Over the past week we ran a poll to find out how frequently our readers go to confession. The poll closed last night at midnight. It’s pleasing to have received over 250 votes and perhaps surprising to learn that about 80 percent of our voting readers go to confession. Of course, we’re looking at a small and hardly random sample. I’ll bet dollars to donuts that significantly less than 80 percent of all American Catholics go to confession. It figures that the readership of a Catholic blog like this one would take its faith seriously and therefore would be more likely to seek Reconciliation.
Also pleasing is the fact that we have a measurable, though small number of non-Catholic readers (about 7 percent, according to the poll). Perhaps many of these are discerning about converting to the Catholic faith. That leaves just 12-13 percent of our readers who said that they are Catholics who go to confession “seldom or never.”
Those who attend confession relatively often are the ones that struck me most. About one-third of respondents said they go to confession at least once a month. Then again, if my understanding is correct, most Catholics used to go to confession weekly. Readers like Mujerlatina have reported on this. Yet today, just 10 of our respondents, or 3 percent of readers participating in the poll, now go to confession once a week!
If we make the same assumption here that we made above—that readers of YIM Catholic are a relatively devout bunch—then it’s shocking that as few as 1 or 2 percent of American Catholics today go to confession weekly.
A legacy of Vatican II? Or what?
