The Confessing Subject and the Construction of Modern Catholic Selves

Abstract

Historians and sociologists have argued that the practices of confession played a major role in the transition to modern, introspective individuality. Until the 1970s, tough, the literature had dealt mostly with Protestantism and Protestant modes of confession, first and foremost the practice of writing spiritual diaries and then reading and rereading them. The article looks at Catholic confessional practices and how they, too, have shaped modern notion of subjecthood. Centering on Foucault's contribution, the article argue that Catholic confession, just like its Protestant avatar, paved a route to modernity. rESUMEN:El sujeto confesante y la construcción de la individualidad católica moderna.-Tanto historiadores como sociólogos han defendido que las prácticas de confesión tuvieron un papel fundamental en el paso hacia una individualidad moderna, introspectiva. Sin embargo, hasta la década de los setenta del siglo XX la mayor parte de la literatura se centró en el Protestantismo y en los modos de confesión protestante, sobre todo en la práctica de escritura de diarios espirituales así como su posterior lectura y relectura. Este artículo explora las prácticas de confesión católicas y como estas, también, moldearon la noción moderna de subjetividad. Centrándose en la contribución de Foucault, el artículo defiende que la confesión Católica, al igual que su avatar protestante, allanó el camino hacia la modernidad. PAlAbrAS MODErNiTY AND rEligiON bEYOND WEbErDifferent sets of binary oppositions have dominated much of the twentieth-century's scholarship on the transition to modernity. This was due mostly, of course, to the immense impact of the German sociologist Max Weber and his thesis concerning the affinities between Protestantism and capitalism. As is well known, Weber's discussion of modernity presents a "supersessionist" paradigm that posits--sometimes explicitly but mostly implicitly-that a Catholic worldview, dominated by irrational and magical thinking, communal (non-individual) sources of identity, and mechanical performance of ritualistic acts, was replaced in modernity by Protestantism, individualism, capitalist accumulation of wealth, and rationality. In modernity, a period whose starting point is, roughly speaking, in the second half of the sixteenth century, exteriority and performativity were substituted by the acquisition of both introspective and abstractive modes of thinking and being (Weber, 1930).

Audit as confession: The instrumentalisation of ethics for management control

“…Confession was, at its core, a mechanism for identification in the interior of individuals of a sense of wrongdoing as well as a sense of guilt, with confession helping them to acquire a deeper understanding of their essence as sinners. The transition to the modern introspective subject was possible because of the process of materialisation of the recognition of guilt and the cultivation of a sense of contrition that confession achieved (Sluhovsky, 2017).…”