I have been the leader of a religious congregation for more than three decades, a family psychotherapist with a practice independent of my congregational duties, and a university professor. In all three roles, I have adhered strictly to the code of conduct that held me to silence, no matter how interesting or disturbing what I am told may be. Yet, I found handling the confidences that came to me as a minister much different than handling those that came to me as therapist or teacher.

As a therapist, I could easily disguise my clients with extraneous and misleading details and talk specifically about them with other therapists and, in a general way, even with close friends. None of my acquaintances knew my clients. As a teacher, I found disguise harder. Many of the other teachers knew the same students as I did, although I could still talk about problems in a general way. But, as a minister, I could not use either disguise or general description to preserve confidentiality. As a minister, my pastoral counseling gave me confidential information about people who were known by nearly everyone else in the same congregation.

As a therapist, my relationship with clients rested upon a commercial transaction. My clients were people who had no other contact with me than the appointed 50-minute sessions. They entered and left my life as they opened and shut the door to my office. Teachers are in a hierarchical relationship with students that generally ends with the power to grade. Only occasionally have students sought me out when not enrolled in a class of mine. But even then. in less than four years, they moved on, rarely to be seen again.

Those who come to me for pastoral counseling stand in a quite different relationship to me. While the congregation collectively pays my salary, individual congregants do not pay for pastoral counseling as such. I have no power over them. They are free to come and go as they please. More often than not, they do not talk to me in my study but in a hallway before or after a meeting or by phoning me either at my study or at home.

I have continual communication with members of my congregation not because they necessarily want to confide in me but because we share a sustained religious life. This fact, more than any other, seems to be critical for understanding the difference between the confidentiality a pastor must preserve and the confidentiality a therapist or teacher must preserve. Only I, among those I know, know my therapy clients; a few others among those I know, know my students; but the people whom I see for pastoral counseling are also people known to others in the congregation. More than anything else, this difference in acquaintance has made it much harder for me to know what to keep quiet about and what to reveal.

Here are four examples of what I have in mind, examples that still trouble me.

Deathbed Confession
Harry, a 60 year-old widower, who had just remarried, had terminal cancer. As I sat at the side of his hospital bed, he said, "I have to tell you something that I've never told anyone else."
His first wife had been an abusive alcoholic. He wanted to divorce her but she made that all but impossible. She died one day, falling down a flight of steps in their home after having drunk too much. "The police called it an accident," he explained. "The truth is that we were arguing and I pushed her. It wasn't an accident. I killed her."

Harry died the following week. There was a funeral for him at the Ethical Society. He was much beloved by the congregation, a soft-spoken, thoughtful and considerate man. So, my comments about him were along these lines, as were those of the many members and friends who rose to eulogize him. All the time I knew that Harry did not think of himself as a good man but as a murderer and deceiver, someone who could not even bring himself to tell his new wife what most troubled him. He had kept the secret, and so had I. Not until many years later, after his widow remarried and moved away, did I tell even my wife.

Money Trap
Rachel and Tom were a middle-class couple always struggling to make ends meet. Once, to assist them, I had given them a loan from a fund available only to the minister. Then Tom told me that he was increasingly angry- with Rachel for what he said was her mismanaging of the family's money.

Several months later Rachel told me that she was giving money to a friend who was using cocaine. She hoped that he would straighten out. Soon after that conversation, I began to notice that Rachel looked withdrawn when attending activities at the congregation, and unkempt. How could I tell Tom that I suspected Rachel was using drugs? What could I tell him about why I thought their savings were dwindling?

Within a year Rachel left the house to live in a basement apartment in a drug-infested part of town.

"What ever happened to Tom and Rachel?" members asked.

"Oh, you know what happens to couples sometimes," I said.

Jail Visit
One evening, I told my family that I had to make an emergency visit to the county jail. Asked why, I responded, "I can't tell you that." The reason for the visit was that Alex, 16 years old, a graduate of our Sunday School, and an active member of the youth group, had been arrested for molesting his cousin. He entered a plea bargain, admitting in court a crime he otherwise denied, and continued to attend the youth group after he received a sentence of a year-and-a-half probation.

Since Alex's mother had spoken to my wife about the situation, I kept my wife informed about the case. But I never told my children about it. Leaving that night to make a prison visit was just one of the odd things they had to expect from their father, part of the secret work of clergy.

A Not-So-Secret Hell
Brian told me that he was going through a living hell but would not give me any details. When his wife Linda called, I understood why. "Brian has been raping our daughter and is going to trial in the next few months."

I felt I should not tell Brian about Linda's call. If he wanted to keep a secret from me, he had the right to think that he had succeeded. I also felt I had a duty to listen to him without judgment.

Members noticed that Linda and her daughter were no longer at the Society and that Brian's attendance was spotty. What should I have said when they asked if anything was wrong? And what should I have done about the several hundred dollars of the congregation's money Brian had the keeping of in his own home? I did encourage the congregation's president to ask for the money, but when he asked why, I had to be vague.

Brian was sentenced to 60 years in prison. Linda and daughter have not been heard from since. When members ask what has happened to them, I say that I don't know.

Conclusions and Guidelines
Like all professionals, clergy have to balance the harm of revealing a confidence against the potential harm of maintaining the secret. In general, the law provides greater latitude to clergy in maintaining strict confidentiality than to other professions. For the sake of separation of state and church, the law allows religious bodies to develop their own guidelines.

A major difficulty arises for clergy because many confidences are exchanged outside formal settings. The more a religious society functions as a community, the greater the difficulty of defining confidentiality. For example, it is often not at all clear to me how much of a conversation is confession, and so confidential, and how much is ordinary conversation I am free to share with others. I have, therefore, adopted a strict rule: all discussions I have with congregants should be treated as confidential, no matter how trivial they may appear or how off-handedly the congregant may seem to be speaking. If there is any reason to reveal the information, I ask the congregant whether the information is confidential.

When speaking to colleagues, I disguise the congregant enough to maintain confidentiality. In no case would I reveal even this much to a colleague except to seek the colleague's counsel or to help the colleague learn from my experience.

If a religious organization has a code of ethics, sharing it with the congregation is a good idea. Such sharing helps to prevent misunderstanding, fosters a sense of trust between the clergy and the congregation, and thereby encourages congregants to turn to the clergy for advice or consolation.