The greatest fear for those of us who grew up as Catholics was waiting outside the sinister dark of the mahogany confession box on a black winter's evening. Each second brought that terrible moment closer when you would have to confess your heinous sin of stealing that missing piece of chocolate. When the priest leaned forward, would he recognise your shadowy face through the grid? What would happen if you stalled halfway through the complexities of the Act of Contrition? Would the penance be unbearable and would the priest become angry?
With the decline in religious practice, such fears are likely to be alien to your average seven year-old today. However, he or she may still need an outlet for all that pent-up guilt. With the proliferation of virtual confession sites on the Web, anonymous, instant and total forgiveness of sins is now available at the click of a mouse.
An example of a site offering this service is absolution- online.com. Starting with a disclaimer that notes the church has not endorsed the site, it opens the e-Confession with the words, "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen". You are asked to select a sin from a list under one of five headings: the Ten Commandments, The Seven Deadly Sins, Internal Sins, Physical Sins and General Sins. Each sin has further subdivisions from which you must choose. Once you have selected your sin you then go on to receive your penance.
By way of experiment, I entered the sin of murder. I was then presented with various degrees of murder from which I had to choose my own particular offence: self defence, minor or accidental murder, serious, very serious, and premeditated and cruel murder. Having chosen premeditated and cruel murder, I received my absolution: "May the Almighty God have mercy on you, and forgiving your sins, bring you to everlasting life. May the Almighty and merciful God grant you pardon, absolution, and remission of your sins". My penance was to fast for five days and to inform the authorities of my crime. The automated computer then absolved me of my sins, "in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen". Everything from sorcery to missing Mass can be confessed on this site.
Absolution-online.com is one of numerous virtual confession sites on the Net. While most are automated and operate a basically Christian value system, like nauticom.net which makes it clear the service is "NOT a substitute for the Sacrament of Reconciliation", others, such as notproud.com, are more secular in tone.
The latter site offers a notice board service where "true adult confessions" can be posted and shared. The site is humorous in intent, and the confessor who posted "I'll confess tomorrow", under the heading of the sin of sloth, is typical of the notproud.com style. As for penance, well, there is none. "Thank you. I hope that helped" is the only advice given at the end of the confession.
Outside the field of Christianstyle confession is a plethora of weird and irreverent sites. For example, managing-desire.org is a safe-sex information site offering a confession box service. No matter what sin you confess, the penance is the same: "say three Hail Marys and take some condoms". Many of the sites, such as confessitnow.com, have a New Age flavour, while others are much closer to counselling services than to confession sites, places where people can get advice rather than simply confess their sins.
THE question is, however, what does the church make of all this? From a religion that was quick to launch its own website, www.vatican.va, one might expect an open and enterprising attitude from the Catholic Church to the prospect of virtual confession. But, as director of the Mater Dei Institute of Education, Father Michael Drumm, points out, that precisely is the problem with online confession: it is only virtual.
"An earlier form of this problem came up with television. Does watching Mass on television fulfil the Catholic obligation to attend Mass? The answer is no. The communal element is vital for any sacrament, and so is vital for confession. The Catholic understanding is that human interaction is key."
In virtual confession the basic requirement of human presence is lacking, and as Father Drumm points out, "from the very beginning what has characterised Christian worship is gathering".
While Father Drumm agrees that a cyber community constitutes a gathering of a kind, he is clear that Catholic teaching does not recognise the validity of online confession. "From the Council of Trent through to the new Catechism of the Catholic Church, there is a clear tradition." That tradition, says Father Drumm, has emphasised the interpersonal element of confession, without which there would be a threat posed to the secrecy of the confessional - not only on the Internet, he says, but by telephone or even traditional mail.
The Church of Ireland position is quite similar. While Anglicans do not have person-to-priest confession in the Catholic sense, the Church of Ireland's emphasis on confession in the context of community does not allow for the validity of confession in virtual communities.
The Anglican chaplain of Trinity College, Rev Dr Alan McCormack, says that, in his personal view, the Web is not an appropriate forum for the confession of sins. "I would see it as important that the calling to mind of one's sins does happen with other people. The virtual nature of cyberspace challenges the very idea of what the interpersonal is. Christianity is an incarnational faith. It's all about context and particularity. All of that is lost in cyberspace."
For the Jewish community, too, the Internet "is not an appropriate place for spiritual services of any kind", says Michael Coleman, spokesman for the Jewish community in Ireland. "You cannot pray to the Internet". While the Jewish faith does not have confession in the Catholic sense, its Day of Atonement is something that the individual engages in personally with God: the Internet could not have a role, he says. While there has been a marked drop in recent years in the numbers regularly going to confession, the increase in virtual confession sites underlines people's deep-seated need to find an outlet for feelings of guilt. Not only does the Internet offer the anonymity many people require to face their own transgressions and shortcomings, but it also allows the sharing of problems with a potential audience of millions.
While it is often unlikely that the priest hearing your confession shares the same sin as you, in the massive virtual community of the Internet, there is bound to be someone out there who can relate to your predicament. As the Joe Duffys and Jerry Springers of the world are testament to, confession is a basic human need that has a place even in a secular or post religious context.
"The church will have to develop ways of speaking to people through the cyber world," says Father Michael Drumm, "but I don't think that the sacraments are adaptable to the Internet. Sacraments demand that people gather."
That up-close and personal element to confession may ensure sinners will be quaking outside the confession box for some time to come.