Did you see the confessional? the co-owner of the auction house asked me as I stood there talking to another auction-goer. The auctioneer conducting the bidding had looked for me when it came up, he said, figuring that this was something I’d want to see.
He was right. It sounded unusual enough to be very very intriguing. I’m not a Catholic, and the only confessionals I had ever seen were stationed inside a church – too big and too unwieldy to be sitting among furniture at an auction house. Confessionals are where Catholics bear their souls privately to their priests inside a church. I’d never heard of one that you could carry around under your arm.
So I followed him as he checked the furniture room, and I wondered how I had missed it when I made my pre-auction rounds. He asked an assistant if it had been sold; the man didn’t know, said he wasn’t around at the time it was auctioned.
Then I trailed him out a side door to the parking lot, and he looked around. Several large trucks had their trailers open and he spotted it in one of them. I didn’t see anything that remotely resembled a confessional, but I dutifully followed him as he strode up an incline into the bed of the truck.
Then he pulled a tall flat wooden screen from against a wall. It looked like a room divider or Chinese screen, but as soon as he opened it up, the middle panel revealed the part I was most familiar with. There in the center was a window with an opaque screen.
Now, that was a confessional, remarkable, the first one I’d seen at auction. It got me to wondering about why anyone outside a church would have one in their home. The auction house had gotten it from an estate, he said, and he assumed that a priest had come to someone’s house to hear their secrets. It was amusing for us to guess about how it was actually used.
When I think of confessionals, I think of the stationary wooden structures in Catholic churches with separate compartments for priest and penitent. That has changed, because now congregants can also talk to their priests face to face in their confessions – which one site dated back to the 16th century and is one of the most important rites of the church.
The site catholic.org offered a guide on how to prepare for a confession and seek forgiveness. The church has even sanctioned an iPhone app that prepares members for confession.
I also learned through Googling that portable confessionals have been – and can be – used in a variety of ways:
The Wisconsin Historical Society has a 1943 photo of a portable confessional planted on a table in a center aisle at a church in Madison.
A 1954 Life magazine article on secondary education showed a girl kneeling at a confessional in a closet where a priest sat behind a screen.
A newly formed church in Monroe, GA, in 1954 set up a folding altar and portable table confessional each Sunday in a temporary building until it could find a permanent location.
An antiques shop in the United Kingdom sold a circa 1910 French oak confessional that it said had been used by a local priest in Normandy to hear the confessions of villagers.
An Austin, TX, auction gallery sold for $375 what it said was a confessional from the 18th century that had been used by priests in Brazil. According to the site, the wooden door and feet were hauled by mule and then erected on site.
A 2010 New York Fringe Theater play called “The Scavenger’s Daughter” included a scene where nuns and a priest set up a confessional in the gym of a Catholic school for boys.
In a nontraditional use, an artist collective called PDL Industries in 2007 created a whimsical booth where people could drop in and “confess” to the artists.
For $250, you can rent a confession booth for parties in which your friends can record their best wishes to you on DVD.
I’m not sure how much the portable confessional sold for at this auction, but I found two offered on eBay – one for $125 and the other with a red-cushioned kneeling bench for $350.
One church learned, though, that you have to be careful about how you advertise such a sale. Last year, a Vienna, Austria, church trying to raise money for renovations wanted to sell what appeared to be one of its own confessionals on eBay. It suggested that the confessional could be used as a sauna, a bar or a child’s playhouse.
The archdiocese nixed the idea, saying the structure was too sacred for such use.
