General Confession

Faced with thousands of people who came to Kronstadt to commune at his hand, Fr. John of Kronstadt could not hear them one by one, and so he developed the practice for which he became most famous and most contested: the general confession — a mass, simultaneous confession of the whole congregation at St. Andrew’s Cathedral, in which penitents shouted out their sins aloud together amid weeping and prostrations, after which he pronounced a collective absolution. Eyewitnesses and Kizenko describe scenes of extraordinary emotional intensity. The practice raised real canonical questions, was tolerated by the Synod as an exception, and did not continue as a normative form of the sacrament after his death.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (glorified ROCOR 1964, Moscow Patriarchate 1990)

What It Actually Was

The general confession was a direct consequence of Fr. John’s eucharistic program (see Daily Liturgy and Frequent Communion). With daily congregations of 3,500 to over 5,000 in the last fifteen years of his life, and as many as 5,000 wishing to commune at a single Liturgy, the ordinary form of one-on-one confession had become, in the language of the seminary literature, “utterly unpracticable” (Kizenko, A Prodigal Saint; Jordanville study). One priest could not possibly hear thousands of individual confessions before communing them.

Fr. John’s solution was to conduct a general confession just before the communion of the laity. Accounts of the form are consistent. He would remove his outer vestments and come out onto the amvon (the raised place before the royal doors) wearing his cassock (riassa) with only the epitrachelion (priestly stole) as a vestment. He addressed the crowd with a word of instruction, read the prayers appointed before confession, and then called the whole congregation to confess aloud — together, simultaneously, each penitent crying out his or her own sins (Kizenko, A Prodigal Saint; Jordanville study). After this, he pronounced absolution over the assembled people collectively.

The Eyewitness Descriptions

The eyewitness record is vivid and is the reason the practice is so well remembered. The crowd of penitents would be weeping, screaming, and shouting out their sins in repentance, some falling prostrate on the floor; such public confession could continue for two or more hours. The cathedral, by these accounts, “was full of moans, shrieks and howls; it seemed as if the whole church was shaking from the shattering wails of the people” (eyewitness account preserved in the memoir literature; Jordanville study, citing the period memoirs). The memoirist Vasily Meshchersky records Fr. John himself overcome: “Father John covered his face with his hands, but even behind them the large tears continued to fall down his face onto the cold floor of the church” (Meshchersky, memoir; cited in the Jordanville study). A striking detail of these descriptions is that each penitent, in the collective roar, “saw only himself, not noticing anyone else, and fearlessly laid bare the secrets of his sins” — the very publicity of the act paradoxically producing a kind of privacy.

These are reports of what witnesses attest, recorded here as such and not asserted as a neutral documentary account; the memoir literature is itself part of the cult that formed around Fr. John, a point Kizenko examines critically throughout A Prodigal Saint.

Why He Adopted It: The Impossible Numbers

Fr. John did not set out to reform the form of confession; the general confession was forced on him by the success of the frequent-communion revival. He had labored to bring the laity back to the chalice; when they came in their thousands, the existing form of the sacrament could not accommodate them. The general confession was a pastoral improvisation under pressure of sheer scale, undertaken so that the multitude who came to Kronstadt to commune could in fact be communed (Kizenko, A Prodigal Saint, ch. 3–4). It is best read not as a theological thesis about confession but as a logistical solution that acquired enormous spiritual charisma in his hands.

The pressure was made sharper by the very discipline Fr. John was working within. In the Russian Church of the synodal period, confession was not merely recommended before communion — it was effectively required before every communion (see Confession (The Mystery of Repentance), which records that “confession is required before every reception of Holy Communion” as the traditional Russian norm). So long as communion was a once-a-year event, this requirement was manageable: a priest could hear his parishioners individually over the days of Great Lent. But Fr. John had collapsed the premise. By making communion frequent and the congregation enormous, he created a situation in which the standing requirement of confession-before-communion could not be met one penitent at a time. The general confession was the point at which his two innovations — frequent communion and a packed cathedral — collided with the inherited discipline and forced an improvisation.

The Canonical Questions — Then and Since

The practice sat uneasily with the canonical and dogmatic shape of the Mystery of Repentance, and it raised questions both in Fr. John’s lifetime and afterward.

The norm it departed from. In the Russian tradition of the period, confession was individual and auricular, and — as the synodal-era discipline had it — required before every reception of Holy Communion (see Confession (The Mystery of Repentance), “Confession and Communion”). The whole rite is built around the penitent confessing his or her own sins to God in the presence of the priest as witness, who then pronounces absolution; the Slavic prayer of absolution is itself addressed to a single penitent by name. A simultaneous shouted confession of an entire congregation, followed by a collective absolution, was a real departure from this form.

The Synod’s tolerance of the exception. The ecclesiastical authorities tolerated Fr. John’s practice rather than endorsing it as a general rule. Kizenko’s account, and the surrounding literature, present the toleration as bound up with his standing: once his reputation as a wonderworker and as the “All-Russian” pastor was secure — and especially after he was summoned to the deathbed of Alexander III in 1894 (see All-Russia Pastorate) — he became, in effect, immune to the kind of disciplinary objection that a lesser priest would have faced. The publication of sympathetic memoirs by the press of the Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra has been read as a sign of tacit approval at high ecclesiastical levels (Jordanville study; Kizenko, A Prodigal Saint). The toleration was personal and exceptional, extended to this priest in these circumstances.

