Blessed Margared of Costello, Patroness of the unwanted
This life and is very powerful to read! Hope you get much from it!
Blessed Margaret
of Costello,Unwanted
Born 1287-Died 1320
Margaret's parents were members of the Italian nobility. Her father Parisio was Captain of the People, a totally fearless and highly capable soldier. He had captured the mountaintop castle of Metola and instantly became a national hero, along with the awards and pride such recognition brings. As a reward for his valor, Parisio was given the castle and its extensive estate to which he proudly brought his young bride Emilia. Parisio and Emilia enjoyed the adulation of the common people and the easy life of wealth. Everything was going wonderfully for the upwardly mobile young couple, when these two "beautiful people" conceived their first child. Of course, their child would be a perfectly formed, perfectly behaved infant whom they could show off to friends, family, and neighbors. Since prenatal diagnosis did not exist in those days, the couple did not know that their first born daughter was a badly deformed dwarf until they laid eyes on her at birth. Emilia and Parisio were totally shocked. How could this happen to them? Where did this ugly child come from? They could not even bear to look at her, so how could anyone else? And what if the country heard about this monstrosity being born to the most important couple in the area? They decided to hide the child forever and tell no one about her, so they gave the baby to a trusted servant to care for secretly. "What is the child's name?" the servant asked. "It has no name," came the reply. The servant looked at the infant 's bulbous head and malformed, short right leg. "You have to have a name," the servant whispered. "How about Margaret?" Parisio's servant was also a servant of Christ who taught Margaret about the Lord. Even as a child, Margaret would pray frequently. She would hobble on her lame feet into the castle's chapel and bow her head, never seeing any of the candles or religious trappings there because she was blind. On one of her visits to the chapel, another visitor spied her and nearly discovered the horrid secret that this hump backed lump was the lord of the castle 's daughter. "We can't have anyone discovering her," Parisio told Emilia. "She likes to pray. So he'll let her do that." Parisio had a mason build a cell next to a church in the forest. He had him put a window opening into the chapel so that Margaret could hear Mass. Another small window opened on the outside so that food could be passed in to the child without anyone seeing her. Once the cell was built, six year old Margaret was thrust into it and the doorway walled up. Here, in her stark, damp, doomed to live out her life.
The chaplain of the church spoke to Margaret frequently and soon discovered that she had a brilliant mind that was hungry for the things of God. So the chaplain taught her, and Margaret grew rapidly in faith and knowledge. So much she did she wish to please God that, at the age of seven, began to fast as the monks did, from mid-September to Easter. For the rest of the year, she fasted four days a week. On Fridays, she took only a little bread and water. When Margaret was nineteen, Parisio's territory was threatened with invasion. Hardly knowing whether to abandon Margaret to possible rape and slaughter or to take her away, Emilia finally opted for a Christian response. She and her attendant took Margaret with them to the safety of Mercatello. Margaret was immediately hidden in an underground vault, fed, and forgotten. A year later, five pilgrims going through Mercatello told Emilia about the wonderful cures taking place in Castello at the tomb of a Franciscan Third Order member, Fra Giacomo. As soon as Parisio was certain that peace had been restored, he and Emilia took Margaret to the tomb and thrust her there among the sick and crippled. Then they backed off to watch for the cure. Margaret prayed fervently all day for a cure. But no cure came. "It's hopeless," Parisio said. Look at all those deformed, sick people who are praying, too. She belongs with them, not with us.' Emilia agreed. So she and Parisio quietly rode off to Metola, abandoning Margaret at the tomb. How dark was it before Margaret realized that her parents were not returning for her? She found her way to the inn where they had lodged and learned that Parisio and Emilia had gone home without her. The knowledge could have unleashed floods of bitterness and anger, yet Margaret resigned herself to the will of God. Perhaps she knew that God had a plan for her, despite the apparent hopelessness of her situation. The young woman, who had always been fed, sheltered, and secluded, now had to make her way through unknown streets, among unknown people, and beg. Two beggars befriended her and watched over her that first terrifying night. They introduced her to others and to families who were sympathetic to the poor. As Margaret's story became known, and as people realized that she would not speak a harsh word against her parents but always claimed to love them, the populace of Castello began to regard this four-foot tall hunchback with awe. Families let her live in their homes, honored by her presence. Then the cloistered nuns of St. Margaret's Monastery invited Margaret to live with them. Here she spent many joyous days where, in spite of her blindness, she helped prepare meals, clean the convent, and do other chores. When the monastery foundress died and the nuns began to relax their rule, Margaret still followed the strict guidelines she had followed at her entry. This austere behavior in the face of the convent's laxity upset the sisters who asked Margaret to leave. Now the citizens of Castello began to wag their tongues. "She's not as holy as we thought," they whispered, ''if the nuns asked her to leave." Day after day, cruel remarks were flung in Margaret's direction, for people cannot abide the notion that a supposed saint is found to be a sinner after all.
Continued, next column, up on right
Margaret bore this persecution stoically and always defended the sisters, telling others of their kindness and patience. Time reveals all, and it did so here. The real situation became known, and now Margaret's reputation for sanctity swelled. Margaret, who had been attending a church run by the Dominicans, was attracted to the order of the Mantellate, which evolved into the Third Order of Saint Dominic. Margaret wished to join this religious order for the laity, so the prior of the church instructed her in Dominican spirituality with its emphasis on study, prayer, and penance. Soon Margaret was clothed with the Dominican habit which consisted of a white tunic, leather belt, and long, white veil. In addition to the prescribed prayers, Margaret daily recited all 150 Psalms and two religious offices. Soon she passed from meditation to contemplation in which, despite her blindness, she could "see" the Savior. Margaret began to practice mortifications similar to those that St. Dominic had practiced. She often spent whole nights in prayer and then attended daily Mass. She began to care for the sick and dying, limping wherever necessary to offer food, medicine, encouragement, and prayer. She brought many supposedly hopeless sinners to conversion and penance through her prayers to St. Joseph and her own touching example. When she learned of the inhumane treatment of the area's prisoners, she made them her apostolate. Every day she took them food, clothing, and medicine, and many of them returned to the Church. She once elevated during prayer and worked several miracles of various sorts.
For the last years of her life, Margaret was invited to live with some of the area's wealthy families. She accepted the offer, but chose to live in small attics rather than the large, sumptuous rooms offered her. She continued her prayers, penances, and ministries until her death on April 13, 1320, at the age of thirty-three. Margaret's body was to be buried without a coffin, as was Dominican custom at the time. However, the cure of a crippled child at her bier caused the city council to pay for the embalming of her body and to provide her a coffin for burial in one of the Dominican chapels. Despite the very primitive embalming used, Margaret's body remains incorrupt to this very day and can be seen in the chapel of the School for the Blind in Citta di Castello, Italy. comment Families let her live in their homes, honored by her presence. Then the cloistered nuns of St. Margaret's Monastery invited Margaret to live with them. Here she spent many joyous days where, in spite of her blindness, she helped prepare meals, clean the convent, and do other chores. When the monastery foundress died and the nuns began to relax their rule, Margaret still followed the strict guidelines she had followed at her entry. This austere behavior in the face of the convent's laxity upset the sisters who asked Margaret to leave. Now the citizens of Castello began to wag their tongues. "She's not as holy as we thought," they whispered, ''if the nuns asked her to leave." Day after day, cruel remarks were flung in Margaret's direction, for people cannot abide the notion that a supposed saint is found to be a sinner after all. Margaret bore this persecution stoically and always defended the sisters, telling others of their kindness and patience. Time reveals all, and it did so here. The real situation became known, and now Margaret's reputation for sanctity swelled. Margaret, who had been attending a church run by the Dominicans, was attracted to the order of the Mantellate, which evolved into the Third Order of Saint Dominic. Margaret wished to join this religious order for the laity, so the prior of the church instructed her in Dominican spirituality with its emphasis on study, prayer, and penance. Soon Margaret was clothed with the Dominican habit which consisted of a white tunic, leather belt, and long, white veil. In addition to the prescribed prayers, Margaret daily recited all 150 Psalms and two religious offices. Soon she passed from meditation to contemplation in which, despite her blindness, she could "see" the Savior. Margaret began to practice mortifications similar to those that St. Dominic had practiced. She often spent whole nights in prayer and then attended daily Mass. She began to care for the sick and dying, limping wherever necessary to offer food, medicine, encouragement, and prayer. She brought many supposedly hopeless sinners to conversion and penance through her prayers to St. Joseph and her own touching example. When she learned of the inhumane treatment of the area's prisoners, she made them her apostolate. Every day she took them food, clothing, and medicine, and many of them returned to the Church. She once elevated during prayer and worked several miracles of various sorts. For the last years of her life, Margaret was invited to live with some of the area's wealthy families. She accepted the offer, but chose to live in small attics rather than the large, sumptuous rooms offered her. She continued her prayers, penances, and ministries until her death on April 13, 1320, at the age of thirty-three. Margaret's body was to be buried without a coffin, as was Dominican custom at the time. However, the cure of a crippled child at her bier caused the city council to pay for the embalming of her body and to provide her a coffin for burial in one of the Dominican chapels. Despite the very primitive embalming used, Margaret's body remains incorrupt to this very day and can be seen in the chapel of the School for the Blind in Citta di Castello, Italy.
Written by Madeline Pecora Nugent, SFO
Patronage against poverty; disabled people; handicapped people; impoverishment; people rejected by religious orders; physically challenged people; poverty; Right To Life groups
If there is any life that should be examined in this world and in this society, it's the life of Margaret. Today, she might be considered the Saint(only blessed) of the UNBORN....the Saint of the Elderly and Impaired!!!, The Saint of those who are not able to speak for themselves in their time of illness. Blessed Margaret, pray for those most in need of your attention, the ones that the world attempts to eliminate.
conscience
"Conscience"
Catholic Encyclopedia on CD-ROM
I. THE NAME
In English we have done with a Latin word what neither the Latins nor the French have done: we have doubled the term, making "conscience" stand for the moral department and leaving "consciousness" for the universal field of objects about which we become aware. In Cicero we have to depend upon the context for the specific limitation to the ethical area, as in the sentence: "mea mihi conscientia pluris est quam omnium sermo" (Att., XII, xxviii, 2). Sir W. Hamilton has discussed how far we can be said to be conscious of the outer objects which we know, and how far "consciousness" ought to be held a term restricted to states of self or self-consciousness. (See Thiele, Die Philosophie des Selbstbewusstseins, Berlin, 1895.) In the two words Bewusstsein and Gewissen the Germans have made a serviceable distinction answering to our "consciousness" and "conscience". The ancients mostly neglected such a discrimination. The Greeks often used phronesis where we should use "conscience", but the two terms are far from coincident. They also used suneidesis, which occurs repeatedly for the purpose in hand both in the Old and the New Testament. The Hebrews had no formal psychology, though Delitzsch has endeavoured to find one in Scripture. There the heart often stands for conscience.
II. ORIGIN OF CONSCIENCE IN THE RACE AND IN THE INDIVIDUAL
Of anthropologists some do and some do not accept the Biblical account of man's origin; and the former class, admitting that Adam's descendants might soon have lost the traces of their higher descent, are willing to hear, with no pledge of endorsing, what the latter class have to say on the assumption of the human development even from an animal ancestry, and on the further assumption that in the use of evidences they may neglect sequence of time and place. It is not maintained by any serious student that the Darwinian pedigree is certainly accurate: it has the value of a diagram giving some notion of the lines along which forces are supposed to have acted. Not, then, as accepting for fact, but as using it for a very limited purpose, we may give a characteristic sketch of ethical development as suggested in the last chapter of Dr. L. T. Hobhouse's "Morals in Evolution". It is a conjectural story, very like what other anthropologists offer for what it is worth and not for fully certified science.
