The Catholic Church and federal government reacted vehemently to new legislation in Washington state that requires priests to report child abuse or neglect to law enforcement after learning about the crime through confessions.
Gov. Mike Ferguson signed the controversial bill into law last week, making it mandatory for all clergy to report child abuse, without exemptions for information disclosed during confession. Confessions were previously considered privileged.
The Archdiocese of Seattle — which was made up of 160 priests and 90 permanent deacons as of 2024 — said it will excommunicate priests who comply with the legislation. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice called the law “anti-Catholic” in a statement announcing a probe into the policy, just days before the Vatican selected the first pope from the United States.
The Seattle Archdiocese in a statement, warned that breaking the confidence of confession is grounds for a priest to be kicked out of the church, essentially reiterating the rules already established for Catholic clergy.
“Catholic clergy may not violate the seal of confession — or they will be excommunicated from the Church,” the Archdiocese said. “All Catholics must know and be assured that their confessions remain sacred, secure, confidential and protected by the law of the Church.”
Too many victims
The U.S. Department of Justice said it had opened a civil rights investigation into Washington’s law, focusing on how it was developed and eventually passed. It suggested the legislation could be at odds with the First Amendment, with Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon saying the legislation “demands that Catholic Priests violate their deeply held faith in order to obey the law.”
In the text of Washington’s reporting law, “clergy” refers collectively to everyone ordained for religious duties in any religion, but confession as a practice is singled out because of the secrecy around it.
Ferguson’s office addressed the federal probe in a statement to CBS News.
“We look forward to protecting Washington kids from sexual abuse in the face of this ‘investigation’ from the Trump Administration,” the statement said.
Washington lawmakers are not the first to try to mandate clergy members to report child abuse, especially as the Catholic Church has increasingly faced public reckonings over sex crimes since the turn of the century. Although a majority of U.S. states already have abuse reporting mandates in place for religious leaders, each of those laws includes a provision exempting information learned through confession.
California tried in 2019 to propose a bill that would have required clergy to report abuse without that exemption, but the church fought its passage and the legislature eventually put it on hold.
The legislation was originally proposed by Washington State Senator Noel Frame, whose jurisdiction includes Seattle. After two earlier attempts to pass this bill failed because of disagreements about whether confessions should be exempt from reporting mandates, the final version passed during the legislative session this spring.
“Far too many children have been victims of abuse,” said Frame in a statement once the latest bill had passed in the state Senate. “The Legislature has a duty to act and end the cycles of abuse that can repeat generation after generation. When kids ask for help, we need to be sure that they get help. It’s time to pass this bill once and for all.”
The seal of confession
Thomas Plante, a psychologist and professor who has worked with the church for decades and written extensively about child sexual abuse among clerics, said removing exemptions for confession could have unintentionally adverse effects.
Plante told CBS News that the “absolute” confidentiality understood to apply in church confessions has, in his experience, encouraged people who have committed crimes to come clean to a priest who has then referred them to a psychologist such as himself.
He said multiple patients were referred to him this way over his career, and he then reported the situation to authorities as a medical professional.
“The seal of confession, which is sort of a global thing that’s been going on for several thousand years, is basically that anything you say under the seal is in complete confidence, and it gives people a place to talk about stuff they can’t talk about anywhere else,” Plante said. “That’s one advantage. People that are involved in a crime or abuse or anything else, they do have a place in the Catholic Church to talk about it with 100% confidentiality.”
Without that assurance, Plante said he suspects priests in Washington will stop offering confession and instead direct people to seek that service at churches in nearby states.
“And I think that would be a terrible tragedy,” he said.
Confession is a core principle in Catholicism. It calls for private conversations where congregants or laypeople divulge their wrongdoings to a priest, and, in turn, receive forgiveness on behalf of God. Anything said during the exchanges is kept secret.
Technically, priests, through their religious oaths, are bound to a seal of confidentiality after hearing confessions, and the church forbids them from sharing the information learned in those sessions with others. Catholic doctrine explicitly prohibits them from notifying authorities even after someone has confessed to a crime.
The Seattle Archdiocese said they agree “with the goal of protecting children and preventing child abuse” and are committed to reporting it, as long as the information is acquired in a setting outside of confession. It also accused the state of Washington of violating constitutional protections for religious establishment and free exercise of religion.
“With this law, the State of Washington is specifically targeting religious conduct by inserting the government into the Catholic tradition, namely, the highly defined ritual of the Sacrament of Reconciliation,” the Archdiocese said.”The state is now requiring priests to violate an essential element of the rite, the confidential communication between the priest and penitent in which the absolution of sin is offered.”
Washington’s new law requires priests to share information from confession only if the person confessing admits to abusing a child.
Last year, while Washington’s current governor, Ferguson, was still the state’s attorney general, he pushed to investigate Catholic church leadership in Seattle, Spokane and Yakima for allegedly using charitable funds to cover up allegations of child sex abuse by clergy. But the probe faced challenges as the church refused to cooperate, arguing it did not need to obey subpoenas for its records.
