You Tube Theology

Panel Discussion Participants

M. Cathleen Kaveny, Boston College
James Keenan, S.J., Boston College
James O'Toole, Boston College
Leslie Tentler, Catholic University of America
Moderated by Mark Massa, S.J.
Date: Wednesday, October 22, 2025

This event was co-sponsored with BC Libraries.

For I Have Sinned presents a social history of the practice of confession by American Catholics. For generations, Catholics in the United States went to confession regularly and in large numbers. It was something they did which their Protestant and other American neighbors did not do, and so it became a distinctive denominational marker for them. They did not like to do it, but they did it anyway in compliance with the Church's expectations. Then, starting in the 1960s and 1970s, the practice all but disappeared. Even those who continued to identify as practicing Catholics stopped going to confession, and parishes everywhere drastically curtailed the hours when priests were available for this purpose. The book explores the reasons for this dramatic change, reasons that came from within the Church and from society at large. The book also examines the role of clergy sexual abuse in the decline of confession and in discouraging any revival of the practice.