Anonymous?

Cfns

Rev dear Rev: In the anglican sector there is confession available in some parishes but generally it is always face to face with the vicar knowing who you are, is it possible to have a right to being anonymous if I choose to come over to the Catholic Way? And do I have a right to anonymity there as a logical and moral expectation? Or am I being too proud? 

Very welcome - a nice question from a happy woke student, all the way from Cambridge. But responding to this Quaesitum - In the anglican sector it is all called a "manifestation of conscience" but not all vicars even allow it, many following the BCP on the subject. Foreseeable but rare. True but when practised not every vicar will think of having a confessional installed in his old style parish church. Anonymity generally denied thereover. But spirituality teaches:

Whilst watching some televangelists in America one summer when on holiday there in deep state Indiana, I noticed that some of the televangelists on baptist TV had serious and grave regrets about the very publicitas of their big conversion moments, since if they had had had had the opportunity of secrecy and anonymity their spiritual conversions and their private resolutions would have remained in the spiritual sphere of their own privacy life before God, alone before God, and they would not have then been called out by an inquisitive and curious media on the usual sorts of compromises and small failings that can occur in the course of a busy and hyper-active public ministry to happy housewives - many of those televangelist would have survived better inside the benefits of Catholic Christianity, not so many adultery cases, it was reasoned. So even beyond the pale of the one glorious faith of Jesus and his apostles, regrets there are a few, and all because the lady loved the big splash, the public testimony, the huge conversion story making mega-bucks. A sad end for once glorious christian careers in the baptist sector. Sad really. Whereas holy mother home world church on the planet has experience too of the world and knows when certain spiritual secrets should be shrouded in secrecy and discretion and cura animarum, confession thence being anonymous until Covid 19 in 2021.

Spirituality and the sensitive spiritual choices that we all make at decisive points in our lives require that we surround ourselves at times with a privacy respect culture, since the forum of the inner sanctum of the soul where mankind is alone with his conscience, as mentioned by the documents of Vatican II at Gaudium et Spes 16, and where he stands alone before God when he makes his life decisions, is a very sacred forum touched by much sensitivity. Besides the decisions and resolutions that one makes there are designed to be enduring and so must be guided by privacy respect as a culture and medium, as the glutinous context in which decisions are made.

Just as in the age of the world wide web, users around the globe and especially in privacy conscious Europa have the right to something called "digital integrity", control over one's own personal data, so too they enjoy a certain basic right to anonymity on the internet, especially girls and vicars and clerics because of the problem of stalkers and unwanted sugar daddies and sugar mommies that seem to be ubiquitous on the web. The right to privacy then is expressed in terms of these FCRs, Fundamental Computer Rights, and one of them is the right to anonymity, just in case the next caller or the next user is a bogus one or an aggressor. How often have we heard dear sweet souls abuse the day they went live on line like JK when their daily diet of computer use seems to be dealing mostly with nuisance callers and aggressors on the internet. Anonymity is thus useful and life-preserving for many pretty girls and pretty boys too. Baskets of deplorables have been turning up on football sites for some time since the Euro Cup Final at the huge stadium at Wembley in 2021 when the brave England Squad consisting of some mixed race players lost the final match on penalties to Italy - times of great tension, times of great frustration, time when the little tin pot domestic gods of the pitch were reduced to their carbon constituents, but not every fan was happy. So anonymity especially for players and girls and vicars is very important. So girls and the spirituals and the christians know of the practical uses of anonymity, the whole concept being revisited and retrieved and recovered again in our own time precisely because of computer use and the internet.  

To this end, 2000 years of tradition have honed and honed and honed the surrounding contexts of the conversion moment in the lives of christians, clerics and laity, and these years of tradition have produced something in the documents of Vatican II called the right to total anonymity. This is not a proud moment that is being advertised since the logic of the experience would require discretion and every girl knows that she does not like being stared at by someone she knows when she is revealing her moral weaknesses - it should be an experience with the anonymous Christ on the other side of the grille or curtain. Also there are some corresponding checks for clergy - This means that a cleric when he is interviewing or confessing a spiritual directee should avoid asking too many questions so as to establish an identity. He should avoid looking out of the box and out of the confessional at the people coming in. He should avoid asking obvious questions especially questions about age, name, location, domicile, work and so on, anything that might build an ID profile. The confessor must be the opposite of a police officer - he is not there to persecute or prosecute or pursue and arrest, he is there to manifest the real Jesus on the other side of that curtain and grille, he is there to emanate Jesus to the person, period, and not to judge too much in the usual negative kind of way that cold and cruel and superior upper class people do very often - it is one reason why working class boys make very good priests, they have none of the attitudes of the superior, supercillious, and snobby elites of high society - people must not feel bad in their presence. Besides we only judge others on the standards of our own comportment. He cannot super-impose his own private feelings and private judgements on the penitent but must receive him or her as Jesus would and did the young trendy girl caught in adultery. So that is why in the Via Catholica Christiana, anonymity is a real and genuine spiritual right, built on spirituality, so it is a right that is not just spiritual but also ethical and when push comes to shove also juridical. The anonymous confessee, the pale face of the saint caught in adultery. Or as Queen Anne says, all of us have sinned and fallen short of God.