For I Have Sinned

Auteur
James M. O'Toole is Charles I. Clough Millennium Professor of History Emeritus and University Historian at Boston College. He is the author of The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America and the editor of Habits of Devotion: Catholic Religious Practice in Twentieth-Century America.

Texte du rabat

The history of US Catholicism is the history of confession. For I Have Sinned charts the rise of confession as the defining ritual of American Catholic piety and identity-and its fall, as clergy sex-abuse scandals and the cultural shifts of the 1970s decimated interest in a practice that, today, is alien even to most faithful believers.