Ethics is conduct or regulated life; and regulation has a crude beginning in the lowest animal life as a response to stimulus, as reflex action, as useful adaptation to environment. Thus the amoeba doubles itself round its food in the water and lives; it propagates by self-division. At another stage in the animal series we find blind impulses for the benefit of life and its propagation taking a more complex shape, until something like instinctive purpose is displayed. Useful actions are performed, not apparently pleasurable in themselves, yet with good in the sequel which cannot have been foreseen. The care of the animal for its young, the provision for the need of its future offspring is a kind of foreshadowed sense of duty. St. Thomas is bold to follow the terminology of Roman lawyers, and to assert a sort of morality in the pairing and the propagating of the higher animals: "ius naturale est quod natura omnia animalia docuit". (It is the natural law which nature has taught all animals.--"In IV Sent.", dist. xxxiii, a. 1, art. 4.) Customs are formed under the pressures and the interactions of actual living. they are fixed by heredity, and they await the analysis and the improvements of nascent reason. With the advent of man, in his rudest state--however he came to be in that state, whether by ascent or descent--there dawns a conscience, which, in the development theory, will have to pass through many stages. At first its categories of right and wrong are in a very fluid condition, keeping no fixed form, and easily intermixing, as in the chaos of a child's dreams, fancies, illusions, and fictions. The requirements of social life, which becomes the great moralizer of social action, are continually changing, and with them ethics varies its adaptations. As society advances, its ethics improves. "The lines on which custom is formed are determined in each society by the pressures, the thousand interactions of those forces of individual character and social relationship, which never cease remoulding until they have made men's loves and hates, their hopes and fears for themselves and their children, their dread of unseen agencies, their jealousies, their resentments, their antipathies, their sociability and dim sense of mutual dependence all their qualities good and bad, selfish and sympathetic, social and anti-social." (Op. cit., Vol. II, p. 262.) The grasp of experience widens and power of analysis increases, till, in a people like the Greeks, we come upon thinkers who can distinctly reflect on human conduct, and can put in practice the gnothi seauton (know thyself), so that henceforth the method of ethics is secured for all times, with indefinite scope left for its better and better application. "Here we have reached the level of philosophical or spiritual religions, systems which seek to concentrate all experience in one focus, and to illuminate all morality from one centre, thought, as ever, becoming more comprehensive as it becomes more explicit". (ibid., p. 266.)
What is said of the race is applied to the individual, as in him customary rules acquire ethical character by the recognition of distinct principles and ideals, all tending to a final unity or goal, which for the mere evolutionist is left very indeterminate, but for the Christian has adequate definition in a perfect possession of God by knowledge and love, without the contingency of further lapses from duty. To come to the fullness of knowledge possible in this world is for the individual a process of growth. The brain at first has not the organization which would enable it to be the instrument of rational thought: probably it is a necessity of our mind's nature that we should not start with the fully formed brain but that the first elements of knowledge should be gathered with the gradations of the developing structure. In the morally good family the child slowly learns right conduct by imitation, by instruction, by sanction in the way of rewards and punishments. Bain exaggerates the predominance of the last named element as the source whence the sense of obligation comes, and therein he is like Shaftesbury (Inquiry, II, n. 1), who sees in conscience only the reprover. This view is favoured also by Carlyle in his "Essay on Characteristics", and by Dr. Mackenzie in his "Manual of Ethics" (3rd ed., III, 14), where we read: "I should prefer to say simply that conscience is a feeling of pain accompanying and resulting from our non-conformity to principle." Newman also has put the stress on the reproving office of conscience. Carlyle says we should not observe that we had a conscience if we had never offended. Green thinks that ethical theory is mostly of negative use for conduct. (Prolegomena to Ethics, IV, 1.) It is better to keep in view both sides of the truth and say that the mind ethically developed comes to a sense of satisfaction in right doing and of dissatisfaction in wrongdoing, and that the rewards and the punishments judiciously assigned to the young have for their purpose, as Aristotle puts it, to teach the teachable how to find pleasure in what ought to please and displeasure in what ought to displease. The immature mind must be given external sanctions before it can reach the inward. Its earliest glimmering of duty cannot be clear light: it begins by distinguishing conduct as nice or as nasty and naughty: as approved or disapproved by parents and teachers, behind whom in a dim way stands the oft-mentioned God, conceived, not only in an anthropomorphic, but in a nepiomorphic way, not correct yet more correct than Caliban's speculations about Setebos. The perception of sin in the genuine sense is gradually formed until the age which we roughly designate as the seventh year, and henceforth the agent enters upon the awful career of responsibility according to the dictates of conscience. On grounds not ethical but scholastically theological, St. Thomas explains a theory that the unbaptized person at the dawn of reason goes through a first crisis in moral discrimination which turns simply on the acceptance or rejection of God, and entails mortal sin in case of failure. (I-II:89:6)
III. WHAT CONSCIENCE IS IN THE SOUL OF MAN?
It is often a good maxim not to mind for a time how a thing came to be, but to see what it actually is. To do so in regard to conscience before we take up the history of philosophy in its regard is wise policy, for it will give us some clear doctrine upon which to lay hold, while we travel through a region perplexed by much confusion of thought. The following points are cardinal:
* The natural conscience is no distinct faculty, but the one intellect of a man inasmuch as it considers right and wrong in conduct, aided meanwhile by a good will, by the use of the emotions, by the practical experience of living, and by all external helps that are to the purpose.
* The natural conscience of the Christian is known by him to act not alone, but under the enlightenment and the impulse derived from revelation and grace in a strictly supernatural order.
* As to the order of nature, which does not exist but which might have existed, St. Thomas (I-II:109:3) teaches that both for the knowledge of God and for the knowledge of moral duty, men such as we are would require some assistance from God to make their knowledge sufficiently extensive, clear, constant, effective, and relatively adequate; and especially to put it within reach of those who are much engrossed with the cares of material life. It would be absurd to suppose that in the order of nature God could be debarred from any revelation of Himself, and would leave Himself to be searched for quite irresponsively.
* Being a practical thing, conscience depends in large measure for its correctness upon the good use of it and on proper care taken to heed its deliverances, cultivate its powers, and frustrate its enemies.
* Even where due diligence is employed conscience will err sometimes, but its inculpable mistakes will be admitted by God to be not blameworthy. These are so many principles needed to steady us as we tread some of the ways of ethical history, where pitfalls are many.
IV. THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONSCIENCE CONSIDERED HISTORICALLY
(1) In pre-Christian times
The earliest written testimonies that we can consult tell us of recognized principles in morals, and if we confine our attention to the good which we find and neglect for the present the inconstancy and the admixture of many evils, we shall experience a satisfaction in the history. The Persians stood for virtue against vice in their support of Ahura Mazda against Ahriman; and it was an excellence of theirs to rise above "independent ethics" to the conception of God as the rewarder and the punisher. They even touched the doctrine of Christ's saying, "What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" when to the question, what is the worth of the whole creation displayed before us, the Zend-Avesta has the reply: "the man therein who is delivered from evil in thought, word, and deed: he is the most valuable object on earth." Here conscience was clearly enlightened. Of the moral virtues among the Persians truthfulness was conspicuous. Herodotus says that the youth were taught "to ride and shoot with the bow", and "to speak the truth". The unveracious Greeks, who admired the wiles of an Odysseus, were surprised at Persian veracity (Herodotus, I, 136, 138); and it may be that Herodotus is not fair on this head to Darius (III, 72). The Hindus in the Vedas do not rise high, but in Brahminism there is something more spiritual, and still more in the Buddhist reform on its best side, considered apart from the pessimistic view of life upon which its false asceticism was grounded. Buddhism had ten prohibitive commandments: three concerning the body, forbidding murder, theft, and unchastity; four concerning speech, forbidding lying, slander, abusive language, and vain conversation; and three concerning the mind internally, covetousness, malicious thoughts, and the doubting spirit. The Egyptians show the workings of conscience. In the "Book of the Dead" we find an examination of conscience, or rather profession of innocence, before the Supreme Judge after death. Two confessions are given enunciating most of the virtues (chap. cxxv): reverence for God; duties to the dead; charity to neighbours; duties of superiors and subjects; care for human life and limb; chastity, honesty, truthfulness, and avoidance of slander; freedom from covetousness. The Assyro-Babylonian monuments offer us many items on the favourable side; nor could the people whence issued the Code of Hammurabi, at a date anterior to the Mosaic legislation by perhaps seven hundred years, be ethically undeveloped. If the Code of Hammurabi has no precepts of reverence to God corresponding with the first three Commandments of the Mosaic Law, at least its preface contains a recognition of God's supremacy. In China Confucius (c. 500 B. C.), in connection with an idea of heaven, delivered a high morality; and Mencius (c. 300 B. C.) developed this code of uprightness and benevolence as "Heaven's appointment". Greek ethics began to pass from its gnomic condition when Socrates fixed attention on the gnothi seauton in the interests of moral reflection. Soon followed Aristotle, who put the science on a lasting basis, with the great drawback of neglecting the theistic side and consequently the full doctrine of obligation. Neither for "obligation" nor for "conscience" had the Greeks a fixed term. Still the pleasures of a good conscience and the pains of an evil one were well set forth in the fragments collected by Stobaeus peri tou suneidotos. Penandros, asked what was true freedom, answered: "a good conscience" (Gaisford's Stobaeus, vol. I, p. 429).
(2) In the Christian Fathers
The patristic treatment of ethics joined together Holy Scripture and the classical authors of paganism; no system was reached, but each Father did what was characteristic. Tertullian was a lawyer and spoke in legal terms: especially his Montanism urged him to inquire which were the mortal sins, and thus he started for future investigators a good line of inquiry. Clement of Alexandria was allegoric and mystic: a combiner of Orientalism, Hellenism, Judaism, and Christianity in their bearing on the several virtues and vices. The apologists, in defending the Christian character, dwelt on the marks of ethical conduct. St. Justin attributed this excellence to the Divine Logos, and thought that to Him, through Moses, the pagan philosophers were indebted (Apol., I, xliv). Similarly Origen accounted for pre-Christian examples of Christian virtue. As a Roman skilled in legal administration St. Ambrose was largely guided by Latin versions of Greek ethics, as is very well illustrated by his imitation in style of Cicero's "De Officiis", which he made the title of his own work. He discusses honestum et utile (I, ix); decorum, or to prepon as exhibited in Holy Scripture (x); various degrees of goodness, mediocre and perfect, in connection with the text, "if thou wilt be perfect" (xi); the passions of hot youth (xvii). Subsequent chapters dwell on the various virtues, as fortitude in war and its allied quality, courage in martyrdom (xl, xli). The second book opens with a discussion of beatitude, and then returns to the different virtues. It is the pupil of St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, who is, perhaps, the most important of the Fathers in the development of the Christian doctrine of conscience, not so much on account of his frequent discourses about moral subjects, as because of the Platonism which he drank in before his conversion, and afterwards got rid of only by degrees. The abiding result to the Scholastic system was that many writers traced their ethics and theology more or less to innate ideas, or innate dispositions, or Divine illuminations, after the example of St. Augustine. Even in St. Thomas, who was so distinctly an Aristotelean empiricist, some fancy that they detect occasional remnants of Augustinianism on its Platonic side.
