Leadership Quote by DeWitt Clinton

Trust is the real sacrament here, and Clinton knows it. The line is built like a political argument dressed in moral clothing: remove confidentiality and you don’t just change a procedure, you destroy the behavior it enables. It’s a compact piece of institutional realism. The sinner “will not confess” isn’t about theology so much as incentives; shame requires an exit ramp. Then Clinton flips it: “nor will the priest receive his confession.” The clergy aren’t merely guardians of a rule, they’re participants in a fragile social contract. Without secrecy, the priest becomes a potential informant, and confession turns from spiritual medicine into legal exposure.

The subtext is a warning to the state: regulate this too aggressively and you will push the most morally combustible material underground. Clinton is effectively arguing for a protected channel where people can admit wrongdoing without triggering civic punishment, because that channel produces social benefits the public never sees: remorse, restitution, behavioral change, communal stability. It’s not sentimental; it’s transactional.

Context matters. In the early American republic, Protestant suspicion of Catholic practice mixed with periodic efforts to curtail clerical privilege. Debates over “priest-penitent privilege” were really debates about what kinds of authority the new nation would tolerate besides its own. Clinton, a politician in a system still defining church-state boundaries, is staking out a pragmatic boundary: confidentiality isn’t a perk for priests, it’s a public tool. Strip the veil and you don’t get more truth. You get silence.