Can Catholic priests disclose the fact that someone has seen him for confession? I recently spoke to one of my (catholic) highschool teachers who was then not a priest but is now a priest.
We were talking, and he mentioned he knew one of my professors during my graduate studies.
I asked him how he knew my professor, and he told me 'confession'.
Q1. Is that allowed? Well obviously the contents of the confessions are confidential, but is the fact that this person goes to confession with a certain priest not held in confidence?
I asked him if it was allowed, and he said yes.

Q2. Follow-up question:
What's the difference between talking to priests and talking to, say, psychiatrists?

(I choose for this example, psychiatrists or psychologists, in re the stigma of mental health. I choose psychiatrists specifically, since, because psychiatrists are necessarily medical doctors, I can say 'patient' as in 'doctor-patient privilege' as analogous to 'penitent' as in 'Priest–penitent privilege'.)

Afaik, psychiatrists don't even disclose that a certain patient consults with them.

On the one hand, seeing psychiatrists isn't as common among humans as confession is among Catholics, and there isn't quite a stigma in a Catholic seeing or having seen a priest or a particular priest since well we're all sinners but don't necessarily have medical mental health problems.

On the other hand, priests seem to have stricter confidentiality laws than psychiatrists: They can't disclose death threats if it would break confidentiality.


It seems weird to me that death threats cannot be disclosed if it would break confidentiality but that someone goes to a certain priest for confession is not confidential.
Edit: Btw, I recently thought of the possibility that he could've said something like 'religious consultation (but not necessarily specifically confession)', in that Catholics could seek spiritual advice from priests without confessing anything.
Church law does not explicitly prohibit revealing that a given person has been to confession or not. Here are the relevant canons from the Code of Canon Law:

Can.  983 §1. The sacramental seal is inviolable; therefore it is absolutely forbidden for a confessor to betray in any way a penitent in words or in any manner and for any reason.
§2. The interpreter, if there is one, and all others who in any way have knowledge of sins from confession are also obliged to observe secrecy [though not technically the seal; i.e., they would not fall under the latae sententiae excommunication of Can. 1388].
Can.  984 §1. A confessor is prohibited completely from using knowledge acquired from confession to the detriment of the penitent even when any danger of revelation is excluded.
§2. A person who has been placed in authority cannot use in any manner for external governance the knowledge about sins which he has received in confession at any time.

Here, some observations should be made: the confessor may never break the seal of confession. To “break the seal” means to make a third party understand that a given penitent has committed a certain sin.
Hence, while revealing that someone has been to confession generally does not violate the seal, common sense says that it is best not to provide information that could inadvertently reveal a person’s sins—and revealing whether a person has been to confession or not could potentially do this.
(For example, suppose that there is someone whom a lot of people suspect has committed a grave sin—say, adultery or something like that. If I reveal that he has gone to confession, many people will likely conclude, rightly or wrongly, that this person has, in fact, committed the sin. That is the sort of thing that needs to be avoided.)
If I were asked point blank whether someone has gone to confession or not, I would simply reply the way witnesses are trained to do: “I don’t recall.”