Before leaving the Fathers we may mention St. Basil as one who illustrates a theorizing attitude. He was sound enough in recognizing sin to be graver and less grave; yet in the stress of argument against some persons who seemed to admit only the worst offenses against God to be real sins, he ventured without approving of Stoic doctrine, to point out a sort of equality in all sin, so far as all sin is a disobedience to God (Hom. de Justitia Dei, v-viii). Later Abelard and recently Dr. Schell abused this suggestion. But it has had no influence in any way like that of St. Augustine's Platonism, of which a specimen may be seen in St. Bonaventure, when he is treating precisely of conscience, in a passage very useful as shedding light on a subsequent part of this article. Some habits, he says, are acquired, some innate as regards knowledge of singulars and knowledge of universals. "Quum enim ad cognitionem duo concurrant necessario, videlicet praesentia cognoscibilis et lumen quo mediante de illo judicamus, habitus cognoscitivi sunt quodammodo nobis innati ratione luminis animo inditi; sunt etiam acquisiti ratione speciei"--"For as two things necessarily concur for cognition, namely, the presence of something cognoscible, and the light by which we judge concerning it, cognoscitive habits are in a certain sense innate, by reason of the light wherewith the mind is endowed; and they are also acquired, by reason of the species." ("Comment. in II Lib. Sent.", dist. xxxix, art. 1, Q. ii. Cf. St. Thomas, "De Veritate", Q. xi, art. 1: "Principia dicuntur innata quae statim lumine intellectus agentis cognoscuntur per species a sensibus abstractas".--Principles are called innate when they are known at once by the light of the active intellect through the species abstracted from the senses.) Then comes the very noticeable and easily misunderstood addition a little later: "si quae sunt cognoscibilia per sui essentiam, non per speciem, respectu talium poterit dici conscientia esse habitus simpliciter innatus, utpote respectu upote respectu hujus quod est Deum amare et timere; Deus enim non cognoscitur per similitudinem a sensu, immo `Dei notitia naturaliter est nobis inserta', sicut dicit Augustinus"--"if there are some things cognoscible through their very essence and not through the species, conscience, with regard to such things, may be called a habit simply innate, as, for example, with regard to loving and serving God; for God is not known by sense through an image; rather, 'the knowledge of God is implanted in us by nature', as Augustine says" ("In Joan.", Tract. cvi, n. 4; "Confess.", X, xx, xxix; "De Lib. Arbitr.", I, xiv, xxxi; "De Mor. Eccl.", iii, iv; "De Trin.", XIII, iii, vi; "Joan. Dam. de Fide", I, i, iii). We must remember that St. Bonaventure is not only a theologian but also a mystic, supposing in man oculus carnis, oculus rationis and oculus contemplationis (the eye of the flesh, the eye of reason, and the eye of contemplation); and that he so seriously regards man's power to prove by arguments the existence of God as to devote his labour to explaining that logical conviction is consistent with faith in the same existence (Comm. in III Sent., dist. xxiv, art. 1, Q. iv). All these matters are highly significant for those who take up any thorough examination of the question as to what the Scholastics thought about man having a conscience by his very nature as a rational being. The point recurs frequently in Scholastic literature, to which we must next turn.
In Scholastic times
It will help to make intelligible the subtle and variable theories which follow, if it be premised that the Scholastics are apt to puzzle readers by mixing up with their philosophy of reason a real or apparent apriorism, which is called Augustinianism, Platonism, or Mysticism.
* As a rule, to which Durandus with some others was an exception, the Schoolmen regarded created causes as unable to issue in any definite act unless applied or stimulated by God, the Prime Mover: whence came the Thomistic doctrine of proemotio physica even for the intellect and the will, and the simple concursus of the non-Thomists.
* Furthermore they supposed some powers to be potential and passive, that is, to need a creative determinant received into them as their complement: of which kind a prominent example was the intellectus possibilis informed by the species intelligibilis, and another instance was in relation to conscience, the synteresis. (St. Thomas, De Verit., Q. xvi, art. 1, ad 13.)
* First principles or habits inherent in intellect and will were clearly traced by St. Thomas to an origin in experience and abstraction; but others spoke more ambiguously or even contradictorily; St. Thomas himself, in isolated passages, might seem to afford material for the priorist to utilize in favour of innate forms. But the Thomistic explanation of appetitus innatus, as contrasted with elicitus, saves the situation.
Abelard, in his "Ethics", or "Nosce Teipsum", does not plunge us into these depths, and yet he taught such an indwelling of the Holy Ghost in virtuous pagans as too unrestrictedly to make their virtues to be Christian. He placed morality so much in the inward act that he denied the morality of the outward, and sin he placed not in the objectively disordered deed but in contempt for God, in which opinion he was imitated by Prof. Schell. Moreover he opened a way to wrong opinions by calling free will "the free judgment about the will". In his errors, however, he was not so wholly astray as careless reading might lead some to infer. It was with Alexander of Hales that discussions which some will regard as the tedious minutiae of Scholastic speculation began. The origin lay in the introduction from St. Jerome (in Ezech., I, Bk. I, ch. 1) of the term synteresis or synderesis. There the commentator, having treated three of the mystic animals in the Prophecy as symbolizing respectively three Platonic powers of the soul -- to epithumetikon (the appetitive), to thumikon (the irascible), and to logikon (the rational) -- uses the fourth animal, the eagle, to represent what he calls sunteresis. The last, according to the texts employed by him to describe it, is a supernatural knowledge: it is the Spirit Who groans in man (Romans 8:26), the Spirit who alone knows what is in man (1 Corinthians 2:11), the Spirit who with the body and the soul forms the Pauline trichotomy of I Thess., v, 23. Alexander of Hales neglects this limitation to the supernatural, and takes synteresis as neither a potentia alone, nor a habitus alone but a potentia habitualis, something native, essential, indestructible in the soul, yet liable to be obscured and baffled. It resides both in the intelligence and in the will: it is identified with conscience, not indeed on its lower side, as it is deliberative and makes concrete applications, but on its higher side as it is wholly general in principle, intuitive, a lumen innatum in the intellect and a native inclination to good in the will, voluntas naturalis non deliberativa (Summa Theologica I-II:71 to I-II:77). St. Bonaventure, the pupil, follows on the same lines in his "Commentarium in II Sent." (dist. xxxix), with the difference that he locates the synteresis as calor et pondus in the will only distinguishing it from the conscience in the practical intellect, which he calls an innate habit--"rationale iudicatorium, habitus cognoscitivus moralium principiorum"-- "a rational judgment, a habit cognoscitive of moral principles". Unlike Alexander he retains the name conscience for descent to particulars: "conscientia non solum consistit in universali sed etiam descendit ad particularia deliberativa" --"conscience not only consists in the universal but also descends to deliberative particulars". As regards general principles in the conscience, the habits are innate: while as regards particular applications, they are acquired (II Sent., dist xxxix, art. 1, Q; ii).
As forming a transition from the Franciscan to the Dominican School we may take one whom the Servite Order can at least claim as a great patron, though he seems not to have joined their body, Henry of Ghent. He places conscience in the intellect, not in the affective part--"non ad affectivam pertinet"--by which the Scholastics meant generally the will without special reference to feeling or emotion as distinguished in the modern sense from will. While Nicholas of Cusa described the Divine illumination as acting in blind-born man (virtus illuminati coecinati qui per fidem visum acquirit), Henry of Ghent required only assistances to human sight. Therefore he supposed:
* an influentia generalis Dei to apprehend concrete objects and to generalize thence ideas and principles;
* a light of faith;
* a lumen speciale wherewith was known the sincera et limpida veritas rerum by chosen men only, who saw things in their Divine exemplars but not God Himself;
* the lumen gloriæ to see God.
For our purpose we specially note this: "conscientia ad partem animae cognitivam non pertinet, sed ad affectivam"--"conscience belongs not to the cognitive part of the mind, but to the affective" (Quodlibet., I, xviii). St. Thomas, leading the Dominicans, places synteresis not in the will but in the intellect, and he applies the term conscience to the concrete determinations of the general principle which the synteresis furnishes: "By conscience the knowledge given through synteresis is applied to particular actions". ("De Verit.", Q. xvii, a. 2.; Cf. Summa Theologica, Q. lxxix, a. 13; "III Sent.", dist. xiv, a. 1, Q. ii; "Contra Gent.", II, 59.) Albertus agrees with St. Thomas in assigning to the intellect the synteresis, which he unfortunately derives from syn and hoerere (haerens in aliquo) (Summa Theol., Pt. II, Q. xcix, memb. 2, 3; Summa de Creaturis, Pt. II, Q. lxix, a. 1). Yet he does not deny all place to the will: "Est rationis practicae . . . non sine voluntate naturali, sed nihil est voluntatis deliberativae (Summa Theol., Pt. II, Q. xcix, memb. 1). The preference of the Franciscan School for the prominence of will, and the preference of the Thomistic School for the prominence of intellect is characteristic. (See Scotus, IV Sent., dist. xlix, Q. iv.) Often this preference is less significant than it seems. Fouillée, the great defender of the idée force-- idea as the active principle--allows in a controversy with Spencer that feeling and will may be involved in the idea. Having shown how Scholasticism began its research into conscience as a fixed terminology, we must leave the matter there, adding only three heads under which occasion was given for serious errors outside the Catholic tradition:
* While St. Augustine did excellent service in developing the doctrine of grace, he never so clearly defined the exact character of the supernatural as to approach the precision which was given through the condemnation of propositions taught by Baius and Jansenius; and in consequence his doctrine of original sin remained unsatisfactory. When Alexander of Hales, without distinction of natural and supernatural, introduced among the Scholastics the words of St. Jerome about synteresis as scintilla conscientia, and called it lumen innatum, he helped to perpetuate the Augustinian obscurity.
* As regards the intellect, several Scholastics inclined to the Arabian doctrine of intellectus agens, or to the Aristotelean doctrine of the Divine nous higher than the human soul and not perishable with it. Roger Bacon called the intellectus agens a distinct substance. Allied with this went Exemplarism, or the doctrine of archetypic ideas and the supposed knowledge of things in these Divine ideas. [Compare the prolepseis emphutoi of the Stoics, which were universals, koinai ennoiai]. Henry of Ghent distinguished in man a double knowledge: "primum exemplar rei est species eius universalis causata a re: secundum est ars divina, continens rerum ideales rationes" --"the first exemplar of a thing is universal species of it caused by the thing: the second is the Divine Art containing the ideal reasons (rationes) of things" (Theol., I, 2, n. 15). Of the former he says: "per tale exemplar acquisitum certa et infallibilis notitia veritatis est omnino impossibilis"--"through such an acquired exemplar, certain and infallible knowledge of truth is utterly impossible" (n. 17); and of the latter: "illi soli certam veritatem valent agnoscere qui earn in exemplari (aeterno) valent aspicere, quod non omnes valent"--"they alone can know certain truth who can behold it in the (eternal) exemplar, which not all can do" (I, 1, n. 21;). The perplexity was further increased when some, with Occam, asserted a confused intuition of things singular as opposed to the clearer idea got by the process of abstraction: "Cognitio singularis abstractiva praesupponit intuitivam ejusdem objecti"--"abstractive cognition of a singular presupposes intuitive cognition of the same object" (Quodlib., I, Q. xiii). Scotus also has taught the confused intuition of the singulars. Here was much occasion for perplexity on the intellectual side, about the knowledge of general principles in ethics and their application when the priority of the general to the particular was in question.
* The will also was a source of obscurity. Descartes supposed the free will of God to have determined what for conscience was to be right and what wrong, and he placed the act of volition in an affirmation of the judgment. Scotus did not go thus far, but some Scotists exaggerated the determining power of Divine will, especially so as to leave it to the choice of God indefinitely to enlarge a creature's natural faculties in a way that made it hard to distinguish the natural from the supernatural. Connected with the philosophy of the will in matters of conscience is another statement open to controversy, namely, that the will can tend to any good object in particular only by reason of its universal tendency to the good. This is what Alexander of Hales means by synteresis as it exists in the will, when he says that it is not an inactive habit but a habit in some sense active of itself, or a general tendency, disposition, bias, weight, or virtuality. With this we might contrast Kant's pure noumenal will, good apart from all determinedly good objects.
Anti-Scholastic Schools
The history of ethics outside the Scholastic domain, so far as it is antagonistic, has its extremes in Monism or Pantheism on the one side and in Materialism on the other.
Spinoza
Spinoza is a type of the Pantheistic opposition. His views are erroneous inasmuch as they regard all things in the light of a fated necessity, with no free will in either God or man; no preventable evil in the natural course of things; no purposed good of creation; no individual destiny or immortality for the responsible agent: indeed no strict responsibility and no strict retribution by reward or punishment. On the other hand many of Spinoza's sayings if lifted into the theistic region, may be transformed into something noble. The theist, taking up Spinoza's phraseology in a converted sense, may, under this new interpretation, view all passionate action, all sinful choice, as an "inadequate idea of things", as "the preference of a part to the detriment of the whole", while all virtue is seen as an "adequate idea" taking in man's "full relation to himself as a whole, to human society and to God". Again, Spinoza's amor Dei intellectualis becomes finally, when duly corrected, the Beatific Vision, after having been the darker understanding of God enjoyed by Holy men before death, who love all objects in reference to God. Spinoza was not an antinomian in conduct; he recommended and practiced virtues. He was better than his philosophy on its bad side, and worse than his philosophy on its good side after it has been improved by Christian interpretation.
