Arizona Lets the Church, Not the Court, Define a Confession

On July 30, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled, without a dissent, that a church and not a judge decides what counts as a confession. Clergy there do not have to report child abuse they hear in a private confession, and the church now defines when that applies.

The case came from a real family in Cochise County. A father told his bishop he was abusing his own children. He said it again in a church proceeding. No one told the police, and the abuse went on for years before he was arrested.

The confessional seal is old, and it is not a loophole. People need one place to say their worst out loud and meet God there instead of the state.

He had just set a child in front of the crowd and blessed the powerless. Then he said anyone who leads one of them into harm would be better off drowned. He also told these same followers to forgive seventy times seven. The mercy and the millstone sit in one chapter, and neither erases the other.

Most of us are not bishops. But most of us have sat in a room where a hard truth threatened something we love. A family's name. A good work. A person we could not bear to see clearly. The pull is to keep it quiet and call the silence kindness.

Scripture does not let the two blur. Forgiveness is owed to the one who did wrong. Protection is owed to the one who was wronged. Paying one does not cancel the other.

Arizona has settled who defines a confession. The verse leaves the harder question in your hands. When the truth would cost something you love, whose safety are you keeping?