(LifeSiteNews) — An Arizona bill that would throw priests in prison for years and levy massive fines against them for not violating the Seal of Confession will be killed, a Catholic Republican legislator told LifeSiteNews.
“I will kill the bill,” Representative Quang Nguyen told LifeSiteNews via a phone interview on Tuesday. Rep. Nguyen chairs the Arizona House Judiciary Committee where HB 2039 currently sits.
The bill, proposed by Democrat Stacey Travers, would threaten Catholic priests with jail time and fines unless they reported alleged abuse they heard of in the confessional, as LifeSiteNews previously reported. The law would also require them to predict when abuse might happen and would make them liable to punishment if they did not report their concerns.
Nguyen previously killed Travers’ bill when proposed in 2023. As chair of the House Judiciary Committee, he ensured it did not proceed for a vote.
While Travers previously ignored requests for comment from LifeSiteNews, she subsequently told The Center Square that she thinks the Catholic Church tries to “hide behind the sanctity of the Confessional” and that it is not really concerned about “absolution.”
According to Travers, a far-left legislator who is also the minority whip, “religious institutions are more concerned about their liability than they are about the faithfulness of the search for absolution.”
The Democratic representative is serious about going after Catholics, considering her bill was one of the first prefiled for the new legislative session, Nguyen told LifeSiteNews. The bill is about attacking Catholics, not preventing abuse, he said.
The bill’s number, 2039, “means that she worked double time during the interim in order to drop this bill as early as possibly can. So, what does that tell me? You could not wait to destroy my church.”
“I’m going to be very frank about this,” he said, “this bill has absolutely zero to do with reporting crimes because duty to report already exists in the state of Arizona, just not in the confessional booth,” Nguyen continued. “That is all… This is a way to go out and destroy our church. Nothing more, nothing less.”
He said Travers spoke to Nguyen on the opening day of the legislative session and said, “I just want to have a conversation.”
“And I basically said, I am going to kill the bill, period,” Nguyen related.
He said he has tried “multiple times” to explain to Travers how Confession works and how the priest often cannot see the penitent. There is no chance, if a priest asks a penitent to step out into his office to report a crime, that the criminal would admit it, Nguyen said. Criminals also do not confess to such abuse crimes, he said, relating a conversation he had with a priest.
The representative concluded by vowing to “kill every one of those stupid bills.”
“I am going to die a Catholic,” Nguyen said, vowing to defend the faith from interference.
A Catholic priest is forbidden from ever revealing what he hears in the confessional.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states:
Given the delicacy and greatness of this ministry and the respect due to persons, the Church declares that every priest who hears confessions is bound under very severe penalties to keep absolute secrecy regarding the sins that his penitents have confessed to him. He can make no use of knowledge that confession gives him about penitents’ lives. This secret, which admits of no exceptions, is called the “sacramental seal,” because what the penitent has made known to the priest remains “sealed” by the sacrament.
Bill, if passed, faces uphill legal battle
The Arizona bill is similar to one passed in 2025 in the state of Washington after years of work by a liberal Democratic representative to attack the sanctity of the confessional. Rep. Travers did not answer questions about if a religious freedom expert had reviewed her proposal and how it differed from one struck down in Washington.
In July 2025, a federal judge blocked a similar law in Washington, as previously reported by LifeSiteNews. The law came under scrutiny from Catholic bishops, Orthodox Christians, and the Department of Justice.
“There is no question that SB 5375 burdens Plaintiffs’ free exercise of religion,” Judge David Estudillo concluded. “In situations where Plaintiffs hear confessions related to child abuse or neglect, SB 5375 places them in the position of either complying with the requirements of their faith or violating the law,” the federal judge wrote.
A Catholic leader previously told LifeSiteNews that the Arizona law “would not pass constitutional muster.”
Catholic Action League Executive Director CJ Doyle told LifeSiteNews earlier this month:
The inevitability of a legal challenge should the Arizona legislation become law, the recent decision by the U.S. District Court in the State of Washington, and the likelihood of intervention by the U.S. Department of Justice, all supported by two centuries of common law and American jurisprudence, suggest that such a statute would not pass constitutional muster.
“The sanctity of the Seal of the Confessional – known in civil law as the priest-penitent privilege – has been upheld in American law since People v. Philips in 1813,” Doyle told LifeSiteNews in his emailed comments. The New York court case confirmed Catholic priests cannot be forced to testify about what they hear in the confessional.
Doyle said the law looks like “political posturing.”
He said Travers’ motives are clear, given that she has been endorsed by pro-abortion and pro-LGBT groups.
“For Travers, and other left-wing Democrats, the Catholic Church is an ideological adversary which can be vilified and discredited by portraying it as indifferent to sexual abuse,” he said. “Their motives are cynical, malicious and punitive.”