"Where are the sinners?" priests wonder as confessional booths fall silent.(The Providence Journal)

PROVIDENCE, R.I. _ Easter lilies and varnish scent the sanctuary of the Holy Name of Jesus Church, polished for the springtime bloom of baptisms and First Communions.

Silence fills the wooden confessional booths.

There are few fresh secrets coming in these days to the old Catholic church in Providence's Mount Hope: few admissions of three impure thoughts, two unkind actions . . .At least they aren't reaching the Rev. Kevin Fisette, who waits with the formula of absolution, like a physician with an old-fashioned cure.

At 3:30 every Saturday afternoon, Father Fisette starts looking for parishioners. He has noted in the blue-and-white church bulletin that he will hear confessions in the half-hour before Mass. But, he says, "most weeks, no one is waiting."

Confession used to be what Roman Catholics did that their Protestant neighbors did not, says James O'Toole, an associate professor of history at Boston College. The centuries-old sacrament was a mark of being Catholic. Yet studies in the United States during the last decade show that almost half of U.S. Catholics rarely if ever go to confession anymore _ even if they faithfully attend Mass. There is, says O'Toole, "nothing to indicate that is turning around."

Father Fisette, who is 46, recalls the days when worshipers would wait in line to tell a priest their sins. He laments that now "they lie on a psychiatrist's couch, when they could get our healing for free." Worse, he says, many Catholics "no longer feel the need to get down on their hands and knees and beg forgiveness from God."

Perhaps, say other theologians, it is the Catholic Church from which these Catholics no longer feel the need to beg forgiveness.