Well I believe all trades that have trust have a locked door. Doctors have one. Lawyers have one. Priests have one. There, people say things that they would not say to anyone else, not even their husbands and wives, possibly not even to themselves, if not out loud, then in their minds. anything that goes in, stays in. Until the end of time, if necessary.
Its It's strange when you think about it. We've created full institutions around the notion that some silences are more worthy of being preserved than some truths are of being told. I think that's right, most of the time. A world where people stop being honest, because if they're not, it will be on the evening news is not a world I want to be in. They hide symptoms. They don't show up to the appointment. Therefore, they do not want to have to admit how the infection occurred, and they leave it to fester. Privilege is not about the protection of secrets, it's about the protection of the conditions for the speaking of truth.
However, when you come to the edge case that gets everyone's bedtime thinking juices flowing. There's someone who's sitting in that room who confesses something that's not only personal, its a name, a date, a plan. A bomb. A next victim. Out there in the darkness, a clock is ticking, a life with no idea that it's in danger. The one who would be able to prevent it, is obliged by law or vow to say nothing.
Is it still a noble thing to do? Or is it simply the coward's game of principle?
There is no simple answer and anyone that gives you an answer right away is suspect. You've got to say 'always protect the privilege, no exceptions' because sometimes people will die so that the system as a whole can continue to function. You've given every professional in that room a judgment call to make... and a future patient or client a piece of advice they can't always follow.. when you said, ‘break it whenever lives are at stake'. After individuals realize that a secret could be disclosed when and if it should be, they cease to test those conditions. They simply keep their mouths closed.
The part I always get back to: privilege is not fragile due to a single instance of its being broken. It's breakable due to the impact on others' trust in it that follows. Once you break it, once you break it, then you break it for one confession, then you break it for another, and so on and so forth, until it's broken for all confessions.
Now think about the opposite scenario... a world with no privilege whatsoever. No business records, no sealed confessional, no protected medical record, no attorney-client anything. It's almost like it's a place that's pure and good on paper - a place with nothing to hide. I believe in reality it would be a more paranoid, colder world. Individuals would learn to deceive the ones who are supposed to assist them. Confession would disappear into the sewers, into strangers on the Internet, into nowhere. The urge to do something if the safe room went, wouldn't go away, it would just find one that wasn't safe.
To this end perhaps it is the honest position that the privilege must remain more or less sacred, just because it is more or less sacred. There is the one rare occasion when it hurts, but that one can't become the norm if it is not the very essence of what the room is supposed to be. In some cases you just have to lock doors when you really want them to be unlocked, just this once.
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