Hobbes
Hobbes stands for ethics on a Materialistic basis. Tracing all human action to self-love, he had to explain the generous virtues as the more respectable exhibitions of that quality when modified by social life. He set various schools of antagonistic thought devising hypotheses to account for disinterested action in man. The Cambridge Platonists unsatisfactorily attacked him on the principle of their eponymous philosopher, supposing the innate noemata to rule the empirical aisthemata by the aid of what Henry More called a "boniform faculty", which tasted "the sweetness and savour of virtue". This calling in of a special faculty had imitators outside the Platonic School; for example in Hutcheson, who had recourse to Divine "implantations" of benevolent disposition and moral sense, which remind us somewhat of synteresis as imperfectly described by Alexander of Hales. A robust reliance on reason to prove ethical truth as it proved mathematical truths, by inspection and analysis, characterized the opposition which Dr. Samuel Clarke presented to Hobbes. It was a fashion of the age to treat philosophy with mathematical rigour; but very different was the "geometrical ethics" of Spinoza, the necessarian, from that of Descartes, the libertarian, who thought that God's free will chose even the ultimate reasons of right and wrong and might have chosen otherwise. If Hobbes has his representatives in the Utilitarians, the Cambridge Platonists have their representatives in more or less of the school of which T. H. Green is a leading light. A universal infinite mind seeks to realize itself finitely in each human mind or brain, which therefore must seek to free itself from the bondage of mere natural causality and rise to the liberty of the spirit, to a complete self-realization in the infinite Self and after its pattern. What this pattern ultimately is Green cannot say; but he holds that our way towards it at present is through the recognized virtues of European civilization, together with the cultivation of science and art. In the like spirit G.E. Moore finds the ascertainable objects that at present can be called "good in themselves" to be social intercourse and aesthetic delight.
Kant
Kant may stand midway between the Pantheistic and the purely Empirical ethics. On the one side he limited our knowledge, strictly so called, of things good to sense-experiences; but on the other he allowed a practical, regulative system of ideas lifting us up to God. Duty as referred to Divine commands was religion, not ethics: it was religion, not ethics, to regard moral precepts in the light of the commands of God. In ethics these were restricted to the autonomous aspect, that is, to the aspect of them under which the will of each man was its own legislator. Man, the noumenon, not the phenomenon, was his own lawgiver and his own end so far as morality went: anything beyond was outside ethics proper. Again, the objects prescribed as good or forbidden as bad did not enter in among the constituents of ethical quality: they were only extrinsic conditions. The whole of morality intrinsically was in the good will as pure from all content or object of a definite kind, from all definite inclination to benevolence and as deriving its whole dignity from respect for the moral law simply as a moral law, self-imposed, and at the same time universalized for all other autonomous individuals of the rational order. For each moral agent as noumenal willed that the maxim of his conduct should become a principle for all moral agents.
We have to be careful how in practice we impute consequences to men who hold false theories of conscience. In our historical sketch we have found Spinoza a necessarian or fatalist; but he believed in effort and exhortation as aids to good life. We have seen Kant assert the non-morality of Divine precept and of the objective fitness of things, but he found a place for both these elements in his system. Similarly Paulsen gives in the body of his work a mundane ethics quite unaffected by his metaphysical principles as stated in his preface to Book II. Luther logically might be inferred to be a thorough antinomian: he declared the human will to be enslaved, with a natural freedom only for civic duties; he taught a theory of justification which was in spite of evil deeds; he called nature radically corrupt and forcibly held captive by the lusts of the flesh; he regarded divine grace as a due and necessary complement to human nature, which as constituted by mere body and soul was a nature depraved; his justification was by faith, not only without works, but even in spite of evil works which were not imputed. Nevertheless he asserted that the good tree of the faith-justified man must bring forth good works; he condemned vice most bitterly, and exhorted men to virtue. Hence Protestants can depict a Luther simply the preacher of good, while Catholics may regard simply the preacher of evil. Luther has both sides.
V. CONSCIENCE IN ITS PRACTICAL WORKING
The supremacy of conscience
The supremacy of conscience is a great theme of discourse. "Were its might equal to its right", says Butler, "it would rule the world". With Kant we could say that conscience is autonomously supreme, if against Kant we added that thereby we meant only that every duty must be brought home to the individual by his own individual conscience, and is to this extent imposed by it; so that even he who follows authority contrary to his own private judgment should do so on his own private conviction that the former has the better claim. If the Church stands between God and conscience, then in another sense also the conscience is between God and the Church. Unless a man is conscientiously submissive to the Catholic Church his subjection is not really a matter of inner morality but is mechanical obedience.
Conscience as a matter of education and perfectibility
As in all other concerns of education, so in the training of conscience we must use the several means. As a check on individual caprice, especially in youth, we must consult the best living authorities and the best traditions of the past. At the same time that we are recipient our own active faculties must exert themselves in the pursuit with a keen outlook for the chances of error. Really unavoidable mistakes will not count against us; but many errors are remotely, when not proximately, preventable. From all our blunders we should learn a lesson. The diligent examiner and corrector of his own conscience has it in his power, by long diligence to reach a great delicacy and responsiveness to the call of duty and of higher virtue, whereas the negligent, and still more the perverse, may in some sense become dead to conscience. The hardening of the heart and the bad power to put light for darkness and darkness for light are results which may be achieved with only too much ease. Even the best criteria will leave residual perplexities for which provision has to be made in an ethical theory of probabilities which will be explained in the article PROBABILISM. Suffice it to say here that the theory leaves intact the old rule that a man in so acting must judge that he certainly is allowed thus to act, even though sometimes it might be more commendable to do otherwise. In inferring something to be permissible, the extremes of scrupulosity and of laxity have to be avoided.
The approvals and reprovals of conscience
The office of conscience is sometimes treated under too narrow a conception. Some writers, after the manner of Socrates when he spoke of his doemon as rather a restrainer than a promoter of action, assign to conscience the office of forbidding, as others assign to law and government the negative duty of checking invasion upon individual liberty. Shaftesbury (Inquiry II, 2, 1) regards conscience as the consciousness of wrongdoing, not of rightdoing. Carlyle in his "Essay on Characteristics" asserts that we should have no sense of having a conscience but for the fact that we have sinned; with which view we may compare Green's idea about a reasoned system of ethics (Proleg., Bk. IV, ch. ii, sect. 311) that its use is negative "to provide a safeguard against the pretext which in a speculative age some inadequate and misapplied theories may afford our selfishness rather than in the way of pointing out duties previously ignored". Others say that an ethics of conscience should no more be hortatory than art should be didactic. Mackenzie (Ethics, 3rd ed., Bk. III, ch. I, sect. 14) prefers to say simply that "conscience is a feeling of pain accompanying and resulting from nonconformity to principle". The suggestion which, by way of contrary, these remarks offer is that we should use conscience largely as an approving and an instigating and an inspiring agency to advance us in the right way. We should not in morals copy the physicists, who deny all attractive force and limit force to vis a tergo, a push from behind. Nor must we think that the positive side of conscience is exhausted in urging obligations: it may go on in spite of Kant, beyond duty to works of supererogation. Of course there is a theory which denies the existence of such works on the principle that every one is simply bound to the better and the best if he feels himself equal to the heroic achievement. This philosophy would lay it down that he who can renounce all and give it to the poor is simply obliged to do so, though a less generous nature is not bound, and may take advantage --if it be an advantage--of its own inferiority. Not such was the way in which Christ put the case: He said hypothetically, "if thou wilt be perfect", and His follower St. Peter said to Ananias "Was not [thy land] thine own? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power? . . . Thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God." (Acts 5:4) We have, then, a sphere of duty and beyond that a sphere of free virtue, and we include both under the domain of conscience. It is objected that only a prig considers the approving side of his conscience, but that is true only of the priggish manner, not of the thing itself; for a sound mind may very well seek the joy which comes from a faithful, generous heart, and make it an effort of conscience that outstrips duty to aim at higher perfection, not under the false persuasion that only after duty has been fulfilled does merit begin, but under the true conviction that duty is meritorious, and that so also is goodness in excess of duty. Not that the eye is to be too narrowly fixed on rewards: these are included, while virtue for virtue's sake and for the sake of God is carefully cultivated.
History of the sacrament of reconcilliation to date
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History of The Sacrament of Penance to date:
Catholic Encyclopedia on CD-ROM
Penance is a sacrament of the New Law instituted by Christ in which forgiveness of sins committed after baptism is granted through the priest's absolution to those who with true sorrow confess their sins and promise to satisfy for the same. It is called a "sacrament" not simply a function or ceremony, because it is an outward sign instituted by Christ to impart grace to the soul. As an outward sign it comprises the actions of the penitent in presenting himself to the priest and accusing himself of his sins, and the actions of the priest in pronouncing absolution and imposing satisfaction. This whole procedure is usually called, from one of its parts, "confession", and it is said to take place in the "tribunal of penance", because it is a judicial process in which the penitent is at once the accuser, the person accused, and the witness, while the priest pronounces judgment and sentence. The grace conferred is deliverance from the guilt of sin and, in the case of mortal sin, from its eternal punishment; hence also reconciliation with God, justification. Finally, the confession is made not in the secrecy of the penitent's heart nor to a layman as friend and advocate, nor to a representative of human authority, but to a duly ordained priest with requisite jurisdiction and with the "power of the keys", i.e., the power to forgive sins which Christ granted to His Church.
By way of further explanation it is needful to correct certain erroneous views regarding this sacrament which not only misrepresent the actual practice of the Church but also lead to a false interpretation of theological statement and historical evidence. From what has been said it should be clear:
* that penance is not a mere human invention devised by the Church to secure power over consciences or to relieve the emotional strain of troubled souls; it is the ordinary means appointed by Christ for the remission of sin. Man indeed is free to obey or disobey, but once he has sinned, he must seek pardon not on conditions of his own choosing but on those which God has determined, and these for the Christian are embodied in the Sacrament of Penance.
* No Catholic believes that a priest simply as an individual man, however pious or learned, has power to forgive sins. This power belongs to God alone; but He can and does exercise it through the ministration of men. Since He has seen fit to exercise it by means of this sacrament, it cannot be said that the Church or the priest interferes between the soul and God; on the contrary, penance is the removal of the one obstacle that keeps the soul away from God.
* It is not true that for the Catholic the mere "telling of one's sins" suffices to obtain their forgiveness. Without sincere sorrow and purpose of amendment, confession avails nothing, the pronouncement of absolution is of no effect, and the guilt of the sinner is greater than before.
* While this sacrament as a dispensation of Divine mercy facilitates the pardoning of sin, it by no means renders sin less hateful or its consequences less dreadful to the Christian mind; much less does it imply permission to commit sin in the future. In paying ordinary debts, as e.g., by monthly settlements, the intention of contracting new debts with the same creditor is perfectly legitimate; a similar intention on the part of him who confesses his sins would not only be wrong in itself but would nullify the sacrament and prevent the forgiveness of sins then and there confessed.
* Strangely enough, the opposite charge is often heard, viz., that the confession of sin is intolerable and hard and therefore alien to the spirit of Christianity and the loving kindness of its Founder. But this view, in the first place, overlooks the fact that Christ, though merciful, is also just and exacting. Furthermore, however painful or humiliating confession may be, it is but a light penalty for the violation of God's law. Finally, those who are in earnest about their salvation count no hardship too great whereby they can win back God's friendship.
Both these accusations, of too great leniency and too great severity, proceed as a rule from those who have no experience with the sacrament and only the vaguest ideas of what the Church teaches or of the power to forgive sins which the Church received from Christ.
