Father Kimes offers a nuanced perspective on how these laws intersect with religious freedoms, child protection imperatives, and the sacramental traditions of the Catholic Church.
Newsroom (26/09/2025, Gaudium Press ) In a wave of legislative activity sweeping across multiple U.S. states, lawmakers are increasingly pushing for mandatory reporting laws that would compel clergy to disclose instances of child abuse or neglect revealed during confession—potentially eroding centuries-old protections known as the clergy-penitent privilege. But Father John Paul Kimes, a seasoned canon lawyer and associate professor of the practice at the University of Notre Dame Law School, argues that this trend, while headline-grabbing, is neither as novel nor as straightforward as it appears.
“It’s not nearly as new as people think it is—because they just don’t know. It’s been going on for a while,” Father Kimes told this reporter in a recent interview, emphasizing the historical depth of the debate. With a background that bridges ecclesiastical law and civil jurisprudence, Father Kimes offers a nuanced perspective on how these laws intersect with religious freedoms, child protection imperatives, and the sacramental traditions of the Catholic Church.
The Roots of Mandatory Reporting in America
The foundation for today’s mandatory reporting statutes traces back to federal legislation half a century ago. “We get mandatory reporting in U.S. legislation in the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, in 1974,” Father Kimes explained. Enacted under President Richard Nixon, the act aimed to standardize responses to child abuse nationwide by providing federal funding to states that implemented reporting systems. Since then, it has undergone multiple revisions, amendments, and reauthorizations—the most recent in 2023—to strengthen protections and expand definitions of abuse and neglect.
Today, every U.S. state, the District of Columbia, and territories like Puerto Rico and Guam maintain some form of mandatory reporting law. According to data compiled by the Child Welfare Information Gateway, a resource operated by the Children’s Bureau within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, more than half of these jurisdictions explicitly designate clergy as mandated reporters. However, most carve out exemptions or privileges for communications made in the confessional, recognizing the sanctity of the priest-penitent relationship.
As detailed in a July 2025 article in the American Bar Association’s ABA Journal, the landscape is varied: “More than half the states include members of the clergy as mandated reporters, but most also recognize the confessional privilege. Meanwhile, other states and Washington, D.C., have universal mandatory reporting.” This patchwork reflects ongoing tensions between public safety and religious confidentiality.
Recent proposals, such as those in Washington state, have thrust the issue into the national spotlight by advocating for zero exceptions—even in the confessional. These bills represent a stark departure from traditional accommodations, aiming to prioritize child welfare without compromise.
A Surge in State-Level Initiatives
The push for stricter clergy reporting isn’t confined to one region; it’s a multifaceted movement. States like New Hampshire, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas, and West Virginia already mandate that clergy report confessional disclosures related to sexual abuse, effectively nullifying privilege in those contexts. In 2023, legislatures in Delaware, Hawaii, Utah, and Vermont introduced similar measures, though none advanced to gubernatorial approval.
Father Kimes sees a common thread in these efforts: “All of these bills have one thing in common—they look at the question of protecting children, and the notion of the sacramental seal, as being an irreconcilable binary.” Lawmakers, he suggests, frame the issue as a zero-sum game: either uphold the seal or safeguard children. “They believe that it is impossible to maintain the sacramental seal and protect children at the same time.”
As both a priest and a lawyer, Father Kimes rejects this dichotomy. “As a priest, I find it ridiculous,” he said candidly. “As a lawyer, I find it simpleminded—and at some points terrifying—in its oversimplification of a very complicated and tragic reality of child sexual abuse.” He argues that such binary thinking overlooks the multifaceted nature of abuse, reducing it to a deceptively simple fix that ignores broader systemic failures in prevention, intervention, and support for victims.
Church Doctrine and the Unbreakable Seal
At the heart of the Catholic position is the sacrament of reconciliation, commonly known as confession. The Catechism of the Catholic Church explicitly forbids priests from revealing penitents’ disclosures, binding such information under the “seal” of confession. Violating this seal incurs automatic excommunication, a severe ecclesiastical penalty that underscores the absolute nature of the confidentiality.
This doctrine places priests in potential conflict with civil authorities if privilege is revoked. “The priest-penitent privilege dates back—in the English common law system—a number of centuries,” Father Kimes noted. Historical records indicate its presence in pre-Reformation England, persisting even after the schism. In 1534, when King Henry VIII severed ties with the papacy and declared himself head of the Church of England, the privilege endured. “So even in the rejection of the Catholic faith,” Father Kimes observed, “the English legal tradition did not reject the priest-penitent privilege.”
