The vacant confessional

Roger Ford has confessed his sins to a priest once a week ever since he turned 60.

"As you get older, you want to make it right," said the 63-year-old Baltimore native on a recent Sunday as he was leaving Mass. "You want to get to heaven, you know what I mean?"

Rosemary Lamartina, 52, said she goes to confession three times a year, usually around the holidays. The lifelong Catholic used to confess weekly.

"It was just something we were told we had to do," Lamartina said. "Now [that] I understand more, I don't go as often."

Still, Lamartina goes to confession more than most Catholics. Lay participation in the rite, which is also known as the sacrament of penance and reconciliation, has plummeted since the 1950s. Only 14 percent of Catholics go to confession yearly, according to a 2005 poll conducted by Georgetown University's Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. Forty-two percent of Catholics reported they never go to confession at all.

"The falloff has just been so dramatic," said James O'Toole, a Boston College historian who writes about Catholic life in America.

The decline has been particularly steep among younger Catholics, according to scholars and church-watchers. Fifty years ago, penitents lined the aisles outside confessional booths on Saturday afternoons, waiting to admit their sins, recite the Act of Contrition, receive absolution from a priest, make their penance and be forgiven.

Catholic leaders — including the late Pope John Paul II — have emphasized confession's role in what the church calls "God's sacramental economy," the seven rites through which God's grace is granted. Participation in the sacrament, according to Catholic doctrine, could make the difference between salvation and damnation. Those who have committed serious sins are obligated to confess yearly; others are encouraged to sanctify their lives through regular confession as well.

Still, the lines outside confessional booths have thinned. Sociologists and Catholic clergy list a number of reasons, including changing notions of sin, opposition to the church's stance on birth control, widespread changes after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, ignorance about the sacrament, and busy lives.

But sin tops the list.

In a permissive culture, messages of sin and redemption find less traction, said Washington, D.C., Archbishop Donald Wuerl.

"We live in culture that is saying to people, 'There really isn't such a thing as sin. You may do things your way but that doesn't make it wrong,' " he said.

During a different era, Wuerl might have asked priests in his archdiocese to preach hellfire and damnation to get Catholics back to the confessionals. Instead, in his first major enterprise in the nation's capital, the archbishop unleashed a media blitz on Ash Wednesday — papering the archdiocese with 100,000 brochures, placing ads on the radio and in public transportation hubs, and erecting a billboard with the message "The Light Is On For You" along a major Washington-area highway. Yesterday's fire and brimstone are this year's marketing campaign.

Wuerl said his plan was hatched after talking to penitents who had confessed after many years away from the sacrament. In priestly parlance, this is called catching the "big fish." As in, "I landed a 17-year fish," according to O'Toole.

But Catholics who have been away that long may have a hard time coming back, said the Rev. James Martin, a writer and Jesuit priest in New York.

"People who haven't been in a while think of going to a dark box when they were in elementary school and talking to a screen," he said. "That doesn't bring back the best memories." They may not even know that Catholic parishes now offer face-to-face confessions with a priest in a "reconciliation room," he said.

Martin and other scholars of Catholic life also said that Humanae Vitae — the 1968 papal encyclical that reasserted the Vatican's opposition to artificial birth control — drove Catholics from the confessional.

"I think birth control had a great deal to do with the collapse of confession," said Leslie Tentler, a historian at the Catholic University of America. "It wasn't just the embarrassment of having to discuss sex with a celibate male — something that neither men nor women enjoyed. It was having to talk about a putative sin that growing numbers of Catholics didn't really think was sinful."

O'Toole, from Boston College, said Catholic women once talked about "confessor shopping" to locate priests who didn't take a hard line on issues like birth control. With many parishes reducing confessional hours and many Catholics living lives on the run, it has been difficult to find space to talk about the difficult issues of sin and grace, many Catholics said.