c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Food was becoming an obsession bordering on worship, and the addict wanted to confess.

But not to a priest or a minister. The distraught person went to the computer.

“I have lost friends, jobs and opportunities because I put my addiction first. … I have destroyed the perfectly good health that God gave me,” the anonymous person wrote at dailyconfession.com. “I can’t see how I can be forgiven. I knew better and I did not do better. I cannot stand myself.”

What’s good for the soul is great for the Internet. Chat rooms and confessional sites are exploding in popularity _ dailyconfession.com receives as many as 1.3 million hits a day _ as young people be come more comfortable sharing intimate secrets and seeking advice online.

The advice they receive online can range from the heartfelt to the sarcastic, the religious to the secular. The food addict above was mocked (“What did you do to your friends, eat them?”), counseled to go to Overeaters Anonymous and advised that God would want him or her to shift focus and “volunteer at a homeless shelter to give food to people who really need it.”

But anonymous online confessions are becoming an important outlet for many young people.

Sarah, a 19-year-old from Ontario, Canada, said in a telephone interview that Internet confessional sites such as dailyconfession.com can become almost “a mini-support group,” providing in her case a forum for sharing her conflicted feelings about a drug-addicted parent.

“The idea of confessing isn’t necessarily about right and wrong. It’s about unloading a burden,” she said. “It’s almost cathartic.”

This electronic burst of interest in revealing transgressions, however, is a mixed blessing for religious institutions such as the Catholic Church. Many churches are seeking to revive confessional practices that have declined in the last generation.

While official rites cannot offer the anonymity or reach of the Internet, personal confessions can provide a deeper experience, religious leaders say.

“The Internet does not take away the guilt. It does not take away the sin,” said Bishop Donald Trautman of Erie, Pa., chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on the Liturgy. “Only in the confessional do I have the absolute guarantee that God has forgiven me.”

The number of Catholics participating in the sacrament of penance has dropped dramatically from the 1950s, when many lined up weekly for confession.

Still, slightly more than a quarter of the nation’s 69 million Catholics go to confession at least once a year, according to a 2005 poll conducted by Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate.

And communal penance celebrations are increasingly popular. In these services, held during Advent and Lent, several priests will gather in one church to offer the sacrament as part of a liturgical service.

Yet for all the church’s efforts, it is the Internet that has taken off in filling the void between the desire and opportunity to confess wrongdoing for many young people.

Several Web sites offering confessions have popped up. Some are little more than soft-core pornographic places, where tales of illicit sex are told with more boastfulness than contrition.

But at other sites, such as dailyconfession and MySpace and Facebook, people feel comfortable sharing what they have done wrong and seeking counsel to correct their behavior.

Greg Fox, creator of dailyconfession.com, started the site in May 2000 so people could unburden themselves and receive guidance from others in an online community.

Between 300 and 400 confessions go up each day, Fox said, and upward of a million people browse the site on busy days.

Kate, a 23-year-old from Texas who describes herself as spiritual but not religious, has visited dailyconfession almost every day for five years.

“I like reading people’s confessions because it’s nice to know that I’m not any more selfish, petty, conceited, weird, or macabre than everyone else in America,” she wrote in an e-mail to a reporter. “It’s funny how we all hide these traits on a daily basis, but how we’re secretly dying to tell someone.”

Another regular visitor, a 24-year-old self-described “cussin’ Baptist” from Mississippi, said in a response to a reporter’s query that the Web site provides “an uncut, unsweetened and raw view into the lives of myself, my friends, and neighbors.”

The woman, who asked to remain anonymous for the sake of “the good name of my dear mother,” said she is addicted to the site.

“Suddenly, I realized that I had an outlet where I could vent my frustrations, taunt my enemies, apologize for my transgressions and, if the situation called for it, brag shamelessly, without fear of … ridicule,” she said.

“There’s something to be said about the delicious anonymity of speaking of one’s darkest, deepest secrets.”

Lorne Dawson, a sociology professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario and co-editor of “Religion Online: Finding Faith on the Internet,” said there is hope for religious groups.

The Internet is supplementing, not replacing, offline religious life, he said.

So can religious groups entice people from confessional chat rooms to a religious confessor?

“In principle, yes,” Dawson said. “In fact, we don’t know yet.”

(David Briggs writes for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland.)

KRE/LFEND BRIGGS

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