Legal Implications

An important job of many religious figures is the taking of their congregations’ confessions. Confessions given to one’s priest are protected by a law regarding priest-penitent privilege. Priest-penitent or clergy-penitent privilege has been protected by law in the US since 1828 but only applies to religions where confession is a required part of the religion, like in Catholicism. Priests who receive confession have the power to absolve people of their sins and dole out a punishment that fits within the doctrines of the religion and the severity of the sin committed. There is also a line that is toed when it comes to reporting child abuse admitted to in a confession. If there is a robot in the confessional instead of a human, how can these rights be upheld? Does someone listen to recordings of the confessions? Does the robot have an algorithm that decides how to handle the confessions made to it? Both of these options have different legal ramifications. Confession is supposed to stay between the penitent and the priest, and if the confessions are recorded and then listened to by someone else, that breaks that confidentiality. There is also the issue of how the recordings are stored. When data is stored on the internet or in another location, it is susceptible to hacking. Having the recordings of a whole congregations confessions would give the hacker an amazing amount of personal information and blackmail material to use against those people. An algorithm that decides how a robot handles confessions also poses some problems. The punishments handed out by a priest during confession varies from priest to priest and from situation to situation. There is not really any true, hard and fast rules that decide which punishment is given for certain sins confessed. Creating a robot who can take confessions would require either a very complicated algorithm with exceptions programmed in that would need to constantly be updated or for a person to review the audio of the confession which defeats the purpose of the robo-priest.

 

There are also legal issues that arise from a priests ability to change a person’s legal status. Priests officiate marriages which have an affect on the couple’s legal status. Marriage is essentially a legally binding contract between the two individuals getting married. After a person has married someone, he or she is eligible for a slew of different legal benefits such as being able to file taxes jointly, inheritance rights, the ability to make legal and/or medical decisions on the spouse’s behalf, and many other things. This brings up the question of whether or not a robot should be able to officiate a marriage when it has so many legal ramifications. If a robot is not deemed sufficient to make such a large change, will people married by robotic priests not legally be married? Will the legal system have to create a new precedent regarding the process of being married by a robo-priest? These topics are important to consider when thinking about the legal ramifications of creating robo-priests.