A penitential is a book or set of church rules concerning the Christian sacrament of penance, a "new manner of reconciliation with God" [1] that was first developed by Celtic monks in Ireland in the sixth century AD. It consisted of a list of sins and the appropriate penances prescribed for them, and served as a type of manual for confessors.
Before the church was formalized, there was nothing to correspond with the modern conception of absolution – the pardon or remission of sin by one human being to another. [2] Capitular confession was the ancient public confession. In the primitive Church, confession to God was the only form enjoined. According to St. Clement of Rome the Lord requires nothing of any man save confession to Him. The Didache shows us that this confession was public, in church, and that each believer was expected to confess his transgressions on Sunday, before breaking bread in the Eucharistic feast, for no one was to come to prayer with an evil conscience. [2] The early church taught that the Eucharist itself secured pardon ("...public confession was voluntary and for secret sins; this he says procures admission to the sacrament which removes the sin, showing further that it was the Eucharist that secured pardon"). [2]
Even at the end of the 11th century, so indefinite as yet was the value assigned to sacerdotal ministrations that Urban II, at the 1096 council of Nîmes, promulgated a canon asserting that the prayers of monks had more power to wash away sins than those of secular priests. [2]
Confession was not generally recognized by the bishops as a sacrament in the first 1000 years of the church. [2]
Proof texting of various "church fathers" and non-canonical books provides the following: public penance did not necessarily include a public avowal of sin, but was decided by the confessor, and was to some extent determined by whether or not the offence was sufficiently open or notorious to cause scandal to others. [3] Oakley points out that recourse to public penance varied both in time and place, and was affected by the weaknesses of the secular law. [4] The ancient praxis of penance relied on papal decrees and synods, which were translated and collected in early medieval collection. Little of those written rules, however, was retained in the later penitentials. [5]
The earliest important penitentials were those by the Irish abbots Cummean (who based his work on a sixth-century Celtic monastic text known as the Paenitentiale Ambrosianum) [6] and Columbanus, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Theodore of Tarsus. Most later penitentials are based on theirs, rather than on earlier Roman texts. [5] The number of Irish penitentials and their importance is cited as evidence of the particular strictness of the Irish spirituality of the seventh century. [7] Walter J. Woods holds that "over time the penitential books helped suppress homicide, personal violence, theft, and other offences that damaged the community and made the offender a target for revenge." [8]
According to Thomas Pollock Oakley, the penitential guides first developed in Wales, probably at St. David's, and spread by missions to Ireland. [9] They were brought to Britain with the Hiberno-Scottish mission and were introduced to the Continent by Irish and Anglo-Saxon missionaries. [10]
As priests heard confessions, they began to compile unofficial handbooks that dealt with the most confessed sins and wrote down set penances for those sins. Penances would vary given both the severity of the offence and the status of the sinner; such that the penance imposed on a bishop would generally be more severe than that imposed on a deacon for the same offence. [11] For stealing, Cummean prescribed that a layman shall do one year of penance; a cleric, two; a subdeacon three; a deacon, four; a priest, five; a bishop, six. [3]
The list of various penitential acts imposed on the sinner to ensure reparation included more or less rigorous fasts, prostrations, deprivation of things otherwise allowable; also alms, prayers, and pilgrimages. The duration was specified in days, quarantines, or years. [10] Gildas lists the penance for an inebriated monk, "If any one because of drunkenness is unable to sing the Psalms, being stupefied and without speech, he is deprived of dinner." [12]
The penitentials advised the confessor to inquire into the sinner's state of mind and social condition. The priest was told to ask if the sinner before him was rich or poor; educated; ill; young or old; to ask if he or she had sinned voluntarily or involuntarily, and so forth. The spiritual and mental state of the sinner—as well as his or her social status was fundamental to the process. Moreover, some penitentials instructed the priest to ascertain the sinner's sincerity by observing posture and tone of voice.
Penitentials were soon compiled with the authorization of bishops concerned with enforcing uniform disciplinary standards within a given district.