Teaching of the Church
The Council of Trent (1551) declares:
As a means of regaining grace and justice, penance was at all times necessary for those who had defiled their souls with any mortal sin. . . . Before the coming of Christ, penance was not a sacrament, nor is it since His coming a sacrament for those who are not baptized. But the Lord then principally instituted the Sacrament of Penance, when, being raised from the dead, he breathed upon His disciples saying: 'Receive ye the Holy Ghost. Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them; and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained' (John 20:22-23). By which action so signal and words so clear the consent of all the Fathers has ever understood that the power of forgiving and retaining sins was communicated to the Apostles and to their lawful successors, for the reconciling of the faithful who have fallen after Baptism. (Sess. XIV, c. i)
Farther on the council expressly states that Christ left priests, His own vicars, as judges (praesides et judices), unto whom all the mortal crimes into which the faithful may have fallen should be revealed in order that, in accordance with the power of the keys, they may pronounce the sentence of forgiveness or retention of sins" (Sess. XIV, c. v)
Power to Forgive Sins
It is noteworthy that the fundamental objection so often urged against the Sacrament of Penance was first thought of by the Scribes when Christ said to the sick man of the palsy: "Thy sins are forgiven thee." "And there were some of the scribes sitting there, and thinking in their hearts: Why doth this man speak thus? he blasphemeth. Who can forgive sins but God only?" But Jesus seeing their thoughts, said to them: "Which is easier to say to the sick of the palsy: Thy sins are forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, take up thy bed and walk? But that you may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins, (he saith to the sick of the palsy,) I say to thee: Arise, take up thy bed, and go into thy house" (Mark 2:5-11; Matthew 9:2-7). Christ wrought a miracle to show that He had power to forgive sins and that this power could be exerted not only in heaven but also on earth. This power, moreover, He transmitted to Peter and the other Apostles. To Peter He says: "And I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven" (Matthew 16:19). Later He says to all the Apostles: "Amen I say to you, whatsoever you shall bind upon earth, shall be bound also in heaven; and whatsoever you shall loose upon earth, shall be loosed also in heaven" (Matthew 18:18). As to the meaning of these texts, it should be noted:
* that the "binding" and "loosing" refers not to physical but to spiritual or moral bonds among which sin is certainly included; the more so because
* the power here granted is unlimited -- "whatsoever you shall bind, . . . whatsoever you shall loose";
* the power is judicial, i.e., the Apostles are authorized to bind and to loose;
* whether they bind or loose, their action is ratified in heaven. In healing the palsied man Christ declared that "the Son of man has power on earth to forgive sins"; here He promises that what these men, the Apostles, bind or loose on earth, God in heaven will likewise bind or loose. (Cf. also POWER OF THE KEYS.)
But as the Council of Trent declares, Christ principally instituted the Sacrament of Penance after His Resurrection, a miracle greater than that of healing the sick. "As the Father hath sent me, I also send you. When he had said this, he breathed on them; and he said to them: Receive ye the Holy Ghost. Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them; and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained' (John 20:21-23). While the sense of these words is quite obvious, the following points are to be considered:
* Christ here reiterates in the plainest terms -- "sins", "forgive", "retain" -- what He had previously stated in figurative language, "bind" and "loose", so that this text specifies and distinctly applies to sin the power of loosing and binding.
* He prefaces this grant of power by declaring that the mission of the Apostles is similar to that which He had received from the Father and which He had fulfilled: "As the Father hath sent me". Now it is beyond doubt that He came into the world to destroy sin and that on various occasions He explicitly forgave sin (Matthew 9:2-8; Luke 5:20; 7:47; Revelation 1:5), hence the forgiving of sin is to be included in the mission of the Apostles.
* Christ not only declared that sins were forgiven, but really and actually forgave them; hence, the Apostles are empowered not merely to announce to the sinner that his sins are forgiven but to grant him forgiveness-"whose sins you shall forgive". If their power were limited to the declaration "God pardons you", they would need a special revelation in each case to make the declaration valid.
* The power is twofold -- to forgive or to retain, i.e., the Apostles are not told to grant or withhold forgiveness nondiscriminately; they must act judicially, forgiving or retaining according as the sinner deserves.
* The exercise of this power in either form (forgiving or retaining) is not restricted: no distinction is made or even suggested between one kind of sin and another, or between one class of sinners and all the rest: Christ simply says "whose sins".
* The sentence pronounced by the Apostles (remission or retention) is also God's sentence -- "they are forgiven . . . they are retained".
It is therefore clear from the words of Christ that the Apostles had power to forgive sins. But this was not a personal prerogative that was to erase at their death; it was granted to them in their official capacity and hence as a permanent institution in the Church -- no less permanent than the mission to teach and baptize all nations. Christ foresaw that even those who received faith and baptism, whether during the lifetime of the Apostles or later, would fall into sin and therefore would need forgiveness in order to be saved. He must, then, have intended that the power to forgive should be transmitted from the Apostles to their successors and be used as long as there would be sinners in the Church, and that means to the end of time. It is true that in baptism also sins are forgiven, but this does not warrant the view that the power to forgive is simply the power to baptize. In the first place, as appears from the texts cited above, the power to forgive is also the power to retain; its exercise involves a judicial action. But no such action is implied in the commission to baptize (Matthew 28:18-20); in fact, as the Council of Trent affirms, the Church does not pass judgment on those who are not yet members of the Church, and membership is obtained through baptism. Furthermore, baptism, because it is a new birth, cannot be repeated, whereas the power to forgive sins (penance) is to be used as often as the sinner may need it. Hence the condemnation, by the same Council, of any one "who, confounding the sacraments, should say that baptism itself is the Sacrament of Penance, as though these two sacraments were not distinct and as though penance were not rightly called the second plank after shipwreck" (Sess. XIV, can. 2 de sac. poen.).
These pronouncements were directed against the Protestant teaching which held that penance was merely a sort of repeated baptism; and as baptism effected no real forgiveness of sin but only an external covering over of sin through faith alone, the same, it was alleged, must be the case with penance. This, then, as a sacrament is superfluous; absolution is only a declaration that sin is forgiven through faith, and satisfaction is needless because Christ has satisfied once for all men. This was the first sweeping and radical denial of the Sacrament of Penance. Some of the earlier sects had claimed that only priests in the state of grace could validly absolve, but they had not denied the existence of the power to forgive. During all the preceding centuries, Catholic belief in this power had been so clear and strong that in order to set it aside Protestantism was obliged to strike at the very constitution of the Church and reject the whole content of Tradition.
Belief and Practice of the Early Church
Among the modernistic propositions condemned by Pius X in the Decree "Lamentabili sane" (3 July, 1907) are the following:
* "In the primitive Church there was no concept of the reconciliation of the Christian sinner by the authority of the Church, but the Church by very slow degrees only grew accustomed to this concept. Moreover, even after penance came to be recognized as an institution of the Church, it was not called by the name of sacrament, because it was regarded as an odious sacrament." (46)
* "The Lord's words: 'Receive ye the Holy Ghost, whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them, and whose sins you shall retain they are retained' (John xx, 22-23), in no way refer to the Sacrament of Penance, whatever the Fathers of Trent may have been pleased to assert." (47)
According to the Council of Trent, the consensus of all the Fathers always understood that by the words of Christ just cited, the power of forgiving and retaining sins was communicated to the Apostles and their lawful successors (Sess. XIV, c. i). It is therefore Catholic doctrine that the Church from the earliest times believed in the power to forgive sins as granted by Christ to the Apostles. Such a belief in fact was clearly inculcated by the words with which Christ granted the power, and it would have been inexplicable to the early Christians if any one who professed faith in Christ had questioned the existence of that power in the Church. But if, contrariwise, we suppose that no such belief existed from the beginning, we encounter a still greater difficulty: the first mention of that power would have been regarded as an innovation both needless and intolerable; it would have shown little practical wisdom on the part of those who were endeavouring to draw men to Christ; and it would have raised a protest or led to a schism which would certainly have gone on record as plainly at least as did early divisions on matters of less importance. But no such record is found; even those who sought to limit the power itself presupposed its existence, and their very attempt at limitation put them in opposition to the prevalent Catholic belief.
Turning now to evidence of a positive sort, we have to note that the statements of any Father or orthodox ecclesiastical writer regarding penance present not merely his own personal view, but the commonly accepted belief; and furthermore that the belief which they record was no novelty at the time, but was the traditional doctrine handed down by the regular teaching of the Church and embodied in her practice. In other words, each witness speaks for a past that reaches back to the beginning, even when he does not expressly appeal to tradition.
* St. Augustine (d. 430) warns the faithful: "Let us not listen to those who deny that the Church of God has power to forgive all sins" (De agon. Christ., iii).
* St. Ambrose (d. 397) rebukes the Novatianists who "professed to show reverence for the Lord by reserving to Him alone the power of forgiving sins. Greater wrong could not be done than what they do in seeking to rescind His commands and fling back the office He bestowed. . . . The Church obeys Him in both respects, by binding sin and by loosing it; for the Lord willed that for both the power should be equal" (De poenit., I, ii,6).
* Again he teaches that this power was to be a function of the priesthood. "It seemed impossible that sins should be forgiven through penance; Christ granted this (power) to the Apostles and from the Apostles it has been transmitted to the office of priests" (op. cit., II, ii, 12).
* The power to forgive extends to all sins: "God makes no distinction; He promised mercy to all and to His priests He granted the authority to pardon without any exception" (op. cit., I, iii, 10).
* Against the same heretics St. Pacian, Bishop of Barcelona (d. 390), wrote to Sympronianus, one of their leaders: "This (forgiving sins), you say, only God can do. Quite true: but what He does through His priests is the doing of His own power" (Ep. I ad Sympron, 6 in P.L., XIII, 1057).
* In the East during the same period we have the testimony of St. Cyril of Alexandria (d. 447): "Men filled with the spirit of God (i.e. priests) forgive sins in two ways, either by admitting to baptism those who are worthy or by pardoning the penitent children of the Church" (In Joan., 1, 12 in P.G., LXXIV, 722).
* St. John Chrysostom (d. 407) after declaring that neither angels nor archangels have received such power, and after showing that earthly rulers can bind only the bodies of men, declares that the priest's power of forgiving sins "penetrates to the soul and reaches up to heaven". Wherefore, he concludes, "it were manifest folly to condemn so great a power without which we can neither obtain heaven nor come to the fulfillment of the promises. . . . Not only when they (the priests) regenerate us (baptism), but also after our new birth, they can forgive us our sins" (De sacred., III, 5 sq.).
* St. Athanasius (d. 373): "As the man whom the priest baptizes is enlightened by the grace of the Holy Ghost, so does he who in penance confesses his sins, receive through the priest forgiveness in virtue of the grace of Christ" (Frag. contra Novat. in P. G., XXVI, 1315).
These extracts show that the Fathers recognized in penance a power and a utility quite distinct from that of baptism. Repeatedly they compare in figurative language the two means of obtaining pardon; or regarding baptism as spiritual birth, they describe penance as the remedy for the ills of the soul contracted after that birth. But a more important fact is that both in the West and in the East, the Fathers constantly appeal to the words of Christ and given them the same interpretation that was given eleven centuries later by the Council of Trent. In this respect they simply echoed the teachings of the earlier Fathers who had defended Catholic doctrine against the heretics of the third and second centuries. Thus St. Cyprian in his "De lapsis" (A.D. 251) rebukes those who had fallen away in time of persecution, but he also exhorts them to penance: "Let each confess his sin while he is still in this world, while his confession can be received, while satisfaction and the forgiveness granted by the priests is acceptable to God" (c. xxix). (See LAPSI.) The heretic Novatian, on the contrary, asserted that "it is unlawful to admit apostates to the communion of the Church; their forgiveness must be left with God who alone can grant it" (Socrates, "Hist. eccl.", V, xxviii). Novatian and his party did not at first deny the power of the Church to absolve from sin; they affirmed that apostasy placed the sinner beyond the reach of that power -- an error which was condemned by a synod at Rome in 251 (See NOVATIANISM.)
