[Past Your Eyes]

What, when they talk to each other?

[Mrs. Don-o]

This is just stupid grandstanding on the part of the Victoria government.

• First, if offenders knew that Sacramental confessions would be revealed, they would certainly not go to Confession.
• Second, I don't know if a single case where it as even been alleged that the offender revealed his crime in a Sacramental confession.
• Third, it would be impossible to enforce: Who'd tell that the priest had failed to alert the police? The Penitent? or the Confessor?
• Fourth, are they going to record confessions, so some Police Detective can sift through thousands of hours of "Father, I ate a hamburger on a Friday in Lent" in order to detect some probably-nonexistent criminal confession?
• Fifth, what a priest can do, and is supposed to do, if a person confesses a felony, is instruct the penitent to contact the police, and withhold absolution until the penitent self-reports his crime.

The political authorities surely realize all this. Which is why I can't see it as anything other than making a show of pointlessly bullying clergy in order to score politically with the bigot constituency.

[MrEdd]

First the police came for the people who rape children, and I did not speak up because I was not a child rapist.

Then the police came for the people that covered for the child rapists, and I...

---

Nope. Can't come up with a scenario where I see any reason to make religious exceptions on criminal accessory laws.