Say you walk into a confessional and you tell a priest something heavy. Something you've been carrying for months. Because you feel the booth is safe, you know that what happens in the booth stays there, and because you needed to say it out loud to someone without watching their face change, now imagine that priest walks out and reports what you said, to who? To the authorities, to anyone, because he decided the information was too important to keep.
How quickly do you think people would stop going to confession?
That's the thing about privilege. It is not a loophole. It is not a technicality that exists to protect bad people. Trust forms the basis for those relationships to exist, to function and to thrive, if you don't reveal the symptoms, a doctor can't treat you properly because he/she won't know what to do with the information if you withheld it, A lawyer can't defend you if you are changing your words because you don't know where it might end up, A priest cannot offer you spiritual guidance if the confessional becomes a reporting station, the moment privilege disappears, the relationship breaks. And the relationship is the whole point.
If this were not the case, the world would be a cruel place without This privileges , And I mean that sincerely, Not dramatic, not exaggerated. Cruel, Because what it would actually create is a world where people suffer in silence rather than risk the consequences of honesty, the person struggling with something dangerous stops seeking help, The patient hides the full picture of what's happening in their body, the accused refuses to tell their lawyer the truth. And all of that silence, all of that withheld information, produces worse outcomes for everyone.
More suffering, not less.
now get the other point of view. I genuinely do, how do you live with that, If a priest hears in confession that someone is planning to hurt people, and he says nothing, and those people get hurt, how do you sit with that? How does he? That weight is real and it is not something you can argue away with legal principles, it is a moral crisis and it deserves to be treated as one.
But here's where I land, The moment you create an exception even a reasonable sounding one you have ended privilege, because privilege only works if it is absolute, the second a doctor knows that certain information will leave the room, every patient sits across from them calculating what to say and what to leave out, the second a lawyer knows they might have to report what they are told, every client starts managing the conversation, the safety disappears and with it everything that makes those confessions possible in the first place.
What we need instead are better systems around how dangerous information is handled without dismantling the framework that produces the honesty in the first place. Crisis protocols, Ethical guidelines, Ways for professionals to navigate those impossible situations without the default answer being betrayal.
Because once trust is broken in those spaces it does not come back, People have to believe that certain rooms are safe, that certain conversations stay where they happen.
That going to the doctor, the lawyer, the priest does not mean handing someone a weapon to use against you later, take that away and you don't get safer world.
You just get a quieter, more frightened one.
***Image Is Generated With ChatGpt ***
