Excommunication for recording confession

[DominiCanis]

deleted

[Obi-Wan Kenobi]

I'm not a canon lawyer and I don't play one on TV, but it's pretty clear to me that the revised canon does remove the old penalty.

[Doom]

For what possible reason would the penalty be reduced? If a priest is secretly recording confessions, say for blackmail material, this ought to be an offense worthy of excommunication. Imagine a Catholic president or Prime Minister who has his own confessor and spiritual advisor and then he learns that the priest has been recording everything to use it against him for some nefarious purpose. For example, suppose the priest was secretly a mole feeding information to a foreign power. This may be an unlikely scenario but if something like this happened, mere laicization is not a severe enough penalty.

[Obi-Wan Kenobi]

I'm not sure what the portion dealing with clergy is about, since they (we) are covered by paragraph 1:

§ 1. A confessor who directly violates the sacramental seal incurs a latae sententiae excommunication reserved to the Apostolic See; he who does so only indirectly is to be punished according to the gravity of the offence.

I guess a different penalty could be applied to the different aspects of the offense.

[peregrinator]

For what possible reason would the penalty be reduced? If a priest is secretly recording confessions, say for blackmail material, this ought to be an offense worthy of excommunication. Imagine a Catholic president or Prime Minister who has his own confessor and spiritual advisor and then he learns that the priest has been recording everything to use it against him for some nefarious purpose. For example, suppose the priest was secretly a mole feeding information to a foreign power. This may be an unlikely scenario but if something like this happened, mere laicization is not a severe enough penalty.

That would be covered under the canon(s) for breaking the confessional seal. I'm assuming the mention of clergy in the OP's cite has to do with clergy recording confessions in which they are the penitent.

[Doom]

But the penitent can talk about what happens in confession until the cows come home can't he?

[Obi-Wan Kenobi]

Yes.

[peregrinator]

Right, and there might even be a valid reason for someone to record his or her own confession.

But looking at the canon it seems obvious that it's aimed at third parties who might record the confession (something I didn't notice before).

[Obi-Wan Kenobi]

Several decades ago, an Italian journalist got the brilliant idea of going to confession with different priests and recording it, and then comparing them to each other. The law prohibiting recording confessions was promulgated in response to that.