The Penitential of Cummean counselled a priest to take into consideration in imposing a penance, the penitent's strengths and weaknesses. [13] Those who could not fast were obliged instead to recite daily a certain number of psalms, to give alms, or perform some other penitential exercise as determined by the confessor. [3]
Some penances could be commuted through payments or substitutions. While the sanctions in early penitentials, such as that of Gildas, were primarily acts of mortification or in some cases excommunication, the inclusion of fines in later compilations derive from secular law, and indicate a church becoming assimilated into the larger society. [13] The connection with the principles embodied in law codes, which were largely composed of schedules of wergeld or compensation, are evident. "Recidivism was always possible, and the commutation of sentence by payment of cash perpetuated the notion that salvation could be bought". [14]
Commutations and the intersection of ecclesiastical penance with secular law both differed from locality to locality. Nor were commutations restricted to financial payments: extreme fasts and recitation of large numbers of psalms could also commute penances; the system of commutation did not reinforce commonplace connections between poverty and sinfulness, even though it favoured people of means and education over those without such advantages. But the idea that whole communities, from top to bottom, richest to poorest, submitted to the same form of ecclesiastical discipline is itself misleading. For example, meat was a rarity in the diet of the poor, with or without the imposition of ecclesiastical fasts. In addition, the system of public penance was not replaced by private penance; the penitentials themselves refer to public penitential ceremonies.
The Council of Paris of 829 condemned the penitentials and ordered all of them to be burnt. In practice, a penitential remained one of the few books that a country priest might have possessed. Some argue that the last penitential was composed by Alain de Lille, in 1180. The objections of the Council of Paris concerned penitentials of uncertain authorship or origin. Penitentials continued to be written, edited, adapted, and, in England, translated into the vernacular. They served an important role in the education of priests as well as in the disciplinary and devotional practices of the laity. Penitentials did not go out of existence in the late twelfth century. Robert of Flamborough wrote his Liber Poenitentialis in 1208.
Hanna, Edward (1913). "The Sacrament of Penance". In Herbermann, Charles (ed.). Catholic Encyclopedia . New York: Robert Appleton Company. Boudinhon, Auguste (1913). "Penitential Canons". In Herbermann, Charles (ed.). Catholic Encyclopedia . New York: Robert Appleton Company.| Authority control databases: National |
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Confession, in many religions, is the acknowledgment of one's wrong thoughts and actions (sins). This may occur directly to a god, to fellow people, or to a person acting as a mediator for a god.
Penance is any act or a set of actions done out of repentance for sins committed, as well as an alternate name for the Catholic, Lutheran, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox sacrament of Reconciliation or Confession. It also plays a part in confession among Anglicans and Methodists, in which it is a rite, as well as among other Protestants. The word penance derives from Old French and Latin paenitentia, both of which derive from the same root meaning repentance, the desire to be forgiven. Penance and repentance, similar in their derivation and original sense, have come to symbolize conflicting views of the essence of repentance, arising from the controversy as to the respective merits of "faith" and "good works". Word derivations occur in many languages.
In the teaching of the Catholic Church, an indulgence is "a way to reduce the amount of punishment one has to undergo for sins". The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes an indulgence as "a remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven, which the faithful Christian who is duly disposed gains under certain prescribed conditions through the action of the Church which, as the minister of redemption, dispenses and applies with authority the treasury of the satisfactions of Christ and all of the saints".
In Christianity, contrition or contriteness is repentance for sins one has committed. The remorseful person is said to be contrite.
Absolution is a theological term for the forgiveness imparted by ordained Christian priests and experienced by Christian penitents. It is a universal feature of the historic churches of Christendom, although the theology and the practice of absolution vary between Christian denominations.
In the Catholic Church, the Seal of Confession is the absolute duty of priests or anyone who happens to hear a confession not to disclose anything that they learn from penitents during the course of the Sacrament of Penance (confession). Even where the seal of confession does not strictly apply – where there is no specific serious sin confessed for the purpose of receiving absolution – priests have a serious obligation not to cause scandal by the way they speak.
The Sacrament of Penance is one of the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church, in which the faithful are absolved from sins committed after baptism and reconciled with the Christian community. During reconciliation mortal sins must be confessed and venial sins may be confessed for devotional reasons. According to the dogma and unchanging practice of the church, only those ordained as priests may grant absolution.
The Seal of the Confessional is a principle within Anglicanism which protects the words spoken during confession. Confession has certain censures on disclosure as there is an understanding among the clergy that there is an inviolable confidence between the individual priest and the penitent. This principle should not be confused with the rarer practice of lay confession, nor with the public confession of sins which is an element of most eucharistic liturgies throughout the Anglican Communion. The "Seal of the Confessional" refers specifically to the private confession of sins by an individual, in the presence of a priest, the form of which is regulated by the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and later liturgical sources.
Penitential canons are religious rules laid down by councils or bishops concerning the penances to be done for various sins. These canons, collected, adapted to later practice, and completed by suitable directions formed the nucleus of the Penitential Books .
