“BLESS me, Father, for I have sinned. It is [fill in a number] weeks since my last confession.” The words take me straight back to my (Roman) Catholic childhood in Liverpool. The number back then was sometimes one, more often two, never more than four, but in adulthood it is a practice from which I have long ago lapsed without a backward glance. That gives me as an English Catholic something in common with the vast majority of my co-believers in America, Professor James O’Toole of Boston College confirms in this easy-to-read (i.e. not too stuffily academic) study.

Why this mass collective act of turning our backs on one of the seven sacraments? Confessors and penitents both have played a part in this, he says. With the first group, his answers are already very familiar. The landmark 1968 papal encyclical Humanae Vitae, banning the use of so-called artificial contraception, caused a major breach of trust between priests and people. It revealed and shamed the Church as a mixture of muddled, idealistic, and cruel in its obsession with regulating sex.

Those who had sought comfort and absolution in the confessional simply decided that they would make up their own minds — on sex and, by association, on other matters, too. The drift away then became a flood, as reports of priests abusing children began to emerge in the late 1980s. Often, the confessional had been the place where the grooming had started. In some instances, recounted by O’Toole, it was also the scene of their appalling crimes.

Why those of us who were once penitents no longer yearn for the balm of absolution as dispensed in the confessional is harder to pin down. The ubiquity of the alternative of therapy or analysis is part of it, but in there, too, O’Toole suggests rather vaguely is our loss of a sense of sin, certainly in holding ourselves to account, when looking at how society is structured and operates.

Yet, he argues cogently but not quite convincingly enough to make me want to go again, something has been lost, because confession provided “a larger framework for thinking about how we behave with one another . . . how we live out our ideals, and how to come to terms with those times when we don’t”.

Peter Stanford is a writer, journalist, and broadcaster.

For I Have Sinned: The rise and fall of Catholic confession in America
James M. O’Toole
Harvard University Press £29.95
(978-0-674-29452-3)
Church Times Bookshop £26.95