Pius Pietrzyk, '97: Op-Ed on California Bill Targeting Catholic Priests
The Bill of Rights is supposed to protect people from having to choose between the most sacrosanct part of their religious beliefs and imprisonment.
California is considering a proposed law that is nothing less than an attempt to jail innocent priests. California Senate Bill 360 seeks to change its law to force a priest, when he hears of sins in the confessional regarding sexual abuse, to make a choice. He must choose to either maintain the confidentiality of the sacrament and face possible imprisonment or to betray that confidentiality and violate his deepest conscience and the laws of God and the Roman Catholic Church. No priest I know would choose the latter.
In 1813, the New York Court of General Sessions commented on the Catholic sacrament of confession and the government’s proper role in respecting the secrecy of the confessional as a part of its constitutional duty to protect religious freedom. It said: “To decide that the minister shall promulgate what he receives in confession, is to declare that there shall be no penance; and this important branch of the Roman Catholic religion would be thus annihilated.”
If this bill is passed into law, California will commit precisely such an annihilation.
Fr. Pius Pietrzyk, a Dominican priest, currently serves as an assistant professor of canon law at St. Patrick Seminary in Menlo Park, California. He has his civil law degree from the University of Chicago and his doctorate in canon law from the University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome. Since 2010, he has served as a member of the board of directors of the Legal Services Corporation.
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