The distinction between sins that could be forgiven and others that could not, originated in the latter half of the second century as the doctrine of the Montanists (q.v.), and especially of Tertullian. While still a Catholic, Tertullian wrote (A.D. 200-6) his "De poenitentia" in which he distinguishes two kinds of penance, one as a preparation for baptism, the other to obtain forgiveness of certain grievous sins committed after baptism, i.e., apostasy, murder, and adultery. For these, however, he allows only one forgiveness: "Foreseeing these poisons of the Evil One, God, although the gate of forgiveness has been shut and fastened up with the bar of baptism, has permitted it still to stand somewhat open. In the vestibule He has stationed a second repentance for opening to such as knock; but now once for all, because now for the second time; but never more, because the last time it had been in vain. . . . However, if any do incur the debt of a second repentance, his spirit is not to be forthwith cut down and undermined by despair. Let it be irksome to sin again, but let it not be irksome to repent again; let it be irksome to imperil oneself again, but let no one be ashamed to be set free again. Repeated sickness must have repeated medicine" (De poen., VII). Tertullian does not deny that the Church can forgive sins; he warns sinners against relapse, yet exhorts them to repent in case they should fall. His attitude at the time was not surprising, since in the early days the sins above mentioned were severely dealt with; this was done for disciplinary reasons, not because the Church lacked power to forgive.
In the minds, however, of some people the idea was developing that not only the exercise of the power but the power itself was limited. Against this false notion Pope Callistus (218-22) published his "peremptory edict" in which he declares: "I forgive the sins both of adultery and of fornication to those who have done penance." Thereupon Tertullian, now become a Montanist, wrote his "De pudicitia" (A. D. 217-22). In this work he rejects without scruple what he had taught as a Catholic: "I blush not at an error which I have cast off because I am delighted at being rid of it . . . one is not ashamed of his own improvement." The "error" which he imputes to Callistus and the Catholics was that the Church could forgive all sins: this, therefore, was the orthodox doctrine which Tertullian the heretic denied. In place of it he sets up the distinction between lighter sins which the bishop could forgive and more grievous sins which God alone could forgive. Though in an earlier treatise, "Scorpiace", he had said (c. x) that "the Lord left here to Peter and through him to the Church the keys of heaven" he now denies that the power granted to Peter had been transmitted to the Church, i.e., to the numerus episcoporum or body of bishops. Yet he claims this power for the "spirituals" (pneumatici), although these, for prudential reasons, do not make use of it. To the arguments of the "Psychici", as he termed the Catholics, he replies: "But the Church, you say, has the power to forgive sin. This I, even more than you, acknowledge and adjudge. I who in the new prophets have the Paraclete saying: 'The Church can forgive sin, but I will not do that (forgive) lest they (who are forgiven) fall into other sins" (De pud., XXI, vii). Thus Tertullian, by the accusation which he makes against the pope and by the restriction which he places upon the exercise of the power of forgiving sin, bears witness to the existence of that power in the Church which he had abandoned.
Not content with assailing Callistus and his doctrine, Tertullian refers to the "Shepherd" (Pastor), a work written A.D. 140-54, and takes its author Hermas (q.v.) to task for favouring the pardon of adulterers. In the days of Hermas there was evidently a school of rigorists who insisted that there was no pardon for sin committed after baptism (Simil. VIII, vi). Against this school the author of the "Pastor" takes a resolute stand. He teaches that by penance the sinner may hope for reconciliation with God and with the Church. "Go and tell all to repent and they shall live unto God. Because the Lord having had compassion, has sent me to give repentance to all men, although some are not worthy of it on account of their works" (Simil. VIII, ii). Hermas, however, seems to give but one opportunity for such reconciliation, for in Mandate IV, i, he seems to state categorically that "there is but one repentance for the servants of God", and further on in c. iii he says the Lord has had mercy on the work of his hands and hath set repentance for them; "and he has entrusted to me the power of this repentance. And therefore I say to you, if any one has sinned . . he has opportunity to repent once". Repentance is therefore possible at least once in virtue of a power vested in the priest of God. That Hermas here intends to say that the sinner could be absolved only once in his whole life is by no means a necessary conclusion. His words may well be understood as referring to public penance (see below) and as thus understood they imply no limitation on the sacramental power itself. The same interpretation applies to the statement of Clement of Alexandria (d. circa A.D. 215): "For God being very merciful has vouchsafed in the case of those who, though in faith, have fallen into transgression, a second repentance, so that should anyone be tempted after his calling, he may still receive a penance not to be repented of" (Stromata, II, xiii).
The existence of a regular system of penance is also hinted at in the work of Clement, "Who is the rich man that shall be saved?", where he tells the story of the Apostle John and his journey after the young bandit. John pledged his word that the youthful robber would find forgiveness from the Saviour; but even then a long serious penance was necessary before he could be restored to the Church. And when Clement concludes that "he who welcomes the angel of penance . . . will not be ashamed when he sees the Saviour", most commentators think he alludes to the bishop or priest who presided over the ceremony of public penance. Even earlier, Dionysius of Corinth (d. circa A.D. 17O), setting himself against certain growing Marcionistic traditions, taught not only that Christ has left to His Church the power of pardon, but that no sin is so great as to be excluded from the exercise of that power. For this we have the authority of Eusebius, who says (Hist. eccl., IV, xxiii): "And writing to the Church which is in Amastris, together with those in Pontus, he commands them to receive those who come back after any fall, whether it be delinquency or heresy".
The "Didache" (q.v.) written at the close of the first century or early in the second, in IV, xiv, and again in XIV, i, commands an individual confession in the congregation: "In the congregation thou shalt confess thy transgressions"; or again: "On the Lord's Day come together and break bread . . . having confessed your transgressions that your sacrifice may be pure." Clement I (d. 99) in his epistle to the Corinthians not only exhorts to repentance, but begs the seditious to "submit themselves to the presbyters and receive correction so as to repent" (c. lvii), and Ignatius of Antioch at the close of the first century speaks of the mercy of God to sinners, provided they return" with one consent to the unity of Christ and the communion of the bishop". The clause "communion of the bishop" evidently means the bishop with his council of presbyters as assessors. He also says (Ad Philadel,) "that the bishop presides over penance".
The transmission of this power is plainly expressed in the prayer used at the consecration of a bishop as recorded in the Canons of Hippolytus (q.v.): "Grant him, 0 Lord, the episcopate and the spirit of clemency and the power to forgive sins" (c. xvii). Still more explicit is the formula cited in the "Apostolic Constitutions" (q.v.): "Grant him, 0 Lord almighty, through Thy Christ, the participation of Thy Holy Spirit, in order that he may have the power to remit sins according to Thy precept and Thy command, and to loosen every bond, whatsoever it be, according to the power which Thou hast granted to the Apostles." (Const. Apost., VIII, 5 in P. (i., 1. 1073). For the meaning of "episcopus", "sacerdos", "presbyter", as used in ancient documents, see BISHOP; HIERARCHY.
Exercise of the Power
The granting by Christ of the power to forgive sins is the first essential of the Sacrament of Penance; in the actual exercise of this power are included the other essentials. The sacrament as such and on its own account has a matter and a form and it produces certain effects; the power of the keys is exercised by a minister (confessor) who must possess the proper qualifications, and the effects are wrought in the soul of the recipient, i.e., the penitent who with the necessary dispositions must perform certain actions (confession, satisfaction).
Matter and Form
According to St. Thomas (Summa, III, lxxiv, a. 2) "the acts of the penitent are the proximate matter of this sacrament". This is also the teaching of Eugenius IV in the "Decretum pro Armenis" (Council of Florence, 1439) which calls the act's "quasi materia" of penance and enumerates them as contrition, confession, and satisfaction (Denzinger-Bannwart, "Enchir.", 699). The Thomists in general and other eminent theologians, e.g., Bellarmine, Toletus, Suarez, and De Lugo, hold the same opinion. According to Scotus (In IV Sent., d. 16, q. 1, n. 7) "the Sacrament of Penance is the absolution imparted with certain words" while the acts of the penitent are required for the worthy reception of the sacrament. The absolution as an external ceremony is the matter, and, as possessing significant force, the form. Among the advocates of this theory are St. Bonaventure, Capreolus, Andreas Vega, and Maldonatus. The Council of Trent (Sess. XIV, c. 3) declares: "the acts of the penitent, namely contrition, confession, and satisfaction, are the quasi materia of this sacrament". The Roman Catechism used in 1913 (II, v, 13) says: "These actions are called by the Council quasi materia not because they have not the nature of true matter, but because they are not the sort of matter which is employed externally as water in baptism and chrism in confirmation". For the theological discussion see Palmieri, op. cit., p. 144 sqq.; Pesch, "Praelectiones dogmaticae", Freiburg, 1897; De San, "De poenitentia", Bruges, 1899; Pohle, "Lehrb. d. Dogmatik". Regarding the form of the sacrament, both the Council of Florence and the Council of Trent teach that it consists in the words of absolution. "The form of the Sacrament of penance, wherein its force principally consists, is placed in those words of the minister: "I absolve thee, etc."; to these words indeed, in accordance with the usage of Holy Church, certain prayers are laudably added, but they do not pertain to the essence of the form nor are they necessary for the administration of the sacrament" (Council of Trent, Sess. XIV, c. 3). Concerning these additional prayers, the use of the Eastern and Western Churches, and the question whether the form is deprecatory or indicative and personal, see ABSOLUTION. Cf. also the writers referred to in the preceding paragraph.
Effect
"The effect of this sacrament is deliverance from sin" (Council of Florence). The same definition in somewhat different terms is given by the Council of Trent (Sess. XIV, c. 3): "So far as pertains to its force and efficacy, the effect (res et effectus) of this sacrament is reconciliation with God, upon which there sometimes follows, in pious and devout recipients, peace and calm of conscience with intense consolation of spirit". This reconciliation implies first of all that the guilt of sin is remitted, and consequently also the eternal punishment due to mortal sin. As the Council of Trent declares, penance requires the performance of satisfaction "not indeed for the eternal penalty which is remitted together with the guilt either by the sacrament or by the desire of receiving the sacrament, but for the temporal penalty which, as the Scriptures teach, is not always forgiven entirely as it is in baptism" (Sess. VI, c. 14). In other words baptism frees the soul not only from all sin but also from all indebtedness to Divine justice, whereas after the reception of absolution in penance, there may and usually does remain some temporal debt to be discharged by works of satisfaction (see below). "Venial sins by which we are not deprived of the grace of God and into which we very frequently fall are rightly and usefully declared in confession; but mention of them may, without any fault, be omitted and they can be expiated by many other remedies" (Council of Trent, Sess. XIV, c. 3). Thus, an act of contrition suffices to obtain forgiveness of venial sin, and the same effect is produced by the worthy reception of sacraments other than penance, e.g., by Holy Communion.
The reconciliation of the sinner with God has as a further consequence the revival of those merits which he had obtained before committing grievous sin. Good works performed in the state of grace deserve a reward from God, but this is forfeited by mortal sin, so that if the sinner should die unforgiven his good deeds avail him nothing. So long as he remains in sin, he is incapable of meriting: even works which are good in themselves are, in his case, worthless: they cannot revive, because they never were alive. But once his sin is cancelled by penance, he regains not only the state of grace but also the entire store of merit which had, before his sin, been placed to his credit. On this point theologians are practically unanimous: the only hindrance to obtaining reward is sin, and when this is removed, the former title, so to speak, is revalidated. On the other hand, if there were no such revalidation, the loss of merit once acquired would be equivalent to an eternal punishment, which is incompatible with the forgiveness effected by penance. As to the further question regarding the manner and extent of the revival of merit, various opinions have been proposed; but that which is generally accepted holds with Suarez (De reviviscentia meritorum) that the revival is complete, i.e., the forgiven penitent has to his credit as much merit as though he had never sinned. See De Augustinis, "De re sacramentaria", II, Rome, 1887; Pesch, op. cit., VII; Göttler, "Der hl. Thomas v. Aquin u. die vortridentinischen Thomisten über die Wirkungen d. Busssakramentes", Freiburg, 1904.
The Minister (i.e., the Confessor)
From the judicial character of this sacrament it follows that not every member of the Church is qualified to forgive sins; the administration of penance is reserved to those who are invested with authority. That this power does not belong to the laity is evident from the Bull of Martin V "Inter cunctas" (1418) which among other questions to be answered by the followers of Wyclif and Huss, has this: "whether he believes that the Christian . . . is bound as a necessary means of salvation to confess to a priest only and not to a layman or to laymen however good and devout" (Denzinger-Bannwart, "Enchir.", 670). Luther's proposition, that "any Christian, even a woman or a child" could in the absence of a priest absolve as well as pope or bishop, was condemned (1520) by Leo X in the Bull "Exurge Domine" (Enchir., 753). The Council of Trent (Sess. XIV, c. 6) condemns as "false and as at variance with the truth of the Gospel all doctrines which extend the ministry of the keys to any others than bishops and priests, imagining that the words of the Lord (Matthew 18:18; John 20:23) were, contrary to the institution of this sacrament, addressed to all the faithful of Christ in such wise that each and every one has the power of remitting sin". The Catholic doctrine, therefore, is that only bishops and priests can exercise the power.