This Anglo-American heritage influenced U.S. jurisprudence, where the privilege has been upheld as a safeguard for religious practice.
The Wigmore Criteria: A Century-Old Benchmark
To evaluate whether communications merit privilege, courts often apply the Wigmore Criteria, a framework established over a century ago by John Henry Wigmore, a pioneering American legal scholar on evidence law. The four principles are:
- The communications must originate in confidence that they will not be disclosed.
- Confidentiality must be essential to the relationship’s maintenance.
- The relationship must be one that society deems worthy of protection.
- The harm from disclosure must outweigh the benefits to justice.
Father Kimes believes recent legislative shifts reflect a perceived erosion in the third and fourth criteria. “These legislative proposals presume that there has been a change in the way that the community views the confidentiality of the sacramental seal,” he said. While the first two elements remain intact—confession inherently involves trust and relies on secrecy—lawmakers argue that societal priorities have evolved, tipping the balance toward disclosure for the greater good.
“Obviously the communications originate in confidence; that’s the nature of the sacrament of confession,” Father Kimes elaborated. “Confidentiality is essential to the full and satisfactory maintenance of the relationship. The penitent knows that he or she comes to the priest also because of this element of confidentiality.” Yet, he contends, the assumption that nondisclosure causes more harm than good is flawed, failing to account for the privilege’s role in encouraging spiritual healing.
Historical Precedent: The 1813 Philips Case
Contrary to modern associations with sexual abuse scandals, the seminal U.S. case on clergy privilege involved a far different crime: theft. In People v. Philips (1813), heard in New York City’s Court of General Sessions, an Irish Catholic immigrant confessed to receiving stolen goods to Father Anthony Kohlmann, a Jesuit priest. Father Kohlmann facilitated the return of the items but refused to testify when subpoenaed, invoking the seal.
The court, in a unanimous decision penned by Mayor DeWitt Clinton, sided with the priest. “To decide that the minister shall promulgate what he receives in confession is to declare that there shall be no penance,” Clinton wrote. “And this important branch of the Roman Catholic religion would thus be annihilated.”
Father Kimes highlighted the ruling’s constitutional grounding: “The judge—in the very first case in U.S. legal history that applies the priest-penitent privilege—decided it on his understanding of the First Amendment, of the Free Exercise Clause.” This precedent established that civil law must respect religious internals to uphold free exercise, a principle that has echoed through subsequent cases.
Modern Realities of Abuse and Confession
In contemporary discussions, the focus often centers on clergy abuse scandals, but Father Kimes urges a more accurate view. Victim-survivor advocates report that abused children sometimes confess the incidents, manipulated into believing they are at fault. “If you talk to victim survivor groups, they will say that a reasonable number of victims bring this concern to confessions, because they are manipulated into thinking that it’s their fault,” he said. “And so they bring it to confession as if it were a sin that they had committed.”
Perpetrators confessing to fellow priests? Father Kimes deems it improbable. “It’s very much not the case that the priest who’s doing this is going to another priest and saying, ‘I did this, give me absolution.’ If that happens, it would be exquisitely rare,” he asserted. Drawing from his extensive experience handling abuse cases, he added: “In all of the cases of sexual abuse of minors that I have had to deal with—which are considerable—I have never seen any evidence of a case of a priest hearing the confession of a perpetrator.”
This distinction, Father Kimes argues, is often lost on legislators. “Whether they understand or not, I don’t know—but they certainly misrepresent the reality of the sacrament being used to protect perpetrators,” he stressed. Instead, the confessional more frequently serves as a space for victims seeking solace, not a shield for abusers.
Balancing Protection and Privilege
As states continue to debate these laws, Father Kimes calls for a more informed approach that avoids pitting child safety against religious freedom. “The binary approach does not reflect the reality of these complexities,” he warned. “And it necessarily reduces a complicated problem to what appears to be a simple solution. That’s just not the case.”
Advocates for reform argue that eliminating exceptions could prevent future abuses, while opponents, including religious leaders, warn of chilling effects on spiritual practices. With bills pending in several legislatures, the tension between seal and statute shows no signs of abating, underscoring the enduring challenge of reconciling faith, law, and justice in a diverse society.
- Raju Hasmukh with files from OSV News
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