The Rev. Janusz Kukulka can't say his parishioners are sinning more but they sure are lining up at the new confessional booth.
For years, Kukulka, the pastor of St. Mary the Immaculate Conception in Derby, was content with absolving sins in a private room marked by an exit sign to the right of the altar.
But something happened during Lent this year. For the first time, Kukulka really took note of the two confessionals missing from the rear of his church. They’d been gone for four decades, ripped out during a Second Vatican Council-inspired renovation during the 1970s to make room for air conditioning units.
They must have been a thing of beauty, Kukulka thought. He imagined their dark oak paneled doors and arched moldings to match the Gothic architecture of the church designed by renowned architect Patrick Keely in the 1800s.
Their absence was striking, especially when the Archdiocese of Hartford had asked parishes to extend their confession hours during Lent, part of a public relations campaign to get Catholics to return to the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
So, one Sunday Kukulka announced his desire to the congregation.
“I told them I wanted a visible confessional,” he said.
He got one within a week.
Timothy Conlon and Patrick Knott, members of the church's rejuvenation team, moved quickly to fullfill their priest's wish. They thought about building a confessional but the cost was prohibitive for the cash-strapped parish. So, they turned to the Internet where Conlon found an antique confessional for sale in Iowa on eBay. Conlon flew out to Iowa and drove the confessional back to Derby. Knott's wife, Elisa, donated the $1,100 cost of the confessional in honor of her parents, Pasquale and Geraldina Scarpa, who were devoted church members. A plaque above the confessional bears their name.
“It's a big hit,” Conlon said.
Knott, who had never confessed in the private room, said a long line formed in February when Kukulka held the first confession in the booth. Knott was the first to try it out.
“I got celebrity status,” said Knott. “It wasn't bad.”
Kukulka said confessions have been up ever since at the church.
But Thomas Groome, professor of theology and religious education at Boston College, doubts the new confessional will save the day.
Confessions among American Catholics have been on the decline for decades, a trend many theologians attribute to changes introduced by the Second Vatican Council.
In an attempt to make confession less about sin, many churches during Vatican II shuttered their confessional booths and opened “reconciliation rooms” where the faithful could sit face-to-face with a priest and talk about their sins in the context of self-improvement.
“The church was moving in a direction where priests were supposed to be counselors instead of judges,” Groome said. “The problem was that many priests didn't have the counseling or spiritual skills, and people didn't like the openness. They wanted the anonymity that comes behind the grill.”
When Msgr. Stephen DiGiovanni arrived at St. John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church in Stamford in 1998, he found two confessionals nailed shut during Vatican II.
He closed off the church’s reconciliation room furnished at the time with “two beat up old chairs and a crummy little screen” and opened up the confessionals. In 2009, he told a New York Times reporter that more than 400 people partake in the confessional rite every Sunday.
That number continues to grow and the church has added more confession times.
“When I began as a priest in 1977, it was about “I'm okay , your okay,” we don't have to confess anything. We shouldn't be guilt-ridden Catholics, that's all true, but we should be contrite,” he said.
Kukulka couldn't be happier with the new confessional.
Except for one small problem: voices inside the confessional echo through the sanctuary.
