On the other hand, there could be numerous innocent people who would be unwilling to confess because of the risk that the priest will report to authorities. It's not hard to imagine a world where a government passes laws requiring priests to report homosexuality, immigration status, or attendance at anti-government protests.
No, it's not hard to imagine those kinds of laws, but that doesn't mean this law has to be bad as well. You have to look at the content of a law, not just its shape, to judge it. The only difference between a law making it illegal to punch someone in the nose and a law making it illegal to make the sign of the cross is the details of the arm movements.
This law as written doesn't require a confession or proof, but only suspicion and not of a crime, but of the law's definition of 'child abuse' which at its broadest defines abuse as "...injury of a child by any person under circumstances which cause harm to the child's health, welfare, or safety,..." It also has a specific carve out for members of the clergy requiring them to report it even when they suspect it only from privileged conversations.
Mandatory reporting is nothing new. Applying it to the confessional is. But I really don’t see a reason for the state to consider a confessional to be privileged in a legal sense. The religion’s views on its rituals carry no legal weight.
The state has already legal defined confession to be in the class of privileged conversations. Given the sensitive topics a person might address in confession, I think it is pretty easy to see why it might be privileged quite irrespective (and in fact, despite) the religions views on its own rituals.
