“Tell me what and to whom you confess, and i will tell you who you are”: the sacramental confession in O crime do Padre Amaro, by Eça de Queirós

Abstract

O crime do Padre Amaro (1880), by Eça de Queirós (1845-1900), carries anticlericalism in its title, even naming the ecclesiastical character responsible for the crime. We usually understand this novel by Queirós as a denunciation of clerical lust and its consequences for believers and non-believers – as well as the lack of final consequences for most of the predatory priests who populate the novel. Among the various elements that the narrator uses to formulate his denunciations is the practice of sacramental confession. The characters themselves debate and comment on confessors and penance, so that confession does not constitute a secondary issue in the economy of the work, even helping to link the narrative, the construction of verisimilitude, and ultimately becoming one of the anticlerical themes of denunciation against ecclesiastical crimes. In this study, we will seek to demonstrate the importance of this theme for the novel, verifying how its fictional representation occurs, in line with the anticlerical discourses that were powerful throughout the 19th century, especially in the specific context of Portugal. To this end, we will take into account the institutional prescriptions of the Roman Catechism (1566), promulgated after the Council of Trent (1545-1563), and, above all, the reflections of Luís Machado de Abreu (2004), José Rivair Macedo (2009), among other authors, who have addressed the issue.