It seems there is an inverse proportion between the number of people who receive Communion and the number of people who go to confession. While the former is increasing the latter is decreasing.

I am not basing myself on some scientific survey but on what I see around me. The same experience is shared by others I talk to and by writers in Catholic periodicals in other countries. The Pope himself, in his letter to priests on the occasion of the year dedicated to them, has written about "the apparent indifference of the faithful to this sacrament".

I don't think the reason for this decline is that people find it difficult to talk to someone about their sins. Television and the new media have radically eroded the sense of privacy that was exalted to such a high degree by the culture of print. Privacy was the most basic of rights then; now it is almost becoming a perversion.

The oral or preliterate culture had shunned privacy as it was considered to undermine the unity of the group. The sense of solidarity brought about in our contempory culture is mimicking the same feeling of our ansectors who lived in caves.

Confessor Baily tells the main character in Ben Elton's book Blind Faith: "Privacy is blasphemous. Only perverts do things in private." TV chat shows, phone-in programmes, reality programmes and social networks are a manifest sign of the number of things people now gladly do, show and say in public but which were, till a few years ago, considered to be intimately private.

The main reason for the decline in the number of people who go to confession lies elsewhere. People's understanding of sin varies from the understanding of sin as preached by Church leaders, especially in the area of sexual morality.

Empirical support for this prevailing situation, even locally, can be found in the recently published Religious Beliefs and Attitudes of Maltese University Students Revisited - 2009. Just a few examples suffice: only 24 per cent consider premarital sex morally wrong; just one sixth think artificial contraception is morally wrong; and 73.5 per cent approve of premarital cohabitation.

On the other hand, people are becoming more conscious of other areas and responsibilities of being human. We care much more about the environment, the rights of future generations and social justice, than people did three or four decades ago. But people do not go to confession saying: 'Father, I have sinned, I am using too many aerosols that damage the ozone layer', or 'Forgive me, I do not have an eco-friendly lifestyle'.

More and more people are today declaring their personal autonomy by saying that they, and no one else, have the right to say what is right or wrong. As children who come of age seek self-affirmation by distancing themselves from the diktat of their parents, many are distancing themselves from what they consider to be the diktat of Church authorities.

Besides, many people who have been alienated from, and by, a juridical Church, have not discovered a communitarian style of Church that characterised the Church in the Acts of the Apostles. This lack of ecclesial feeling breeds a resistance to the understanding of the communitarian dimension of sin which leads to an emphasis on the privatisation of reconciliation.

The rehabilitation of the sacrament of penance or reconciliation will surely not be an easy endeavour.