These decrees moreover put an end, practically, to the usage, which had sprung up and lasted for some time in the Middle Ages, of confessing to a layman in case of necessity. This custom originated in the conviction that he who had sinned was obliged to make known his sin to some one -- to a priest if possible, otherwise to a layman. In the work "On true penance and false" (De vera et falsa poenitentia), erroneously ascribed to St. Augustine, the counsel is given: "So great is the power of confession that if a priest be not at hand, let him (the person desiring to confess) confess to his neighbour." But in the same place the explanation is given: "although he to whom the confession is made has no power to absolve, nevertheless he who confesses to his fellow (socio) becomes worthy of pardon through his desire of confessing to a priest" (P. L., XL, 1113). Lea, who cites (I, 220) the assertion of the Pseudo-Augustine about confession to one's neighbour, passes over the explanation. He consequently sets in a wrong light a series of incidents illustrating the practice and gives but an imperfect idea of the theological discussion which it aroused. Though Albertus Magnus (In IV Sent., dist. 17, art. 58) regarded as sacramental the absolution granted by a layman while St. Thomas (IV Sent., d. 17, q. 3, a. 3, sol. 2) speaks of it as "quodammodo sacramentalis", other great theologians took a quite different view. Alexander of Hales (Summa, Q. xix, De confessione memb., I, a. 1) says that it is an "imploring of absolution"; St. Bonaventure ("Opera', VII, p. 345, Lyons, 1668) that such a confession even in cases of necessity is not obligatory, but merely a sign of contrition; Scotus (IV Sent., d. 14, q. 4) that there is no precept obliging one to confess to a layman and that this practice may be very detrimental; Durandus of St. Pourcain (IV Sent., d. 17, q. 12) that in the absence of a priest, who alone can absolve in the tribunal of penance, there is no obligation to confess; Prierias (Summa Silv., s.v. Confessor, I, 1) that if absolution is given by a layman, the confession must be repeated whenever possible; this in fact was the general opinion. It is not then surprising that Dominicus Soto, writing in 1564, should find it difficult to believe that such a custom ever existed: "since (in confession to a layman) there was no sacrament . . . it is incredible that men, of their own accord and with no profit to themselves, should reveal to others the secrets of their conscience" (IV Sent., d. 18, q. 4, a. 1). Since, therefore, the weight of theological opinion gradually turned against the practice and since the practice never received the sanction of the Church, it cannot be urged as a proof that the power to forgive sins belonged at any time to the laity. What the practice does show is that both people -and theologians realized keenly the obligation of confessing their sins not to God alone but to some human listener, even though the latter possessed no power to absolve.
The same exaggerated notion appears in the practice of confessing to the deacons in case of necessity. They were naturally preferred to laymen when no priest was accessible because in virtue of their office they administered Holy Communion. Moreover, some of the earlier councils (Elvira, A. D. 300; Toledo, 400) and penitentials (Theodore) seemed to grant the power of penance to the deacon (in the priest's absence). The Council of Tribur (895) declared in regard to bandits that if, when captured or wounded they confessed to a priest or a deacon, they should not be denied communion; and this expression "presbytero vel diacono" was incorporated in the Decree of Gratian and in many later documents from the tenth century to the thirteenth. The Council of York (1195) decreed that except in the gravest necessity the deacon should not baptize, give communion, or "impose penance on one who confessed". Substantially the same enactments are found in the Councils of London (1200) and Rouen (1231), the constitutions of St. Edmund of Canterbury (1236), and those of Walter of Kirkham, Bishop of Durham (1255). All these enactments, though stringent enough as regards ordinary circumstances, make exception for urgent necessity. No such exception is allowed in the decree of the Synod of Poitiers (1280): "desiring to root out an erroneous abuse which has grown up in our diocese through dangerous ignorance, we forbid deacons to hear confessions or to give absolution in the tribunal of penance: for it is certain and beyond doubt that they cannot absolve, since they have not the keys which are conferred only in the priestly order". This "abuse" probably disappeared in the fourteenth or fifteenth century; at all events no direct mention is made of it by the Council of Trent, though the reservation to bishops and priests of the absolving power shows plainly that the Council excluded deacons.
The authorization which the medieval councils gave the deacon in case of necessity did not confer the power to forgive sins. In some of the decrees it is expressly stated that the deacon has not the keys -- claves non habent. In other enactments he is forbidden except in cases of necessity to "give" or "impose penance", poenitentiam dare, imponere. His function then was limited to the forum externum; in the absence of a priest he could "reconcile" the sinner, i.e., restore him to the communion of the Church; but he did not and could not give the sacramental absolution which a priest would have given (Palmieri, Pesch). Another explanation emphasizes the fact that the deacon could faithfully administer the Holy Eucharist. The faithful were under a strict obligation to receive Communion at the approach of death, and on the other hand the reception of this sacrament sufficed to blot out even mortal sin provided the communicant had the requisite dispositions. The deacon could hear their confession simply to assure himself that they were properly disposed, but not for the purpose of giving them absolution. If he went further and "imposed penance" in the stricter, sacramental sense, he exceeded his power, and any authorization to this effect granted by the bishop merely showed that the bishop was in error (Laurain, "De l'intervention des laïques, des diacres et des abbesses dans l'administration de la pénitence", Paris, 1897). In any case, the prohibitory enactments which finally abolished the practice did not deprive the deacon of a power which was his by virtue of his office; but they brought into clearer light the traditional belief that only bishops and priests can administer the Sacrament of Penance. (See below under Confession.)
For valid administration, a twofold power is necessary: the power of order and the power of jurisdiction. The former is conferred by ordination, the latter by ecclesiastical authority (see JURISDICTION). At his ordination a priest receives the power to consecrate the Holy Eucharist, and for valid consecration he needs no jurisdiction. As regards penance, the case is different: "because the nature and character of a judgment requires that sentence be pronounced only on those who are subjects (of the judge) the Church of God has always held, and this Council affirms it to be most true, that the absolution which a priest pronounces upon one over whom he has not either ordinary or delegated jurisdiction, is of no effect" (Council of Trent, Sess. XIV, c. 7). Ordinary jurisdiction is that which one has by reason of his office as involving the care of souls; the pope has it over the whole Church, the bishop within his diocese, the pastor within his parish. Delegated jurisdiction is that which is granted by an ecclesiastical superior to one who does not possess it by virtue of his office. The need of jurisdiction for administering this sacrament is usually expressed by saying that a priest must have "faculties" to hear confession (see FACULTIES). Hence it is that a priest visiting in a diocese other than his own cannot hear confession without special authorization from the bishop. Every priest, however, can absolve anyone who is at the point of death, because under those circumstances the Church gives all priests jurisdiction. As the bishop grants jurisdiction, he can also limit it by "reserving" certain cases (see RESERVATION) and he can even withdraw it entirely.
Recipient (i.e., the Penitent)
The Sacrament of Penance was instituted by Christ for the remission of Penance was instituted by Christ for the remission of sins committed after baptism. Hence, no unbaptized person, however deep and sincere his sorrow, can be validly absolved. Baptism, in other words, is the first essential requisite on the part of the penitent. This does not imply that in the sins committed by an unbaptized person there is a special enormity or any other element that places them beyond the power of the keys; but that one must first be a member of the Church before he can submit himself and his sins to the judicial process of sacramental Penance.
Contrition and Attrition
Without sorrow for sin there is no forgiveness. Hence the Council of Trent (Sess. XIV, c. 4): "Contrition, which holds the first place among the acts of the penitent, is sorrow of heart and detestation for sin committed, with the resolve to sin no more". The Council (ibid.) furthermore distinguishes perfect contrition from imperfect contrition, which is called attrition, and which arises from the consideration of the turpitude of sin or from the fear of hell and punishment. See ATTRITION; CONTRITION, where these two kinds of sorrow are more fully explained and an account is given of the principal discussions and opinions. See also treatises by Pesch, Palmieri, Pohle. For the present purpose it need only be stated that attrition, with the Sacrament of Penance, suffices to obtain forgiveness of sin. The Council of Trent further teaches (ibid.): "though it sometimes happens that this contrition is perfect and that it reconciles man with God before the actual reception of this sacrament, still the reconciliation is not to be ascribed to the contrition itself apart from the desire of the sacrament which it (contrition) includes". In accordance with this teaching Pius V condemned (1567) the proposition of Baius asserting that even perfect contrition does not, except in case of necessity or of martyrdom, remit sin without the actual reception of the sacrament (Denzinger-Bannwart, "Enchir.", 1071). It should be noted, however, that the contrition of which the Council speaks is perfect in the sense that it includes the desire (votum) to receive the sacrament. Whoever in fact repents of his sin out of love for God must be willing to comply with the Divine ordinance regarding penance, i.e., he would confess if a confessor were accessible, and he realizes that he is obliged to confess when he has the opportunity. But it does not follow that the penitent is at liberty to choose between two modes of obtaining forgiveness, one by an act of contrition independently of the sacrament, the other by confession and absolution. This view was put forward by Peter Martinez (de Osma) in the proposition: "mortal sins as regards their guilt and their punishment in the other world, are blotted out by contrition alone without any reference to the keys"; and the proposition was condemned by Sixtus IV in 1479 (Denzinger-Bannwart, "Enchir.", 724). Hence it is clear that not even heartfelt sorrow based on the highest motives, can, in the present order of salvation, dispense with the power of the keys, i.e., with the Sacrament of Penance.
Confession (Necessity)
"For those who after baptism have fallen into sin, the Sacrament of Penance is as necessary unto salvation as is baptism itself for those who have not yet been regenerated" (Council of Trent, Sess. XIV, c. 2). Penance, therefore, is not an institution the use of which was left to the option of each sinner so that he might, if he preferred, hold aloof from the Church and secure forgiveness by some other means, e. g., by acknowledging his sin in the privacy of his own mind. As already stated, the power granted by Christ to the Apostles is twofold, to forgive and to retain, in such a way that what they forgive God forgives and what they retain God retains. But this grant would be nullified if, in case the Church retained the sins of penitent, he could, as it were, take appeal to God's tribunal and obtain pardon. Nor would the power to retain have any meaning if the sinner, passing over the Church, went in the first instance to God, since by the very terms of the grant, God retains sin once committed so long as it is not remitted by the Church. It would indeed have been strangely inconsistent if Christ in conferring this twofold power on the Apostles had intended to provide some other means of forgiveness such as confessing "to God alone". Not only the Apostles, but any one with an elementary knowledge of human nature would have perceived at once that the easier means would be chosen and that the grant of power so formally and solemnly made by Christ had no real significance (Palmieri, op. cit., thesis X). On the other hand, once it is admitted that the grant was effectual and consequently that the sacrament is necessary in order to obtain forgiveness, it plainly follows that the penitent must in some way make known his sin to those who exercise the power. This is conceded even by those who reject the Sacrament of Penance as a Divine institution. "Such remission was manifestly impossible without the declaration of the offences to be forgiven" (Lea, "History etc.", I, p. 182). The Council of Trent, after declaring that Christ left his priests as His vicars unto whom as rulers and judges the faithful must make known their sins, adds: "It is evident that the priests could not have exercised this judgment without knowledge of the cause, nor could they have observed justice in enjoining satisfaction if (the faithful) had declared their sins in a general way only and not specifically and in detail" (Sess. XIV, c. 5).
