First-time viewer here, so what I'm about to ask may have been covered already.
Not long ago, the public discourse in Australia was dominated by events around the revelations of systematic abuse of children by clergy. I was curious about the process of Confession in Catholic rites. Suppose the guilt of a misdeed (or, even, a crime) that the perpetrator brings to Confession is absolved. Does the rite have the effect of wiping the deed from memory?
You raise a really interesting implication for this research. I don't know the answer, but a quick skim of this autobiographical research study (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00750/full) found that the more guilty someone felt, the more sensory details they could remember about a moral memory. Thus, I wonder if the reverse is true -- that relinquishing guilt through Confession helps people forget about a moral memory. Interesting!
First-time viewer here, so what I'm about to ask may have been covered already.
Not long ago, the public discourse in Australia was dominated by events around the revelations of systematic abuse of children by clergy. I was curious about the process of Confession in Catholic rites. Suppose the guilt of a misdeed (or, even, a crime) that the perpetrator brings to Confession is absolved. Does the rite have the effect of wiping the deed from memory?
Hi Trevor,
You raise a really interesting implication for this research. I don't know the answer, but a quick skim of this autobiographical research study (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00750/full) found that the more guilty someone felt, the more sensory details they could remember about a moral memory. Thus, I wonder if the reverse is true -- that relinquishing guilt through Confession helps people forget about a moral memory. Interesting!