Confession is good for the soul — provided you have one

RIGHT now, somewhere in Ireland, someone’s giving their name and telling everybody in the room how they stole from dying relatives or spent their children’s Holy Communion money or sold the curtains for drink.

Members of Alcoholics Anonymous call this confession the “drunkalogue”. It’s the infinitely sad monologue of how the drinker lost control of their life through alcohol dependence.

The Catholic Church has favoured private confession, at least since the Inquisition, but the public confession has always had great appeal to totalitarian regimes: Get the evil-doer out there to repent — often before execution — and give the details of their crimes and names of their co-conspirators pour encourager les autres.