A Short History of the Cyber-Confessional

A "Hitchhiker's Guide" style entry about the Catholic Church in an all-too-believable near-future.

It was 2024 when the current pope endorsed the first cyber-confessionals. Global adoption of the units happened in 2028. The Vatican made the decision to deploy the cyber-confessionals in response to cultural trends.

Years before, the church had taken to abandoning the dry, boring sermons for homilies that provided real-life examples and engagements of holy scripture to everyday existence. The congregations raised with smartphones in their hands had lost even the attention span for those, checking their palm-based screens or augmented reality (AR) glasses, thinking no one could tell. Even the well-meaning parishioners no longer had the attention span to pay attention to a full mass.

Despite their best attempts at solving the problem, Catholicism still hadn't escaped the bad press that the sex abuse scandals had left them. The long memory of the virtual world ensured that. Attendance at the staid, old institution had been slowly peeling off even before that, and coffers that once could barely support an installed priest could no longer even manage that. In part, it was the budgetary issue of personnel expenses that help the church turn men of the cloth into men of the circuit board.

That reduction in staffing also helped to embed a new pun about remote access priests and simulcast services being the new “circuit riders.”

The original idea for cyber-confessionals evolved from a proposal Vatican 2.0 conference in 2019; as a summit designed to explore the integration of technology into the church without losing the tradition. Along with proving that their marketing team was out of touch, it proved that the church was willing to continue marching down the path of obsolescence. Most of the content included technological gimmicks that were intended to save money. Votive candles lit via a touchscreen bank instead of the repeated purchase of real candles was most loudly opposed measures suggested. Offering via chip-and-pin credit cards, tablet-mounted readers, or just direct transfer through an AR icon made available during service saw wide, and nearly immediate adoption across the First World.

From this conference, a new orthodox movement began. The schism developed along these new technological fault lines, as church members accused the leadership and V2.0 (as the tongue-in-cheek abbreviation of the conference came to be referred to in newscast headlines) of disconnecting from the original unwired salvation into a new unwired damnation. The Neo-Catholics (NCs) accused the traditionalists of being a “Tactile Orthodoxy,” merely a group of Luddites who refused to get with the times. The originally-termed orthodox branches took an even dimmer view of the situation, having been staunch defenders of such traditional things that the NCs abandoned during the days when they were just called Catholics, such as the long-standing contempt for praise bands in lieu of traditional organ and choral music.

Outside observers, and newscasters, took potshots in highlighting how this entire debate was taking place across the Great Unwired.

The debate went on for some time, with most churches settling into some level of adopting the new technologies. As noted before, the digital offerings were widely adopted quickly, and helped see a boost in revenues when parishioners could deposit directly into particular funds or projects that they saw fit, spending more when they felt more in control of the disbursement of their tithes. The electronic votive displays paid for themselves when someone wrote an app that allowed the bundling of a virtual candle with donation using NFC: a person would tap their device (or RA icon) to the display and a candle would be added to large screen for display. It was the personal touch of letting a user/parishioner light and place a candle instead of just touching the large display to light an existing candle icon that sold the idea, perpetuating the age old model of the candles paying for themselves. Except these funds went to pay for electricity and hardware maintenance.

To the original point of the cyber-confessionals, it nearly sparked a war between those who saw the original proposal at V2.0, and was all but anathema (in the metaphorical as well Catholic terminology) until the pope allowed one to be installed at the Vatican on a trial basis. The original installation (in the technical terminology, not religious terminology " that's in a minute) of the cyber-confessional was allowed only under the strictest auspices of digital privacy that could be established at the time, as well as with the personal guarantee of His Holiness that a real flesh-and-blood member of the clergy would be on the other side of that communication to receive the confessional.

To this day, the encryption provided by the cyber-confessionals has not been broken, and the pope made a personal live broadcast before the first one was turned on that the church will never allow any world government a back door into that encryption, cementing the precept of priest-penitent confidentiality even in this radically connected day and age. (It is important to note that as important as the issue was, and still is, there has been no ex cathedra statement on the issue.)

There was a large outcry about the possibility of telecommuting priests, too lazy to come to their churches and open the doors anymore, or making remote hospital visits instead of that personal, caring touch a man of the cloth is supposed to provide to his flock when they're in need. As a historical note, there are no records currently available of Last Rites or Holy Communion being given via telepresence as of the date this article was written.

Dissent was present for many years, and overall adoption of the technology was slow. The most widespread came from nursing homes and hospitals, where chapels were installed with the ability to do remote confession for those too ill or shut-in to make it to their church. From there, the concept spread rapidly. Once grandma, the most devout Catholic you knew, decided it was okay, the rest of the family felt comfortable at least trying it out.

That is how we come full circle to labor expenses. With the explosion in demand for confessing across the aether, came a demand for priests to have a constant presence at their church's node to receive parishioners logging in to confess. Attendance at service may not have gone up in any significant way, but the confessional was always packed, so to speak. More priests were needed to fill the electronic versions than they were to fill in at their physical buildings. That still meant a resurgence in personnel expenses.

A few lines of code later, and each church's node had the option for offering, tithe, and freewill donation available upon entering or exiting (really, logging on or off) the electronic confessional booth. The majority of those using the service found it exceedingly convenient, and didn't hesitate to make their offerings when confessing, instead of attending services " even virtual ones.

As of last year, there are more confessional nodes across the Net than there are actual church nodes, let alone physical buildings. It's become an industry, and some of the more sour Catholics have started calling these node “collar centers,” as a mocking throwback to the early part of the century where hundreds of people crammed into cubicles in order to answer telephones for technical support issues, accusing the priests in the node of being little more than bored seminary dropouts reading from a script as people make their genuine confession and contrition known.

There is also a small, but growing movement who has adopted the persona of the Unwired Reformation (UR). Along with believing the church has strayed too far from its roots as a house of sanctuary and salvation, they are also beginning to echo the original Protestant doctrine of sola fide " salvation through faith " which they suggest is what a church that declares itself to be part of the Unwired should be. They point to the donations at the cyber-confessionals as evidence that the church has, intentionally or otherwise, returned to the practice of indulgences; that is, selling salvation. Aligning themselves on these particular issues with the Neo-Protestants (though remarkably divisive on others), they suggest that an Unwired church is one that offers Unwired salvation: no strings, intercessions, or indulgences.

The Vatican has yet to offer any official statement on the indulgences issue.

As a final note, there's a fringe faction of hackers who have accused the Vatican of developing artificial intelligence instead of filling collar centers, pointing to chunks of code that indicate triggers for what they call “mortal keywords.” Their allegation is that you're not confessing to anything real at all, which feeds both the UR church movement's confess-to-God-alone position, and the atheists who have always said there was no God.

This author takes no especial stance, but will offer that whether it's a collar center or an AI, be mindful that just because the reverend listens, doesn't mean he cares.

-- A Short History of the Cyber-Confessional, posted by M95LWitt at 04:06:30 UTC, 31.10.2042

Author's Note

Originally submitted to a flash fiction contest (defined as 500 - 1,500 words) back in October 2015 with the prompt, "Just because the reverend listens, doesn't mean he cares."

Word count is 1,490.

The entry was submitted under one of my pseudonyms, Adam Locke.