Washington State Bishops Sue to Challenge Law Forcing Priests to Break Seal of Confession
The suit claims the law requiring priests to report child abuse revealed during the sacrament violates the Constitution.
By Gary Gately
Catholic bishops in Washington state have sued to challenge a law requiring priests to report child sexual abuse revealed in confession or face criminal charges, claiming the law violates the U.S. Constitution.
In the federal lawsuit, the bishops of the state’s three Catholic dioceses argue that the law violates First Amendment protections against religious discrimination, as well as the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and the state’s constitution.
The suit points out that the law, set to take effect July 27, would force priests to break the sacred seal of confession, which results in automatic excommunication, or face up to a year imprisonment and a $5,000 fine.
“Washington is targeting the Roman Catholic Church in a brazen act of religious discrimination,” the lawsuit states. “Without any basis in law or fact, Washington now puts Roman Catholic priests to an impossible choice: violate 2,000 years of Church teaching and incur automatic excommunication or refuse to comply with Washington law and be subject to imprisonment, fine, and civil liability….
“The object of this law is clear: subject Roman Catholic clergy to dictates of the state.”
The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Tacoma, names as defendants Democratic Governor Bob Ferguson, who signed the legislation into law on May 2, fellow Democrat Attorney General Nicholas Brown and numerous county prosecutors.
The law adds clergy to “mandatory reporters” of child abuse, including school counselors, police, healthcare workers, social workers and nurses.
“Protecting our kids, first, is the most important thing,” Ferguson, a Catholic, said after signing the legislation. “This bill protects Washingtonians from abuse and harm.”
The law stipulates that priests must report suspected child abuse revealed during confession to law enforcement or the state’s Department of Children, Youth and Families.
A broad array of organizations representing clergy sexual abuse victims, Catholic and Jewish clergy, Native American tribes, law enforcement, crisis counselors and children’s advocates lined up in support of the legislation.
The bill’s sponsor, state Senator Noel Frame, a Democrat, said it should be a moral imperative for priests to report child abuse, even when they learn of it during confession.
But Mark Rienzi, president and CEO of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, and a member of the legal team representing the bishops, said; “Washington state has no business intruding into the confessional, particularly when they give a free pass to lawyers who have legally protected confidential relationships with clients.
“Punishing priests for following the Catholic Church’s millennia-old faith traditions isn’t just wrong, it’s unconstitutional,” Rienzi added.
And Jean Hill, executive director of the Washington State Catholic Conference, the lobbying arm of the Catholic Church in the state, said confession is a “sanctuary for the human soul and must be kept private not only because it’s a sacred duty of Catholic priests, but also to ensure the faithful are free to participate in this act of reconciliation with their God.”
In a statement, Hill said: “We are hopeful that the court will recognize the law not only punishes priests but sets a dangerous precedent that erodes trust in sacred practices for all faiths.”
The bishops’ suit said the state’s three dioceses have already adopted policies to protect children that go beyond the requirements of existing state law on reporting child abuse and neglect.
The policies mandate reporting suspected abuse by clergy and other Church personnel except when it is revealed during confession, according to the lawsuit.
In early May, the Trump administration’s Justice Department launched an investigation into the “anti-Catholic” law, which it said “appears on its face to violate the First Amendment” guarantee of religious freedom.
Assistant U.S. 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 said.
About 30 U.S. states now include clergy among mandatory reporters, though all but a handful of them include exceptions for information about abuse shared during confession.
Religious institutions make horrendous examples of compassion and charity when they enable child abuse. Christ practiced and preached the opposite of what enables horrible acts to occur on this planet. Sadly, sometimes those terrible acts are allowed to remain a buried secret. ...
If early-life abuse, sexual or otherwise, goes prolongedly unchecked it readily causes the young child’s brain to improperly develop. It can readily be the starting point of a life in which the brain uncontrollably releases potentially damaging levels of inflammatory stress hormones and chemicals, even in otherwise non-stressful daily routines.
It can amount to non-physical-impact brain-damage abuse: It has been described as an emotionally tumultuous daily existence, indeed a continuous discomforting anticipation of ‘the other shoe dropping’; for others, it also includes being simultaneously scared of how badly they will deal with the upsetting event, which usually never transpires.
The lasting emotional/psychological pain throughout one's life from such trauma is very formidable yet invisibly confined to inside one's head, solitarily suffered. And it can easily make every day a mental ordeal, unless the turmoil is prescription and/or illicitly medicated.
As a moral rule, a mentally as well as physically sound future should be every child’s fundamental right — along with air, water, food and shelter — especially considering the very troubled world into which they never asked to enter.
The wellbeing of all children needs to be of real importance to everyone — and not just concern over what other parents’ children might or will cost us as future criminals or costly cases of government care, etcetera.