In debate over iPhone confession app, aftershocks of Calvinist-Catholic fault line

The New York Times is not known for particular sensitivity toward religious issues. So Maureen Dowd had my full attention when she recently proclaimed that “Nothing is sacred anymore, not even the sacred.”

Was she referring to new revelations of clergy scandals? Or to the latest poll statistics showing continued decline in church attendance? Was she lamenting new twists in the commingling of religion and politics?

Perfect aid?

None of the above. Ms. Dowd was writing about a new application for the iPhone and iPad: a “Confession App.” “Designed to be used in the confessional,” reads the official iTunes product description, “this app is the perfect aid for every penitent.”

A succession of screens guides the user through the steps of Confession. The penitent reviews a list of responsibilities (“Examination of Conscience”) before checking off boxes on a menu of committable sins. Then follows a list of suitable prayers. There are even pop-up quotes from Scripture.

Reactions, predictably, have ranged from praise to puzzlement to ridicule. (When was the last time the sacrament of Confession got so many headlines?)
(Apps, for the uninitiated, are mini software programs lined up in rows on the touchscreen phone surface; touching the appropriate “icon” launches the program.)

Catholic bloggers jumped into the debate, lining up screenshots and dissecting the content and product specs. Flaws were noted: true confession requires indicating the number of times a sin has been committed (and not just the kind of sin). Nor does the app include the required penance befitting each sin. The general verdict appears to be “useful but flawed.”

Is the new app, then – conveniently priced at $1.99 – really a “perfect aid for every penitent”? Apparently not.

Minor product flaws aside, much of the concerned commentary centers on a familiar, nondenominational source of anxiety: the role of mediation in our religious lives.

Tension between the spiritual and the physical

Throughout human history, people have been caught in an irresolvable tension between the desire to experience the divine intimately and immediately, and the inexorable need for mediating words, objects, and relationships.

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