In Defense of Older Telephony

If a man casually in the office of a priest said "I have poisoned all the water of the city, and people will die" and no seal of confession was involved, the priest would be perfectly justified in calling the police, perhaps not about the man (unless he seemed totally impenitent), but certainly about the poisoning.

But if he said it in confession, the priest couldn't do that. He could also not tell the man as a condition for absolution to turn himself in. However, he would be perfectly justified in telling the man to make an anyonymous phone call, not mentioning he was the culprit, to get the poisoning averted.

Anonymous phone calls were far easier back in the day. You would walk into a phone booth, pay in cash, dial the police, and you could do so. In such an urgency, while the police might try to trace the call to the phone booth, the more urgent measure would be to verify if there was poison in the water works of the city. The culprit could, after receiving absolution, also get away from the police, if he desired to do so.

With cell phones, nowadays a cell phone is always someone's personal cell phone, unless it's stolen. If the culprit asked to borrow someone's cell phone, that someone would remember him.

So, today, the likelihood is, a man who had poisoned the waters of a city, still not wanting to get caught, would not be able to avert deaths by a very anonymous phone call and knowing it might be required, would hesitate to confess even. I suggest, phone booths were a pretty good thing to have openly, for cash, not just for cards./HGL