This could be the last Holy Week that confessions are heard in Galway City, following the revelation last evening that automated confession kiosks are set to be installed in several city churches next month.
The state-of-the-art kiosks which have been dubbed the iConfess in the Italian media will be placed in churches in the locations that currently house the confessionals and are set to revolutionise the sacrament of confession.
Director of the Vatican's Officio de Technologica, Fr Paollio from Milan is In Galway this week to meet with Diocesan officials so that the Galway diocese can be used as a pilot project for the automated high-tech kiosks.
Measuring the same size as the traditional confessionals, the kiosks are estimated to cost in the region of €70,000 to purchase and will be phased into parishes to work alongside traditional confessions for a trial period.
The official Vatican newspaper Osservatore Romano has reported that the Galway pilot project will pave the way for the Church to counter falling vocations by having priest-less confessions with the ATM-like technology.
There is speculation in the city that the Augustinian Church is being considered as the first location for the iConfess kiosks, given Fr Dick Lyng's progressive approach to modern technology.
However, that was not confirmed last evening, as Fr Paollio is remaining tight-lipped about the kiosks until after Holy Week.
How it works is that the person who wishes to have confession heard goes into the sealed unit, shuts the door, and pushes the start button. The screen lights up and a on-screen menu guides the confessor through the ceremony.
The confessor is then asked how long it has been since their last confession.
This is broken into less than a month; between one and six months; six to twelve months; and more than one year.
The confessor is then asked to recite privately the Act of Contrition; after which he/she will be asked to select the gravity of sin that they wish to confess.
It is not clear how these are detailed, but a list of issues such as pride, selfishness, greed, avarice, lust, gluttony, sloth, envy, despair and extravagance are believed to be among those displayed on screen.
The confessor then selects the category of his/herfirst sin and presses ‘continue’. They are then asked to grade th seriousness of the offence on a scale of one to ten. After each one, they are asked, "Do you have additional sins?" until they are finished.
They then press what is known as the ‘reflection’ button and they are asked to pray while the computer database determines the wording of the penance.
It is believed that more than 1,400 different penances are programmed into the system and that they are designed to take multiple sins into consideration.
Fr Paollio said that at the end of the ceremony, the confessor has the option of just reading the penance on screen; of getting a small print-out; or have the option of having the penance sent to his/her phone by SMS text messaging.
However, this has led to concerns about the privacy of the confessional being shattered, esecially if someone leaves the penance list behind them or if the SMS is sent to an incorrect telephone number.
The Advertiser has learned that during the initial trials in Rome, when penance was sent by Bluetooth technology to the confessors' phones, everybody within a 500 metre radius mistakenly received a copy of the confidential penance.
Fr Paollio dismissed suggestions that the confession kiosks will lead to such breaches of privacy for the confessors.
"I can assure you and the parishioners that this will not happen. Those incidents that you refer to happened at the trials in Rome and they were just test messages and not real penances that were mistakenly sent."
He told The Advertiser last evening that he is confident that at least fifteen churches around the dioceses will take part in the trial.
"Many of our priests are elderly men for whom it is not health promoting to be sitting in draughty confession boxes for hours and hours, so we thought that for a modern generation, we need to take a modern approach. This will alleviate the need for them to sit around for long times and free them up for other duties.
"This will facilitate the younger generation who have probably never embraced the sacrament of confession," he said.
However, members of the congregation in the Augustinian Church in the city were today (April 1 ) surprised and sceptical about the planned technology.
"I can't see why they can't leave well enough alone," said one man who declined to be named."They have enough trouble without doing something like this. Is Fr Paollio making a fool of us?" he said.”He’d be better off going back to Rome and rearranging the letters of his name,” he concluded.
