Confession has been one of the Catholic practices most intriguing to the wider public. That's not surprising. It is associated with secrecy, sin (subtext: sex) and sacerdotalism. So recently the Confession app for the iPad received predictable publicity and led to speculation whether confession could be made virtually as well as virtuously.
In fact the app simply helps people prepare for confession. But it also shows how new communications technology is shaping church practices, and in the process is raising more fundamental questions about them.
The internet has become an accepted field for personal spirituality. The Irish Jesuits' site Sacred Space, which offers reflection and images to accompany the text chosen each day, has been enormously popular. So has the English Jesuit podcast, Pray as you Go. It offers music, text and questions for reflection.
Retreats now are increasingly offered electronically. Input for reflection is sent each day, and guide and retreatant can exchange reflections.
In addition all manner of YouTube videos, blogs, ringtones and websites are designed to help people name, understand and enter their faith more deeply.
So it would seem a small step to make confession available online. Indeed, even in the Mexican religious persecution of the 1920s, many people confessed by telephone. Yet the Catholic Church has insisted that confession be made face to face.
This insistence is not simply a matter of sticking to outmoded technology. It rests on the conviction that the sacraments involve bodily contact and communication. In the Catholic outlook it follows from the belief that God has taken on our bodily existence in Christ. It is natural that we meet Christ in the Church through bodily actions: eating and drinking, being washed or anointed, marrying.
So Catholics have resisted the privatisation of faith, whether this is expressed in finding God simply in one's heart instead of going to church, marrying without public ceremony, or simply saying sorry to God in one's heart without need to say it face to face. Faith should be expressed in bodily and communal ways.
It is often hard to make this argument cogently within the Catholic Church, however, because its theology and practice so often privileges the individual soul over the shared bodily condition. Particularly in ritual, bodiliness is formalised and etherealised. The treatment of confession offers a good example of this. Its public and bodily shape has been eroded over many centuries.
The earliest forms of confession were mainly for public sins that were