Was this breaking the seal of the confessional?

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meltzerboy said:
I’m curious regarding if the confession had been an unusual sin, and the priest used it as an example in a sermon but did not mention the name of the penitent, would this be breaking at least the spirit if not, technically speaking, the seal of confession?
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I believe mentioning an example of something specifically hear in confession in a sermon is indeed potentially breaking the seal.

My priest did say once during Lent before Easter, “Hey don’t feel alone if you’ve fallen into the same sin you tried to give up for Lent. I’ve heard it a lot in the confessional people saying they tried but could not overcome a potential sin for long” Then he went on to give a great sermon on sin, how we all struggle with the same sins etc which I felt was fine.

Mary.
 
CB_Catholic said:
The priest in the OP did not identify anything about the person’s Confession, or even that the person had been to confession.
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According to the facts given us by the OP, the priest took knowledge obtained under the Seal and then revealed it in public. That is simply not supposed to happen.
 
Gorgias said:
Right – but the first mention of your condition was in the context of the sacrament of reconciliation?
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Yes, that was the only time I ever mentioned it to anyone. He had no way of knowing other than what I told him under the Seal.

I have posted this question in AskanApologist: still waiting for a response.
 
OK – so, here’s my hypothetical, for anyone to answer:

If you walk into the confessional and say “good morning, Father… … boy, I’m tired!”… and then, after the confession, when you and Father are outside the confessional, he says, “hey! go get a cup of coffee!”… has he broken the seal?

Remember – c. 983 talks about betraying the penitent. Does the priest who says “get a cup of coffee!” betray the penitent?

C. 984 sets a higher standard: “[a] confessor is prohibited completely from using knowledge acquired from confession to the detriment of the penitent even when any danger of revelation is excluded.” But, the context is the use of knowledge to the detriment of the penitent. Is there ‘detriment’ to the sleepy penitent in my example?

… more to the point, is there detriment to the OP, in the case he describes?

(I think I would answer that the OP’s case demonstrates highly improper behavior on the part of the confessor, at the very least – behavior that he should (prudently) avoid. Is it ‘breaking the seal’, however…? :hmmm:)
 
CB_Catholic said:
My guess is that unless you are confessing some very unusual sins, he could be talking about anybody. They mostly hear the same sins over and over from different people. In any case, it does not break the seal because he did not mention your name.

The priest in the OP did not identify anything about the person’s Confession, or even that the person had been to confession.
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In two instances he phrased the sin exactly how I phrased it in confession and then repeated the verbatim response he gave in the confessional.🤷

I figure if he does it about me, he does it about others. I try not to look at who is in the confessional line just in case he starts to talk about a particular sin from the pulpet.😉
 
So I went to church this morning. The priest who uses my just confessed sins as an example in his sermon was hearing confessions this morning. I thought about going to confession then changed my mind. There was a young man hanging around the confessional area and I glanced away. The priest started talking about “hooking up” in his sermon. He was shocked and indignant. He explained what “hooking up for the weekend” meant. He said that he knew college age people did this and you could ask them. (There was only one college age person in church. The young man I saw hanging around the confessional area.) He said in his day that people had sex because you thought you loved someone. He said apparently now days the young people are no better than animals. They get together to have sex for the weekend and that’s it. It’s no better than the animals.

I keep telling myself that it was just a coincidence.😦

Do you think I should mention this in an anonymous letter to the bishop or something?
 
It seems to me that if a priest is using actual confessions as homily examples, he is treading on dangerous ground, even though he is not revealing the sins of particular individuals. It is troubling. I might ask him after Mass sometime something like this: “Father, sometimes it seems to me that you use actual confessions in your homily as examples, and that sort of troubles me.”

It would be particularly troubling if the sins he mentioned were the ones which were just confessed before Mass!
 
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