Religions Reviewed

One belief repeatedly ascribed to Lollards was their rejection of the need or utility of auricular confession.  In Karma Lochrie’s study of medieval secrecy Covert Operations, she explores the dynamics of concealment and disclosure in the medieval Church’s procedures for confession. Besides serving as a component of the program of clerical and lay education inaugurated by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, confession was a practice which vigorously deployed modes of secrecy and disclosure into Christian observance and the relations between laity and clergy. The lay penitent was supposed to fully reveal to the priestly confessor all those sins which she had kept secret. The priest, in turn, was required to keep the matter of confession privy himself. The ideal of trust between these two parties was difficult to achieve, since fallible priests might well disclose confessed sins, and penitents might succumb to fear and keep them secret.  These concerns are explicitly cited in the ninth of the Lollards’ “Twelve Conclusions,” along with two other grave objections: the private time with a confessor could be occasion for sinful acts, and worst of all, since the priesthood was not genuinely Apostolic, it had no actual power to absolve sins.  The apparent absolution from the priest might merely encourage further sin. It would, in any case, not of itself provide the benefits of confession to God, nor to any person whom the sinner had wronged.  In the case of confession, as with the study of scripture, it was the Lollards who opposed the secretive and privy procedures of the Church.