Titus has second thoughts about confession bill

Friday, March 7, 2003 | 9:34 a.m.

CARSON CITY -- Senate Minority Leader Dina Titus, D-Las Vegas, is backing away from her bill that aimed to force Roman Catholic priests to reveal the identity of people who confess that they abused a child.

After Titus' Senate Bill 223 was introduced this week, her office was swamped with opposition from Catholics and their supporters, she said.

Titus said Thursday she has asked the Senate Judiciary Committee not to hold hearings on the bill until she talks with representatives of the Catholic Church and proponents of the bill. She said she may withdraw the bill after those discussions.

One group Titus expects to meet with is the Nevada Coalition Against Sexual Violence, a group that is in favor of the bill. Jodi Tyson, a Las Vegan who leads that group, said she is trying to rally people to contact Titus to express their support.

"There are just as many who support this as are opposed," Tyson said. "We're not dead yet."

Tyson said other senators also are being contacted to try to gather support for the bill.

The bill would remove the state law exempting priests from reporting abuse. Priests who hear confessions from people who have molested, abused or neglected children would have to report the information to police, much as lawyers, doctors, social workers and others covered by the law. Priests are already required to report such incidents if they gain the knowledge outside the confessional.

"Certainly, we want to find ways to prevent child abuse and neglect and to get abused children out of that abusive situations as quickly as possible," Titus said. "On the other hand, we want to preserve the sanctity of the confession in the Catholic Church."

The Rev. Bede Wevita, a priest who serves as spokesman for the Catholic Diocese of Las Vegas, said Titus' decision to put the bill on hold is "good news." He questioned whether people behind this bill understood the sanctity of confession.

"People have a religious right," Wevita said.

Titus' bill has also drawn the attention of the Catholic League, a national organization based in New York. League President William Donohue, said the Titus bill is "patently unconstitutional."

Donohue said a similar bill in Maryland was killed last week. And he said one in Kentucky "is dead for this session."

"A wiser course of action was chosen by Arizona legislators when they explicitly chose not to tamper with the confessional seal," he said.

He said that if the goal of the bills "is really to protect children, then this can certainly be accomplished without fiddling with the priest-penitent privilege."

Catholic leaders said priests, without breaking the confessional confidentiality, may encourage people to report their offenses to law enforcement officials. But they cannot disclose what was said in the confessional.

The bill also requires priests to become witnesses in trials to speak about the sins admitted in the confessional. The bill would violate the laws of the church, opponents said. Priests would face possible excommunication from the church if they disclosed what they heard in confessions, opponents of the bill said.

Proponents of the bill found that argument ironic in light of the national scandal that involved some bishops allowing priests accused of being child molesters to continue working with children.