Later assessments, both ways. Assessments since have run in both directions. Sympathetic accounts — including much of the hagiographical and pastoral literature — present the general confession as a Spirit-filled act of mass repentance, evidence of the saint’s extraordinary charism and of a genuine awakening of the people. More cautious voices, including the historical-critical perspective that Kizenko represents, situate it within the emotional dynamics of the cult that surrounded him and treat it as a singular phenomenon inseparable from his particular personality and authority, rather than as a model to be generalized. The repository’s treatment of the sacrament notes that confession is properly individual and that the priest serves as witness to a personal repentance (see Confession); against that standard, the general confession is an extraordinary exercise of pastoral economy, not a new ordinary form. (Both readings are attributed here as positions in the literature, not adjudicated.)

The shadow of the cult. Part of the later caution stems from what grew up around the general confession and the wider Kronstadt phenomenon. A radical lay following, the Ioannites (Ioannity), venerated Fr. John extravagantly — in the most extreme cases as a saint in his own lifetime or even in quasi-divine terms — and broke with ordinary hierarchical discipline; the movement was repeatedly condemned as a sectarian aberration, and the term “Ioannite” became a byword for religious fanaticism (Kizenko, A Prodigal Saint; H-Net review of Kizenko). Fr. John did not create the Ioannites and disavowed their excesses, but the emotional intensity that the general confession both expressed and amplified is part of the same history. Kizenko’s achievement is to hold these threads together: the genuine sacramental renewal and the volatile popular enthusiasm were facets of one phenomenon, and the general confession sat at their meeting point. This is one reason the mass confession is venerated in retrospect as the act of a saint while not being commended as a template for ordinary parish life.

What Was Confessed and What Was Absolved

A precise question lurks beneath the spectacle: was this a general confession (a collective act of contrition, each person confessing his own sins aloud) or a general absolution (a single priestly absolution pronounced over a crowd in place of the individual prayer)? The descriptions indicate that it was both — and this is exactly where the canonical delicacy lies. The penitents did genuinely confess: each cried out his or her own real sins, and the accounts insist that the confession was sincere and particular, not a vague corporate formula. But the absolution that followed was pronounced over the assembled multitude together, not over each penitent by name in the manner the Slavic Trebnik prescribes (on which see Confession (The Mystery of Repentance), “The Prayer of Absolution”). Orthodox theology does not require that the priest hear and weigh each sin individually for absolution to be valid — the priest is a witness to repentance, not a judge rendering verdicts on enumerated offenses — and Fr. John’s defenders rested the practice precisely on this understanding: the people had truly repented and truly confessed, and the grace of absolution was not diminished by their having done so together.

What the practice did set aside was the individual, private, auricular form that the Russian discipline had come to treat as inseparable from the sacrament — the one-to-one encounter in which the priest can question, counsel, and assign a personal epitimion (penance). That pastoral dimension, central to the spiritual-father relationship described in Confession, simply could not operate in a crowd of thousands. Fr. John substituted his own preached word of instruction for the individualized counsel of ordinary confession, addressing the whole congregation at once. This is the deepest reason the general confession could be venerated as a charismatic act yet not generalized as a rule: it preserved the contrition and the absolution while sacrificing the personal cure of souls that the sacrament ordinarily carries with it.

Non-Continuation as Normative Practice

Decisively, the general confession did not become a normative practice of the Russian Orthodox Church. It remained associated with Fr. John personally; it depended on his charism, his authority, and the unique circumstances of Kronstadt, and it did not survive as a standard form after his repose in 1908. The ordinary discipline of the Russian Church — individual, auricular confession before communion — remained in force, and remains the norm in Russian and ROCOR practice today (see Confession (The Mystery of Repentance)). What endured from Fr. John’s eucharistic revival was the call to frequent communion, not the mass confession that the crowds had once made necessary. The general confession stands in the history of the Russian Church as a remembered exception — venerated in the saint, but not imitated as a rule.

See Also

References

  • Kizenko, Nadieszda. A Prodigal Saint: Father John of Kronstadt and the Russian People. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2000.
  • Meshchersky, Vasily. Memoir of Fr. John of Kronstadt (period memoir literature; the eyewitness description of the general confession). Cited via the Jordanville (Holy Trinity Seminary) study paper.
  • Jordanville (Holy Trinity Seminary) study paper on St. John of Kronstadt, drawing on Kizenko and period memoirs (used to locate the eyewitness descriptions and figures; cross-checked against Kizenko).
  • Pisiotis, Argyrios. Review of Kizenko, A Prodigal Saint. H-Net Reviews (the Ioannites movement and Kizenko’s treatment of the cult).
  • St. John of Kronstadt. My Life in Christ. Translated by E. E. Goulaeff. (For Fr. John’s own understanding of repentance and confession.)
  • Confession (The Mystery of Repentance) — companion file in this repository’s orthodoxy guide, for the normative form of the sacrament.