By my reading of our Catechism, priests are to “make no use” of information learned in the confessional. That is a very high standard. They don’t actually have to forget it, which might be nearly impossible, but they may not make any use of the information. Other than being able to pray for the penitent, the priest’s involvement with a penitent’s sins is supposed to end once absolution has been granted. Priests may not even discuss with other priests the sins of a person if those sins were learned about in the confessional. For a priest to make any mention in public of any particular sin heard in the confessional is not OK. Firstly, regardless of how sketchy the details, people might be able to figure out who the penitent was. Secondly, people could very easily fall into doubt about the priest’s trustworthiness in keeping the dialog of the confessional strictly confidential. I think one of the biggest fears penitents have is that their sins will not remain confidential. To do anything that would exacerbate such fears is, in my opinion, a very bad idea, and could easily lead to people avoiding the sacrament. Catholics have a right to trust priests in the confessional - to maintain the strictest confidence, and to regard the sincere penitent as genuinely freed from the sins for which they have been absolved. It is not OK for a priest to leave people thinking that they really have not quite made things good enough through the sacrament of Penance. For a priest publicly to declare that he sometimes hold a person’s sins against him or her - even a little bit, after confession is wrong, and it is, in my opinion, contrary to the explicit teachings of the catechism.