Since the priest in the pardoning of sin exercises a strict judicial function, Christ must will that such tremendous power be used wisely and prudently. Moreover, in virtue of the grant of Christ the priest can forgive all sins without distinction, quoecumque solveritis. How can a wise and prudent judgment be rendered if the priest be in ignorance of the cause on which judgment is pronounced? And how can he obtain the requisite knowledge unless it come from the spontaneous acknowledgment of the sinner? This necessity of manifestation is all the clearer if satisfaction for sin, which from the beginning has been part of the penitential discipline, is to be imposed not only wisely but also justly. That there is a necessary connection between the prudent judgment of the confessor and the detailed confession of sins is evident from the nature of a judicial procedure and especially from a full analysis of the grant of Christ in the light of tradition. No judge may release or condemn without full knowledge of the case. And again the tradition of the earliest time sees in the words of Christ not only the office of the judge sitting in judgment, but the kindness of a father who weeps with the repentant child (Aphraates, "Ep. de Poenitentia", dem. 7) and the skill of the physician who after the manner of Christ heals the wounds of the soul (Origen in P. G., XII, 418; P.L., Xll, 1086). Clearly, therefore, the words of Christ imply the doctrine of the external manifestation of conscience to a priest in order to obtain pardon.
Confession (Various Kinds)
Confession is the avowal of one's own sins made to a duly authorized priest for the purpose of obtaining their forgiveness through the power of the keys. Virtual confession is simply the will to confess even where, owing to circumstances, declaration of sin is impossible; actual confession is any action by which the penitent manifests his sin. It may be made in general terms, e.g., by reciting the "Confiteor", or it may consist in a more or less detailed statement of one's sins; when the statement is complete, the confession is distinct. Public confession, as made in the hearing of a number of people (e.g. a congregation) differs from private, or secret, confession which is made to the priest alone and is often called auricular, i.e., spoken into the ear of the confessor. We are here concerned mainly with actual distinct confession which is the usual practice in the Church and which so far as the validity of the sacrament is concerned, may be either public or private. "As regards the method of confessing secretly to the priest alone, though Christ did not forbid that any one, in punishment of his crimes and for his own humiliation as also to give others an example and to edify the Church, should confess his sins publicly, still, this has not been commanded by Divine precept nor would it be prudent to decree by any human law that sins, especially secret sins, should be publicly confessed. Since, then, secret sacramental confession, which from the beginning has been and even now is the usage of the Church, was always commended with great and unanimous consent by the holiest and most ancient Fathers; thereby is plainly refuted the foolish calumny of those who make bold to teach that it (secret confession) is something foreign to the Divine command, a human invention devised by the Fathers assembled in the Lateran Council" (Council of Trent, Sess. XIV, c. 5). It is therefore Catholic doctrine, first, that Christ did not prescribe public confession, salutary as it might be, nor did He forbid it; second, that secret confession, sacramental in character, has been the practice of the Church from the earliest days.
Traditional Belief and Practice
How firmly rooted in the Catholic mind is the belief in the efficacy and necessity of confession, appears clearly from the fact that the Sacrament of Penance endures in the Church after the countless attacks to which it has been subjected during the last four centuries. If at the Reformation or since the Church could have surrendered a doctrine or abandoned a practice for the sake of peace and to soften a "hard saying", confession would have been the first to disappear. Yet it is precisely during this period that the Church has defined in the most exact terms the nature of penance and most vigorously insisted on the necessity of confession. It will not of course be denied that at the beginning of the sixteenth century confession was generally practised throughout the Christian world. The Reformers themselves, notably Calvin, admitted that it had been in existence for three centuries when they attributed its origin to the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). At that time, according to Lea (op. cit., I, 228), the necessity of confession "became a new article of faith" and the canon, omnis utriusque sexus, "is perhaps the most important legislative act in the history of the Church" (ibid., 230). But, as the Council of Trent affirms, "the Church did not through the Lateran Council prescribe that the faithful of Christ should confess -- a thing which it knew to be by Divine right necessary and established -- but that the precept of confessing at least once a year should be complied with by all and every one when they reached the age of discretion" (Sess., XIV, c. 5). The Lateran edict presupposed the necessity of confession as an article of Catholic belief and laid down a law as to the minimum frequency of confession -- at least once a year.
In the Middle Ages
In constructing their systems of theology, the medieval doctors discuss at length the various problems connected with the Sacrament of Penance. They are practically unanimous in holding that confession is obligatory; the only notable exception in the twelfth century is Gratian, who gives the arguments for and against the necessity of confessing to a priest and leaves the question open (Decretum, p. II, De poen., d. 1, in P.L., CLXXXVII, 1519-63). Peter Lombard (d. about 1150) takes up the authorities cited by Gratian and by means of them proves that "without confession there is no pardon" . . . "no entrance into paradise" (IV Sent., d. XVII, 4, in P.L., CXCII, 880-2). The principal debate, in which Hugh of St. Victor, Abelard, Robert Pullus, and Peter of Poitiers took the leading parts, concerned the origin and sanction of the obligation, and the value of the different Scriptural texts cited to prove the institution of penance. This question passed on to the thirteenth century and received its solution in very plain terms from St. Thomas Aquinas. Treating (Contra Gentes, IV, 72) of the necessity of penance and its parts, he shows that "the institution of confession was necessary in order that the sin of the penitent might be revealed to Christ's minister; hence the minister to whom the confession is made must have judicial power as representing Christ, the Judge of the living and the dead. This power again requires two things: authority of knowledge and power to absolve or to condemn. These are called the two keys of the Church which the Lord entrusted to Peter (Matthew 16:19). But they were not given to Peter to be held by him alone, but to be handed on through him to others; else sufficient provision would not have been made for the salvation of the faithful. These keys derive their efficacy from the passion of Christ whereby He opened to us the gate of the heavenly kingdom". And he adds that as no one can be saved without baptism either by actual reception or by desire, so they who sin after baptism cannot be saved unless they submit to the keys of the Church either by actually confessing or by the resolve to confess when opportunity permits. Furthermore, as the rulers of the Church cannot dispense any one from baptism as a means of salvation neither can they give a dispensation whereby the sinner may be forgiven without confession and absolution. The same explanation and reasoning is given by all the Scholastics of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. They were in practical agreement as to the necessity of jurisdiction in the confessor. Regarding the time at which confession had to be made, some held with William of Auvergne that one was obliged to confess as soon as possible after sinning; others with Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas that it sufficed to confess within the time limits prescribed by the Church (Paschal Time); and this more lenient view finally prevailed. Further subjects of discussion during this period were the choice of confessor; the obligation of confessing before receiving other sacraments, especially the Eucharist; the integrity of confession; the obligation of secrecy on the part of the confessor, i.e., the seal of confession. The careful and minute treatment of these points and the frank expression of divergent opinions were characteristic of the Schoolmen but they also brought out more clearly the central truths regarding penance and they opened the way to the conciliar pronouncements at Florence and Trent which gave to Catholic doctrine a more precise formulation. See Vacandard and Bernard in "Dict. de theol. cath.", s.v. Confession; Turmel, "Hist. de la theologie positive", Paris, 1904; Cambier, "De divina institutione confessionis sacramentalis", Louvain, 1884.
Not only was the obligation recognized in the Catholic Church throughout the Middle Ages, but the schismatic Greeks held the same belief and still hold it. They fell into schism under Photius (q. v.) in 869, but retained confession, which therefore must have been in use for some time previous to the ninth century. The practice, moreover, was regulated in detail by the Penitential Books (q. v.), which prescribed the canonical penance for each sin, and minute questions for the examination of the penitent. The most famous of these books among the Greeks were those attributed to John the Faster (q. v.) and to John the Monk. In the West similar works were written by the Irish monks St. Columbanus (d. 615) and Cummian, and by the Englishmen Ven. Bede (d. 735), Egbert (d. 767), and Theodore of Canterbury (d. 690). Besides the councils mentioned above (Minister) decrees pertaining to confession were enacted at Worms (868), Paris (820), Chalons (813, 650), Tours (813), Reims (1113). The Council of Chaleuth (785) says: "if any one (which God forbid) should depart this life without penance or confession he is not to be prayed for". The significant feature about these enactments is that they do not introduce confession as a new practice, but take it for granted and regulate its administration. Hereby they put into practical effect what had been handed down by tradition.
St. Gregory the Great (d. 604) teaches "the affliction of penance is efficacious in blotting out sins when it is enjoined by the sentence of the priest when the burden of it is decided by him in proportion to the offence after weighing the deeds of those who confess" (In I Reg., III, v, n. 13 in P.L., LXXIX, 207); Pope Leo the Great (440-61), who is often credited with the institution of confession, refers to it as an "Apostolic rule". Writing to the bishops of Campania he forbids as an abuse "contrary to the Apostolic rule" (contra apostolicam regulam) the reading out in public of a written statement of their sins drawn up by the faithful, because, he declares, "it suffices that the guilt of conscience be manifested to priests alone in secret confession" (Ep. clxviii in P.L., LIV, 1210). In another letter (Ep. cviii in P. L., LIV, 1011), after declaring that by Divine ordinance the mercy of God can be obtained only through the supplications of the priests, he adds: "the mediator between God and men, Christ Jesus, gave the rulers of the Church this power that they should impose penance on those who confess and admit them when purified by salutary satisfaction to the communion of the sacraments through the gateway of reconciliation. "The earlier Fathers frequently speak of sin as a disease which needs treatment, something drastic, at the hands of the spiritual physician or surgeon. St. Augustine (d. 450) tells the sinner: "an abscess had formed in your conscience; it tormented you and gave you no rest. . . . confess, and in confession let the pus come out and flow away" (In ps. lxvi, n. 6). St. Jerome (d. 420) comparing the priests of the New Law with those of the Old who decided between leprosy and leprosy, says: "likewise in the New Testament the bishops and the priest bind or loose . . . in virtue of their office", having heard various sorts of sinners, they know who is to be bound and who is to be loosed" . . . (In Matt., xvi, 19); in his "Sermon on Penance" he says: "let no one find it irksome to show his wound vulnus confiteri) because without confession it cannot be healed." St. Ambrose (d. 397): "this right (of loosing and binding) has been conferred on priests only" (De pen., I, ii, n. 7); St. Basil (d. 397): "As men do not make known their bodily ailments to anybody and everybody, but only to those who are skilled in healing, so confession of sin ought to be made to those who can cure it" (Reg. brevior., 229).
For those who sought to escape the obligation of confession it was natural enough to assert that repentance was the affair of the soul alone with its Maker, and that no intermediary was needed. It is this pretext that St. Augustine sweeps aside in one of his sermons: "Let no one say I do penance secretly; I perform it in the sight of God, and He who is to pardon me knows that in my heart I repent". Whereupon St. Augustine asks: "Was it then said to no purpose, 'What you shall loose upon earth shall be loosed in heaven?' Was it for nothing that the keys were given to the Church?" (Sermo cccxcii, n. 3, in P.L., XXXIX, 1711). The Fathers, of course, do not deny that sin must be confessed to God; at times, indeed, in exhorting the faithful to confess, they make no mention of the priest; but such passages must be taken in connection with the general teaching of the Fathers and with the traditional belief of the Church. Their real meaning is expressed, e.g., by Anastasius Sinaita (seventh century): "Confess your sins to Christ through the priest" (De sacra synaxi), and by Egbert, Archbishop of York (d. 766): "Let the sinner confess his evil deeds to God, that the priest may know what penance to impose" (Mansi, Coll. Conc., XII, 232). For the passages in St. John Chrysostom, see Hurter, "Theol. dogmat.", III, 454; Pesch, "Praelectiones", VII, 165.
The Fathers, knowing well that one great difficulty which the sinner has to overcome is shame, encourage him in spite of it to confess. "I appeal to you, my brethren", says St. Pacian (d. 391), ". . . you who are not ashamed to sin and yet are ashamed to confess . . . I beseech you, cease to hide your wounded conscience. Sick people who are prudent do not fear the physician, though he cut and burn even the secret parts of the body " (Paraenesis ad poenit., n. 6, 8). St. John Chrysostom (d. 347) pleads eloquently with the sinner: "Be not ashamed to approach (the priest) because you have sinned, nay rather, for this very reason approach. No one says: Because I have an ulcer, I will not go near a physician or take medicine; on the contrary, it is just this that makes it needful to call in physicians and apply remedies. We (priests) know well how to pardon, because we ourselves a
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