The new confessional at St. Mary the Immaculate Conception Church in Derby, Conn. RNS photo by Ann Marie Somma/Hartford Faith & Values

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For years, Kukulka, was content with absolving sins in a private room marked by an exit sign to the right of the altar St. Mary the Immaculate Conception Catholic Church.

But something happened during Lent this year. For the first time, Kukulka really noticed the two confessionals missing from the rear of his church. They’d been gone for four decades, ripped out during the 1970s to make room for air conditioning units during a renovation inspired by the Second Vatican Council.

They must have been a thing of beauty, Kukulka thought. He imagined their dark oak paneled doors and arched moldings to match the Gothic architecture of the church designed by renowned 19th-century architect Patrick Keely.

Their absence was striking, especially when the Archdiocese of Hartford had asked parishes to extend their confession hours during Lent, part of a public relations campaign to get Catholics to return to the sacrament of reconciliation.

So, one Sunday Kukulka announced his desire to the congregation. “I told them I wanted a visible confessional,” he said.

He got one within a week.

Parishioners Timothy Conlon and Patrick Knott moved quickly to fulfill their priest’s wish. They thought about building a confessional, but the cost was prohibitive for the cash-strapped parish. So, they turned to the Internet, where Conlon found an antique confessional for sale in Iowa on eBay.

Conlon flew out to Iowa and drove the confessional back to Derby. Knott’s wife, Elisa, donated the $1,100 cost of the confessional in honor of her parents, who were devoted church members. A plaque above the confessional bears their name.

“It’s a big hit,” Conlon said.

Patrick Knott, who had never confessed in the private room, said a long line formed in February when Kukulka held the first confession in the booth. He was the first to try it out.

“I got celebrity status,” he said. “It wasn’t bad.”

Kukulka said confessions have been up ever since at the church.

But Thomas Groome, professor of theology and religious education at Boston College, doubts that an old-school confessional will be enough to keep the momentum going.

Confessions among American Catholics have been on the decline for decades, a trend many theologians attribute to changes introduced by the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965).

In an attempt to make confession less about sin, many churches during Vatican II shuttered their confessional booths and opened “reconciliation rooms” where the faithful could sit face-to-face with a priest and talk about their sins in the context of self-improvement.

Elisa and Patrick Knott, and Tim Conlon helped obtain the new confessional at St. Mary the Immaculate Conception Church in Derby, Conn. RNS photo by Ann Marie Somma/Hartford Faith & Values

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“The church was moving in a direction where priests were supposed to be counselors instead of judges,” Groome said. “The problem was that many priests didn’t have the counseling or spiritual skills, and people didn’t like the openness. They wanted the anonymity that comes behind the grill.”

When Monsignor Stephen DiGiovanni arrived at St. John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church in Stamford, Conn., in 1998, he found two confessionals nailed shut during Vatican II.

He closed off the church’s reconciliation room that featured “two beat-up old chairs and a crummy little screen” and opened up the confessionals. In 2009, he told a New York Times reporter that more than 400 people partake in the confessional rite every Sunday.

That number continues to grow, and the church has added more confession times.

“When I began as a priest in 1977, it was about ‘I’m OK , you’re OK, we don’t have to confess anything,’” he said. “We shouldn’t be guilt-ridden Catholics, that’s all true, but we should be contrite.”

Kukulka couldn’t be happier with the new confessional.

There’s just one small problem: Voices inside the confessional echo through the sanctuary.

(Ann Marie Somma is the editor of Hartford Faith & Values.)

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Staff at the Cyrenius H. Booth Library, who were just beginning to comprehend the massacre, accepted the boxes from a man who said he was from Aetna headquarters in Hartford.

The public library in Newtown created a “Books Heal Hearts” program after receiving thousands of donated books from around the country on healing and grief. RNS photo courtesy Ann Marie Somma/HartfordFAVS

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Kevin Kearney had loaded up his pickup truck to hand-deliver 620 copies of Ellen Sabin’s “The Healing Book.” A life insurance manager at Aetna, Kearney felt Sabin’s book would be helpful to a community that had experienced one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history.

Kearney had met the author in 2009 at a life insurance conference, and Aetna has since been purchasing and donating her book to bereaved Aetna policyholders, especially families with children. Sabin’s book is structured like an activity journal so that children can express and record their feelings and memories of someone who has died.

“This book stood out for me. It creates a legacy of a lost loved one and it also gives children a process to get through the loss,” Kearney said.

What the library staff didn’t know at the time was that Aetna’s donation would be the first in a flood of donated books, numbering in the thousands, to arrive at the library in the days and weeks following the Dec. 14 tragedy.

Books have come from all over the country — from authors, publishers, and ordinary people buying multiple copies of books on Amazon.com that they had found helpful in their grief.

“People are taking the books home by the bagful,” children’s librarian Alana Bennison recently told a woman calling from New York who wanted to donate money to the library to purchase more books.

Soon after the tragedy, Bennison realized the library had to set up a special fund to handle the money and books donated to the library. The outpouring was so overwhelming that she created the “Books Heal Hearts” project where all donated books are given away free of cost to the community and wherever there is a need.

“I know that books can help people get through the darkest times. I knew we needed to give them away to people. People can take them home, write in them and know that they don’t have to give them back,” Bennison said.

There is a book for everyone. Books focus on many different topics and subjects, from proof of heaven to fairies who turn sadness into wonderful things. There are children’s books about a little boy’s journey to heaven and back during surgery, and adult books such as Nina Sankovitch’s memoir “Tolstoy and the Purple Chair,” about how literature helped her get through her older sister’s death.

Library staff said the most popular donated book is “Tear Soup,” a children’s book by Pat Schwiebert and Chuck DeKlyen about a woman who suffers a terrible loss and makes tear soup to help her heal.

DeKlyen, who co-authored the book with his mother, said since Dec. 14, more than 1,000 copies of the book have been purchased and donated to the Newtown library, mainly through griefwatch.com, a nonprofit he runs with his family in Portland, Ore.

DeKlyen said the response has been so overwhelming that his website is asking for donations to help cover the cost of shipping the books to Newtown.

“The book is universal in that it contains recipes for our healing process through any type of grief from a friend moving away to the shootings in Newtown,” DeKlyen said.

Bennison said the library is overwhelmed with book donations, and asks anyone who wants to donate multiple copies of books to call or email the library first. She said it’s important for the community to begin to heal and move past the tragedy.

“We don’t want to become a grief memorial library,” she said.

(Ann Marie Somma is the editor of Hartford Faith & Values.)

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