Catholic Church to Offer Confession at Edinburgh Festival

A Catholic church is offering confession this summer at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Priests at St Patrick's, in the city's Old Town district, say the entry will be "open to people of all faiths and none" over five days. The entry even features in the festival programme and will start on 20 August.

Credited with being the first home of Edinburgh's Hibernian Football Club, St Patrick's Parish was set up in the mid-1870s.

Confession is usually only afforded to Catholics. The Fringe event will be free and non-ticketed.

Although the church is offering physical confessionals at the event, recent studies showed that confessionals in the Catholic church have seen less foot traffic over the past several decades. Much of that traffic, it seems, has moved to anonymous online confessionals.

DailyConfession.com receives hundreds of anonymous confessions and over one million hits each day. The website tells visitors to confess their sins but it doesn't necessarily provide the peace and the forgiveness that a person would find in the church.

Webmaster Greg Fox clearly tells visitors that each confession is "shamelessly presented to the entire planet, for the whole world to read".

Confessing anonymously on the Web has become a major outlet for both young and mature adults with DailyConfession being one of many web-based ways to get secrets or sins off their chest.