Scott Salvato

1 month ago | thedispatch.com | Nic Rowan |Michael Reneau |Scott Salvato |Victoria Holmes

For most Catholics in late medieval England, confession was an annual affair undertaken during Lent. Lines were long, and priests and penitents alike were impatient to get it over with. “Pastoral realism therefore demanded that the confession be kept within manageable dimensions,” wrote the Irish historian Eamon Duffy in 1992. “In a time-honoured formula the penitent was to be brief, be brutal, be gone.”James M.