Everyone Says Arizona Saved the Confessional. Read the Holding. It Did Something Larger.
A unanimous Arizona Supreme Court did not rule that confession is privileged. It ruled that no judge or jury may ask whether a clergy member read his own doctrine correctly. That is a much larger rule.
Strip the case to its principle and it is not the one being reported.
On July 30 the Arizona Supreme Court ruled unanimously for two bishops of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who did not call police after a father confessed to abusing his daughter. The headlines said the confessional held. The Church said the ruling affirms the confidential nature of religious confession. Survivor advocates called it a confessional loophole.
All three are describing a case about privilege. The court decided something else, and it is bigger.
Vice Chief Justice John R. Lopez IV wrote that the clergy-penitent privilege was, in his word, irrelevant.
What the statute actually says
Arizona’s Reporting Statute is broad. Any person who reasonably believes a minor is being abused must immediately report it. Teachers, doctors, coaches, neighbors, everyone.
Clergy get a carve out with two moving parts. The clergy member has to have learned of the abuse during a confession or a confidential communication. And the clergy member has to determine that withholding the report is “reasonable and necessary within the concepts” of his religion.
Notice what that second clause does. The legislature handed a religious judgment to the religious body and wrote it into a reporting duty. This case was about who gets to check that judgment.
The facts, which are ugly
Paul Adams told Bishop John Herrod of the Bisbee Ward in November 2011 that he had abused one of his daughters, who was five. He said it again in a second meeting with Herrod and his wife Leizza present. He said it a third time before a disciplinary council convened by Bishop Robert Mauzy. He was excommunicated in 2013.
Nobody called anyone. Adams kept going. In 2017 an Interpol investigation traced a video downloaded by a man in New Zealand back to him. He confessed to law enforcement and killed himself in jail before trial. Leizza Adams was sentenced to two and a half years. (A conflict in the record, flagged rather than smoothed: the court’s summary says she pleaded guilty, Religion News Service reports no contest.)
Three of the children sued the Church and the bishops in 2020. Cochise County Superior Court threw the case out. The Court of Appeals reinstated it in July 2025 on a waiver theory: because Adams repeated the confession in front of Leizza and in front of council members who might not be clergy, a jury could find the privilege given up, and could then decide whether the bishops were right that their doctrine required silence.
That last step is what the Supreme Court killed.
The holding
Two moves, in order.
First, the privilege does not govern this duty at all. The privilege covers confessions. The statute covers confessions and confidential communications, which is wider ground. So the waiver argument was aimed at the wrong target. Whether the privilege survived Leizza sitting in the room does not matter, because the exemption never depended on the privilege.
Second, the sentence that will travel: “the First Amendment generally prohibits fact finders from inquiring into a clergy member’s application of his particular religious doctrine.” One exception, fraud or collusion for secular purposes, and the court found no evidence of it here.
Put those together. A judge or a jury may not sit in judgment on whether a bishop read his own church’s doctrine correctly. Not may not do it easily. May not do it.
“Reporting Statute and bedrock First Amendment principles compel our decision in favor of the Church Defendants,” Lopez wrote. Unanimous. The trial court is affirmed, the Court of Appeals is reversed, the case goes back down.
Why this is larger than the confessional
Because it is not about the confessional. The booth is a Catholic image, and Latter-day Saint bishops do not use one. The rule Arizona wrote reaches any clergy member of any faith who makes a doctrinal judgment about confidentiality. It shields the imam. It shields the rabbi. It shields the elder board of a nondenominational church in Mesa that has never used the word confession in its life.
That is the pluralist test, and this ruling passes it. A protection that only fit one liturgy would not be a religious liberty protection. It would be a favor.
But pass the test honestly and you have to say the rest out loud. The same rule that keeps a judge from second guessing your pastor keeps a judge from second guessing a bishop who heard, three separate times, that a five year old was being abused, and said nothing, while it went on for six more years. The court did not say the bishops were right. It said no court may ask.
Angela Walker of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests called that a loophole predators can use, and she is not a strawman. The seam is in the statute, though, not in the holding. Arizona’s legislature wrote the exemption and can narrow it. That fight is legislative now.
What to do with this
If you want the exemption kept, say so to your legislature in those terms, and defend the hard version rather than the flattering one. If you want it narrowed, aim at the statute. The First Amendment holding is on solid ground and it protects your church too.
And if you are a pastor or an elder: Arizona did not tell you that you may not report. It told you the state will not review your decision. The Church’s own Handbook, cited in its statement, requires leaders to report abuse disclosed in confession when serious injury could follow. The law has stopped asking you the question. Somebody still should.
Comments ()