm.

So far, more than 10,400 people have signed the petition. Signatures can still be submitted at: Let’s ban children’s confession

Civic petition calling for a ban on children’s confession

We, the undersigned, submit a petition calling for the enactment of regulations introducing, in Poland, a ban on confession for children under 16 in the Catholic Church and other churches if they practice it.

Justification:

  1. Individual confession is a relic of the Middle Ages, when feudal social relations prevailed. This type of relationship has been rejected by modern society. Today we know that children, like adults, have the right to respect and dignity, a sense of their own integrity and distinctiveness, and the right to their own privacy, while adults are obliged to provide them with care and safety.
  2. Individual confession, on one’s knees, under threat of punishment and with a sense of guilt and humiliation, disrupts mutual relations between people and creates a false image of social relations in children’s eyes.
  3. Children’s confessors are celibate men who do not have appropriate psychological training.
  4. Priests’ conduct toward children in the confessional is not subject to any oversight and is therefore an opportunity for abuse and pathological behavior.
  5. No unrelated adult has the right to question a child alone without the supervision of guardians and psychologists, or to ask questions about the child’s intimate life. A teacher, doctor or police officer has no such right; a priest should not have it either.
  6. A child’s proper development must be based on inviolable boundaries around their privacy, because only under such conditions can a child develop a strong and independent personality. Confession crosses these boundaries.
  7. Confession prematurely confronts children with falsely understood concepts of “good and evil” when they have not yet fully developed the ability to understand their actions.
  8. Confession prematurely confronts children with sexual issues, irresponsibly and falsely linking their emerging curiosity about this sphere with feelings of guilt, sin and impurity.
  9. Confession creates in a child a sense of guilt toward Jesus and falsely associates ordinary childhood behavior with the cruelty of torture inflicted on a defenseless person.
  10. Confession provides an opportunity for abuse of children by adult men. Many people recall inappropriate questions from priests about sexuality, while some victims of sexual abuse by priests say that their abusers singled them out in the confessional.
  11. As the recollections of many people show, confession is an experience of humiliation and fear, a traumatic and horrible event that children did not want and were unable to defend themselves against, because it takes place under pressure from their family and the Church.
  12. Confession has no therapeutic or educational value.

Petition author Rafał Betlejewski.