The law is on your side, logic is on Der Trihs’ side … is this really a good situation for you?
To fill in the cells of my matrix from earlier, you’re telling this story from the POV of a shlub, the brother of a person committing a crime. What if the person who was committing the crime was your client? Would you, as an attorney, be forced to tell a jury?
What about if a member of the clergy were in front of the jury? Can he be forced to tell what he knows?
Seriously? I’ve not seen any logic behind DT’s position that actually applies to public policy. He seems to be saying they’re wrong, therefore their desires don’t matter. But the state is supposed to remain neutral on religious matters whenever it can; so the only salient point is that people want to practice in that manner. It is not a socially harmful manner of practice; therefore the state has no right to block it. Pretty simple.
If your argument rests on “All religion (or in this case, specifically Catholicism) is false”, you’re subverting the First Amendment. DT’s argument fails without that premise; therefore it is incompatible with free religious practice. I am, of course, aware that sometimes religious practices clash with the social interest so heavily that there has to be a compromise or a restriction on the practice (e.g. JWs refusing blood transfusions for children who will otherwise die, or arguably, Sikh children wearing kirpans to school), but nobody has even tried to make an argument that there is a substantial social interest in breaking the confidentiality of confessions.
I’m still unclear on whether the confidentiality of confessions is given any protected status in the law. If it is, then that’s not remaining neutral on religious matters.
I’m saying why do these particular wrong people get special privileges when other wrong people don’t. Why should this particular group of con artists get privileges?
Exactly.
If the effect is to conceal the identity of criminals, it’s socially harmful, and isn’t that the problem with it?
…except in reality, it does not conceal the identity of criminals. The priest only knows of the crimes because of his job; and we are discussing the continued legality of that job.
The thing is that where it is protected, it’s usually protected as part of a general clergy-congregant privilege, not a specifically Catholic one. So it gets a (debatable, indeed, but historically accepted in US Courts) pass as “neutral” for being neutral between religions as opposed to neutral between religion and non-religion.
I’m not getting that at all. If the preist knows who committed a murder/robbed a bank, and he doesn’t come forward, he is concealing their identity. Simple as that. There is a social cost for that, murderers and thieves run free.
In other words, fake neutrality like “ceremonial deism”.
…except people are likely not to tell him that if they know he has to report them. So the end result is the same.
Let’s use a hypothetical. Say there were professional secret-keepers, people who you could tell things who in turn couldn’t tell them. Not for religious purposes, just because people wanted them. (Yes, I use lame hypotheticals.) They can’t tell you anything back, they can’t forward your secrets to conspirators or anything, they just have to hear your secrets. Would society suddenly have an increase in people getting away with crimes? Of course not! Ergo, there is no real social cost to having religious figures who can be bound by strict rules of confidentiality. Further, it is not at all clear to me that religious practices even should be bound impartially. We make exemptions for religious groups all the time —allowing Muslims to wear hijabs at work, or JW’s to reject blood transfusions, or Jews to not work on Sundays, etc. The most important point of both the American and Canadian secularisms is to let people practice or not practice as they wish without the government interfering, wherever that is reasonable. This board in general, and people in this thread in particular, seem to want to use the First Amendment to screw religions; that’s clearly not its intent.
On an unrelated note, I’m not at all sure “ministers” have to be especially religious for these sorts of rules to apply. Unitarians and LaVeyan Satanists get the same protections as Catholics, do they not?
Well then what difference does it make?
If a guy will only confess to some horrible “sin” because he knows the priest, or imam, or what-the-fuck-ever, won’t rat him out … how is that any better than the guy just not admitting it to anyone. He still won’t face the music until he sacks up on his own accord.
LOL! I meant to write “Jews not to work on Saturdays”.
Actually, this leads to a nice quasi-hypothetical. So (observant) Jews don’t work on Saturday. They’re pretty tolerant sorts, so they don’t think others need to observe the Sabbath, but let’s imagine that they did. (If you prefer, you can change “Jews” into “Adventists”. Works either way.) Then what would the neutral thing be? Clearly not to force everyone to observe the Sabbath! Yet that would be applying the same rules to everybody, right? On the other hand, if people are getting fired for needing that day off of work, suddenly you can’t be a Jew in society anymore; it’s not neutral, either. Instead, the neutral thing to do is clear: decide that Jews must be allowed to observe the Sabbath, but non-Jews must also be allowed to work on the Sabbath.
We thus conclude that there’s more to freedom of religion then just applying the same rules to everybody.
It’s better because it doesn’t interfere with people freely practicing their religion. That’s the only difference between the two outcomes. That’s exactly the point I was trying to make in our exchange.
No. I could not be forced to the jury anything I learned in the context of attorney-client privilege without the consent of the client. (There are some restrictions on how such communications must happen, mind you – for example, the presence of a third party during the conversation would destroy the privilege, unless that party was a prospective or actual co-defendant.)
No, assuming he learned it in the context of a priest-penitent conversation – again, though, there are circumstances that would remove it from the privilege. And here state laws vary much more dramatically. If I recall correctly, six states don’t recognize the privilege at all. In some others, the privilege is held by the priest, meaning that it’s up to him (or her) to decide to disclose the communication. In others, it’s up to the penitent, and without his consent the priest cannot testify.
Except the priest only knows this information because the criminals knew it was safe to confess to him. If we change the law, criminals no longer reveal their crimes to him, and so he won’t know them anyway.
The priest then can become an influence urging the guy to …er… “sack up.”
Excommunication maybe the worst thing for some Catholics, but there are others who would not care less!
…Or a lawyer who is a professional colleague working with you on the same case and himself retained as an attorney by your client, right? I.e., if you and Gfactor are law partners and I retain your firm, with you as my lead attorney, but with consideration also passing to Gfactor to make me his client as well, the two of you may discuss strategy with me with attorney-client privilege intact; is this correct?
Just to nail this down, you are talking the civil/criminal laws of individual states (and the Feds.) here, and the Vatican’s canon law proposition is that the privilege is absolute and held by the penitent; a priest breaking confidentiality in this way incurs automatic excommunication, right?
(I’m not in any way asserting that canon law trumps secular law, just observing that disregarding the privilege altogether or placing the privilege in the priest’s hands places him in a very difficult situation.
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One additional note on this: The privilege must be within the bounds of the Sacrament of Reconciliation; a ‘confession’ (in the secular sense) in the context of counseling outside sacramental Confession is subject to ‘ordinary’ confidentiality, exactly as if the priest were a lay psychotherapist. IIRC this means it must be honored in ordinary circumstances where the law does not compel divulgence but is overridden by statute or court order that does compel it. Correct?
Absolutely; I think I alluded to something similar earlier in the thread. Such a conversation extends the privilege and does not breach it. I could even retain outside counsel myself to advise me on my own exposure and ethical options, and extend the privilege to them.
Correct. I’m using “priest” in the secular law manner, referring to any priest, minister, rabbi, imam, or other regular religious clergy member. As to the Catholic Code of Canon Law, a priest who directly violates the seal of the confessional incurs a latae sententiae excommunication – that is, he is automatically excommunicated at the instant he commits the offense. Lifting this penalty may not be done by his bishop, but is reserved to the Vatican. A priest who acts in some way to indirectly reveal a secret of the confessional in punished with “a just penalty” which can extend to excommunication, but must be imposed after a trial.
Yes.