Official Roman Catholic Church's "Confession" App

[Urizen]

Are you a sinner? Don't worry, there's an app for that. The Roman Catholic Church has approved a recent iTunes addition called Confession, a $1.99 app that bills itself as "the perfect aid for every penitent." As you can see above, it lets you pick a commandment and tick off all your sins, keeping a running tally to bring into the confessional with you -- a sort of anti-tasklist, if you will. Can't find your particular misstep? No problem! You're able to add your own, custom dastardly deeds, filling in those gaps the app's authors didn't think anyone would fill. Now all it needs is a random sin selector: shake the phone to instantly get a wicked suggestion. That certainly could make boring Thursday nights at the dormitory a little more exciting.

STORY (http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/08/itunes-salvation-roman-catholic-church-approves-confession-app/)

$1.99 for an Indulgence? I'm quite far from being a Catholic, and I don't mean to poke fun, really. I'm more amazed by this than anything.

[TheFlyingOrc]

Cue some really awful people trying to get the whole list.

[Ox]

http://i1021.photobucket.com/albums/af337/oxonian/Achievement.jpg

[TheFlyingOrc]

http://i1021.photobucket.com/albums/af337/oxonian/Achievement.jpg

Ox, I am driving to your house and we are going to have to keep this app open all night to cover everything I'm going to do to you.

[Widgetcraft]

Wasn't part of the reason that the Protestants broke off from the church that they didn't like that a Priest had to be a mediator between them and God? Now the church is making smart phones into the mediator? I guess the times are changing.

Is your list of sins considered privileged under the law?

EDIT: Android users get to BURN.

[Ox]

This is actually not even remotely as interesting as it sounds: it wasn't approved by "the Catholic Church," it was approved by a bishop in Indiana. It's not taking your confession, it's a app that helps you create a list of your sins so your confession to a priest is well-organized (you'd be surprised how easy it is to forget exactly how you've sinned in the past week). It's been reviewed (http://wdtprs.com/blog/2011/02/review-the-new-iphone-app-for-confession-useful-but-flawed/) by a prominent Catholic blogger as "useful but needs additional features in the next version."

But to answer your question: communications with a member of the clergy for the purposes of spiritual guidance are privileged in the United States. This app is designed to be used to facilitate those communications, so the data input to it would plausibly be privileged in the same way a holographic confessional list might be. But while notes pertaining to privileged communications are clearly privileged in the attorney-client and medical contexts, it's not a slam dunk. I do think most courts would err on the side of protecting it, but I'm wrong about these sorts of predictions all the time.

[Widgetcraft]

I kind of figured it was something along the lines of a notepad, but it was so much cooler to think of it as a VirtuPriest.

DigiPriest

ElectroPadre

But yeah, I have to wonder how the privileged element would play out. You'd think it would be privileged, but who knows, it seems like the government wants us to have less privacy these days, not more.

[Generation ABXY]

I kind of figured it was something along the lines of a notepad, but it was so much cooler to think of it as a VirtuPriest.

Yeah, but then they'd have to keep the app away from kids, and that'd just cut into profits.

But yeah, I have to wonder how the privileged element would play out. You'd think it would be privileged, but who knows, it seems like the government wants us to have less privacy these days, not more.

To be fair, I can't imagine the government's too interested in most of what's considered a sin... at least, not the ones you'd need an app to remember ("And, oh yeah, I also murdered that homeless dude - don't want to forget that!") :D

[Ox]

In stark contrast to those periods of time when the government was all like, "Hey, you have information about a terrible threat to public safety? Well, better keep that to yourself!"

Privilege law is a weird area: although we've spent the past few centuries codifying and rationalizing most areas of law from the morass that is the common law, the law of privilege is a glaring exception. The federal rule of evidence literally says you should look at the common law and provides no more guidance than that. As you might imagine, various privileges were created at various times for various reasons and there's little commonality between them. Everyone "knows" that communications between a doctor and her patient are privileged, but the US Supreme Court has never actually said that and you won't find it in the federal rules of evidence. Statements made to a psychotherapist or a social worker, however, have been privileged since 1996. Jaffee v. Redmond, 518 U.S. 1 (1996).