Law Forces Priests to Break Seal of Confession to Report Abuse Or Face Possible Prison Time
Catholic bishops strongly oppose the Washington state law, and the Justice Department says it appears to violate the First Amendment.
By Gary Gately
Priests in Washington state face an unenviable dilemma:
Break the seal of confession — and face automatic excommunication — by reporting to authorities child abuse revealed during the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
Or face up to a year imprisonment and a $5,000 fine for failing to do so.
Legislation signed into law by Democratic Governor Bob Ferguson, a Catholic, adds clergy to “mandatory reporters” of child abuse, including school counselors, police, healthcare workers, social workers and nurses. The law requires priests to report suspected child abuse revealed during confession to law enforcement or the Department of Children, Youth and Families.
“Protecting our kids, first, is the most important thing,” Ferguson said after signing the legislation. “This bill protects Washingtonians from abuse and harm.”
But the law has drawn fierce opposition from Catholic leaders in Washington state and well beyond and from the U.S. Justice Department.
“Catholic clergy may not violate the seal of confession — or they will be excommunicated from the Church,” Archbishop Paul Etienne of Seattle said in a statement. “All Catholics must know and be assured that their confessions remain sacred, secure, confidential and protected by the law of the Church.
“With this law, the State of Washington is specifically targeting religious conduct by inserting the government into the Catholic tradition, namely, the highly defined ritual of the Sacrament of Reconciliation,” Archbishop Etienne said. “Once the state asserts the right to dictate religious practices and coerce information obtained within this sacrament — privileged communication — where is the line drawn between Church and state?”
Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s Justice Department launched an investigation last week into the “anti-Catholic” law, which it said “appears on its face to violate the First Amendment” guarantee of religious freedom.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon said in a statement that the law “demands that Catholic priests violate their deeply held faith in order to obey the law, a violation of the Constitution and a breach of the free exercise of religion that cannot stand under our constitutional system of government.”
“We take this matter very seriously and look forward to Washington State’s cooperation with our investigation,” Dhillon added.
Ferguson retorted: “We look forward to protecting Washington kids from sexual abuse in the face of this ‘investigation’ from the Trump Administration.”
And Mary Dispenza, a founding member of the Catholic Accountability Project, which helped get the measure passed, said: “The bill is not anti-Catholic. In fact, as I see it, priests who report crimes against children are living the heart of the Christian message.”
Dispenza, who was abused as a child by a priest repeatedly over a two-year span in East Los Angeles, also noted that the bill’s sponsor, Democrat Noel Frame, initially introduced legislation aimed at making clergy mandatory reporters three years ago ago in response to an InvestigateWest account of a lawsuit alleging a Jehovah’s Witnesses congregation in Spokane covered up abuse of children by an elder.
The new law also makes clergy of other faiths mandatory reporters, Dispenza pointed out.
“It is anti-Catholic and anti-all faiths to not support the bill,” said Dispenza, who is also a member of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, an advocacy group of survivors of clergy abuse.
Frame said the law sends a clear message: “The Church is not above the law. No one is above the law, especially when it comes to protecting children.”
Speaking to reporters, Frame added: “There are some things that it doesn’t matter what religion you are in, you never put somebody’s conscience over the protection of a child.”
This marks the third straight year that Frame has introduced legislation seeking to add requirements on clergy reporting of child abuse.
She said she had been abused repeatedly as a child by a family member and that the abuse stopped only after she told a mandated reporter, a teacher, about the abuse.
Last year, Frame reached a compromise with the Washington State Catholic Conference (WSCC), the public policy arm of the state’s bishops, that would have preserved the clergy-penitent privilege if clergy members learned only during confession that a child may have been abused. But if they heard about possible abuse in confession and in some other settings beyond confession, they would be required to report it. The Senate passed the bill, but it failed to make it out of a House committee.
And a 2023 measure sponsored by Frame would have mandated that clergy members inform law enforcement if they believed a child was at imminent risk of abuse, even if that belief stemmed partly or fully from what they heard in confession.
The bill died in the face of heavy opposition from the WSCC.
Jean Welch Hill, executive director of the WSCC, noted in written testimony this year that policies in all three Washington dioceses require priests to report any “reasonable suspicions of abuse,” except for information confessed by a penitent during the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
Hill also argued that the measure could prevent repentant sex offenders who recognize the harm they have caused and want to stop their abuse from turning to a priest for counsel. Some GOP lawmakers agreed, predicting that the measure would scare off abusers to the point that they would no longer confide in a priest and seek forgiveness.
Other Republicans asserted that similar laws in other states had failed to reduce child abuse or neglect.
More than 30 U.S. states now include clergy among mandatory reporters, though all but a seven of them allow exceptions for information about abuse shared during confession. In a handful of states, including North Carolina, Texas and Oklahoma, failure to report child abuse revealed in confession is a criminal offense, but it’s unclear whether any priests have been prosecuted for violations.
As attorney general, Ferguson had accused the Archdiocese of Seattle last May of refusing to cooperate in an investigation into whether it illegally relied on charitable funds to cover up allegations of decades of “pervasive sexual abuse” by clergy. He filed a petition seeking to force the archdiocese to turn over records that his office had sought in a civil subpoena.
But in July, a state judge sided with the archdiocese, whose attorneys argued that under a state law governing charitable trusts, Ferguson lacked the authority to enforce the subpoena.
Still, in a statement after the ruling, Etienne said: “Sexual abuse in the Church is a heart-wrenching part of our history, and I am deeply sorry for the pain caused to victim survivors, their families and all Catholics.”
He pledged to “collaborate with the attorney general” because the archdiocese “is committed to preventing abuse, promoting transparency and continuously improving our processes.”
The AG’s Office appealed the judge’s decision in October.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops points to numerous safeguards to prevent sexual abuse that it first adopted in 2002 after a Boston Globe investigation into abuse in the Archdiocese of Boston thrust the sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy into the national spotlight.