What Canon Law says about Confession . . .

''The sacramental seal is inviolable. Accordingly, it is absolutely wrong for a confessor in any way to betray the penitent, for any reason whatsoever, whether by word or in any other fashion. Everything disclosed to the priest in the sacrament of penance, whether absolution is given or not, comes under the 'seal of confession''.

• Put simply, the priest is strictly forbidden to reveal by any means whatever anything the penitent may have disclosed to him. Even the penitent cannot release him from this obligation. If a confessor needs in a particular case to consult an expert in moral theology or in Canon Law, he must in doing so be careful not in any way to connect the sin with the sinner.

Permission

• If there is a real danger of doing this, he must forgo the consultation or receive the penitent's permission to disclose the matter in the limited fashion necessary.
• If an interpreter is required, he/she is obliged to the same secrecy as a priest. Same obligation binds all others who have in any way got to know the sins from a confession. However, no-one is forbidden to confess through an interpreter, provided that abuse and scandal are avoided.
• The confessor is wholly forbidden to use knowledge acquired in confession to the detriment of the penitent, even when all danger of disclosure is excluded.

Can. 938 forbids the disclosure of information gained during sacramental confession; the present paragraph forbids the confessor to use any information so gained to the penitent's detriment, even if there is no risk of disclosure.

• The basic principle is that it is never lawful to do what one would not have done but for the fact of having heard the confession. So a priest could not e.g. discriminate employing someone on the sole basis of what that person told him in confession; neither should he in preaching or lecturing use as a specific example that which he has heard in confession. Any such practice should give rise to the suspicion that he is careless about the seal - and even suspicion, however unfounded, is to be sedulously avoided in this area.

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