Soul and Body refers to two anonymous Old English poems: Soul and Body I, which is found in the Vercelli Book, and Soul and Body II, found in the Exeter Book. It is one of the oldest poems to have survived in two manuscripts of Old English, each version slightly different from the other. Despite their differences, the Soul and Body poems address similar themes. Both versions ask the committed and penitent Christian reader to call to mind his bodily actions on earth in relation to his soul's afterlife. A sense of exigency is found in the poems, imploring the body to live according to the soul's fate and not the desires of the flesh.
Canon 915, one of the canons in the 1983 Code of Canon Law of the Latin Church of the Catholic Church, forbids the administration of Holy Communion to those upon whom the penalty of excommunication or interdict has been imposed or declared, or who obstinately persist in manifest grave sin:
Those who have been excommunicated or interdicted after the imposition or declaration of the penalty and others obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to holy communion.
Handbook for a Confessor is a compilation of Old English and Latin penitential texts associated with – and possibly authored or adapted by – Wulfstan (II), Archbishop of York. The handbook was intended for the use of parish priests in hearing confession and determining penances. Its transmission in the manuscripts seems to bear witness to Wulfstan's profound concern with these sacraments and their regulation, an impression which is similarly borne out by his Canons of Edgar, a guide of ecclesiastical law also targeted at priests. The handbook is a derivative work, based largely on earlier vernacular representatives of the penitential genre such as the Scrifboc and the Old English Penitential. Nevertheless, a unique quality seems to lie in the more or less systematic way it seeks to integrate various points of concern, including the proper formulae for confession and instructions on the administration of confession, the prescription of penances and their commutation.
The Lutheran sacraments are "sacred acts of divine institution". Lutherans believe that, whenever they are properly administered by the use of the physical component commanded by God along with the divine words of institution, God is, in a way specific to each sacrament, present with the Word and physical component. They teach that God earnestly offers to all who receive the sacrament forgiveness of sins and eternal salvation. They teach that God also works in the recipients to get them to accept these blessings and to increase the assurance of their possession.
This is a glossary of terms used within the Catholic Church. Some terms used in everyday English have a different meaning in the context of the Catholic faith, including brother, confession, confirmation, exemption, faithful, father, ordinary, religious, sister, venerable, and vow.
In the canon law of the Catholic Church, excommunication is a form of censure. In the formal sense of the term, excommunication includes being barred not only from the sacraments but also from the fellowship of Christian baptism. The principal and severest censure, excommunication presupposes guilt; and being the most serious penalty that the Catholic Church can inflict, it supposes a grave offense. The excommunicated person is considered by Catholic ecclesiastical authority as an exile from the Church, for a time at least.
The Collectio canonum quadripartita is an early medieval canon law collection, written around the year 850 in the ecclesiastical province of Reims. It consists of four books. The Quadripartita is an episcopal manual of canon and penitential law. It was a popular source for knowledge of penitential and canon law in France, England and Italy in the ninth and tenth centuries, notably influencing Regino's enormously important Libri duo de synodalibus causis. Even well into the thirteenth century the Quadripartita was being copied by scribes and quoted by canonists who were compiling their own collections of canon law.
The Excarpsus Cummeani, also called the Pseudo-Cummeani, is an eighth-century penitential, probably written in the north of the Frankish Empire in Corbie Abbey. Twenty-six copies of the manuscript survive; six of those were copied before 800 CE. It is possible that the penitential, which extends its scope beyond monasticism to include clerics and lay people, has a connection to Saint Boniface and his efforts to reform the Frankish church in the first half of the eighth century. Geographic spread by the end of the eighth century and continued copying of the manuscript into the 9th and 10th centuries have been interpreted to mean the work was considered "by the Christian authorities" a canonical text. It was used as late as the eleventh century, "as the main source of the P. Parisiense compositum.
The Paenitentiale Ecgberhti is an early medieval penitential handbook composed around 740, possibly by Archbishop Ecgberht of York.
The Paenitentiale Theodori is an early medieval penitential handbook based on the judgements of Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury. It exists in multiple versions, the fullest and historically most important of which is the U or Discipulus Umbrensium version, composed (probably) in Northumbria within approximately a decade or two after Theodore's death. Other early though far less popular versions are those known today as the Capitula Dacheriana, the Canones Gregorii, the Canones Basilienses, and the Canones Cottoniani, all of which were compiled before the Paenitentiale Umbrense probably in either Ireland and/or England during or shortly after Theodore's lifetime.
The Penitential of Finnian is a sixth-century penitential believed to have been written by either Finnian of Clonard or Finnian of Movilla. It contains fifty canons addressed to both the clergy and the laity.
