Bill would require priests to report confessed abuse

Cy Ryan and Timothy Pratt

Tuesday, March 4, 2003 | 11:09 a.m.

Roman Catholic priests are forbidden from telling anyone what they hear in confessions.

But the 160-member Nevada Coalition Against Sexual Violence wants to force priests to tell authorities when somebody confesses to child abuse or neglect.

Senate Minority Leader Dina Titus, D-Las Vegas, introduced a bill Monday to remove an exemption in the law shielding priests from reporting these cases to authorities. She said the coalition, based in Las Vegas, asked for the bill.

This is about "keeping our kids safe," Jodi Tyson, director of the coalition, said. She said the change was necessary "to level the playing field," because other people -- lawyers, doctors, social workers, employees of child care centers -- must report cases of child abuse and neglect. Those professions are represented in the coalition, along with law enforcement and people from other walks of life, she said.

The bill comes in the state's first legislative session since several priest sex abuse cases rocked the Catholic Church, including the case of a former Henderson priest, Mark Roberts, who pleaded guilty in January to open and gross lewdness and four counts of child abuse and neglect.

The Catholic Diocese of Las Vegas roundly opposed the bill, saying it would violate the sacred relationship between believers and their God. Officials from the diocese, which encompasses the counties of Clark, Nye, White Pine and Lincoln, say their area includes more than 400,000 Catholics.

"Confession is confession," said Bede Wevita, director of communications for the diocese.

"There's no way we can reveal a confessional secret. It's a very sacred thing that no law can take away, from the time Christ instituted the sacrament -- and it will remain the same."

Brother Matthew Cunningham, chancellor of the Catholic Diocese of Reno, said priests throughout church history have been executed for refusing to reveal what took place in the confessional.

Current Nevada law requires members of the clergy to report child abuse unless they have "acquired the knowledge of the abuse or neglect from the offender during a confession." That exemption would be removed in Senate Bill 223, meaning priests would have to report any abuse mentioned in confession -- even if another priest made the confession.

The bill would also allow a clergyman or priest to be called as a witness to testify about any information received in the confessional.

The bill, referred to the judiciary committee, would apply to confessions made after Oct. 1 this year. Failure to make the reports would be a misdemeanor, and the reports would have to identify the child and the alleged offender.

Cunningham said he would be surprised if the bill passes, and that the church would challenge the bill in court.

But contemporary constitutional law would support the state, said Ted Jelen, chairman of the political science department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

"According to recent case law ... otherwise valid laws that happen to infringe on religious freedom are OK," he said.

"If it goes to court, the diocese is in trouble."

Not addressed by the bill is how officials would know if a priest isn't reporting something heard in confession, and how a priest would know the identity of the person making the confession.

There are face-to-face confessionals where the priest sees the person coming to confess, but "in many, many instances" the person confessing is shielded from the priest by a screen, Cunningham said.

Jelen, who described himself as a lapsed Catholic and a former altar boy, said he thinks the bill would have little impact.

"It's hard to see how this will be enforced, since confession takes place in the dark," he said.

Tyson, of the coalition, said similar legislation has been introduced in other states. And some states already deny confessional privilege for child abuse and neglect cases, she said.

According to the Associated Press, legislatures in Arizona, Iowa, Maryland, Washington, Florida and West Virginia are considering similar bills. The Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., has instructed priests to ignore the legislation if it is passed in Maryland.

One reason so many states are considering changing their laws is the national scandal involving abuse and cover-ups by the Catholic church, Tyson said.

Craig Walton, coordinator of the graduate program in ethics and policy studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said the church is one of many institutions that society no longer trusts to behave ethically.

"Many kinds of wrongdoing are occurring where we're seeing that entities charged with policing the discipline are not following through," Walton said. "(Then) civil society has to take over."

The issue comes down to two competing ethical principles, Walton said.

"The protection of children is a higher duty to civil society than the duty we have to allow the Catholic Church to protect the sanctity of its confessional," he said.

The professor added that the bill could have the effect of keeping people away from confession -- an unfortunate, but perhaps unavoidable situation.

"It's a horrible outcome to say that the forgiveness of the church would no longer be available to them," he said. "(But) we wouldn't have been forced into this if the church hadn't abdicated responsibility on this issue in the first place."

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