The Evolution of the Sacrament of Reconciliation from Public Penance to Private Confession:

Consequences on its Relation to other Sacraments, Spiritual and Theological Implications.

Amani Michael, MD

Introduction

Repentance is the road to the Kingdom of Heaven.[1] Jesus Christ inaugurated His Kingdom through his healing ministry aiming to reconcile man with God.[2] This paper will function as an abstract road that has a horizontal and a vertical direction. Through χρόνος (Chronos), we start the horizontal journey by having a glimpse at the ecclesiastical development of the sacrament of confession, from the apostolic era, while visiting its roots in Judaism and following its course until the present time. Then we will direct our attention to the vertical path, belonging to καιρός (Kairos), as the Head of the Church relates to His mystical body. Only then will we be able to appreciate the strong bond between the sacrament of reconciliation and other sacraments, including the sacrament of initiation, the anointment of the sick and the Eucharist. Apprehending the communal nature of the church sacraments as divine gifts is vital to the church identity as a holy presence in the world and to its mission as a beacon to the kingdom of God.

Jesus Christ ministry of healing man required faith and repentance.[3] The gift of forgiveness of sins was granted to the faithful of all races; Jewish, Samaritan, Syrophoenician, Canaanite and even Roman alike.[4] He healed man as a whole; body, mind and spirit (pneumo-psycho-somatic). The fathers also teach us that when Jesus Christ washed his disciples’ feet, he was inaugurating what will become the sacrament of confession as He stated, “He who has bathed does not need to wash, except for his feet.”[5] Baptism is the complete bath, when the gift of purification immerses us in Christ and we acquire our Christian identity. As we sin again, we need cleansing through confession.[6]

Throughout the apostolic era, the apostles dealt with sins after Baptism by taking responsibility of the sinner who, if rejected or excommunicated, which was rather seldom, was still welcome to return to the holy church once he repents. The Church remained holy through the mutual love, the way Jesus ate at sinners’ tables.[7] Metanoia (Gk. μετάνοια), a change in one’s way of life[8] resulting from penitence or spiritual conversion was the only prerequisite for remaining a church member. St John the apostle illustrates ancient penance when, after he lost a young baptized man who became the captain of bandits, searched for him until he found him armed. Ashamed, the young man ran away. St. John said to him, “son, pity me. I will give account to Christ for thee. If need be, I will willingly endure thy death. Christ hath sent me.” The young man threw his weapons, wept bitterly, his tears were a second baptism. Through continual fasting, supplications and prayers, St. John didn’t leave until he restored him back to the church.[9] The ancient apostles’ Church didn’t use rituals, in order to differentiate itself from the Jewish tradition. By uniting to Christ, the Holy Spirit transcends the differences in the community of faithful who, by identifying with the sinner and through intersessions and prayers,[10] reconciles them to the church and to God. The community was the symbol of the reconciliation. The sacrament was not simply an action but rather an interaction.[11]

During the second and the third centuries, many Jewish rituals were incorporated in the penance rites; the penitent wore sackcloth and sprinkled his head with ashes in mourning. Ritual cleansing, as in Judaism, included fasting and physical suffering. The Bishop laying on of hands was also a Jewish expression of solidarity.[12] But the most influential Jewish practice that left a major imprint on Christian sacraments is the Berakah (Heb. בְּרָכָה, ‘blessing’), or thanksgiving prayer. Even the word ‘Eukarist’ (Gk. εὐχαριστία) is considered by some as mirroring the Jewish reciting of the Berakah over a cup of wine.[13]

In the East, during the third century, Clement of Alexandria refers to a public confession of sins or exomologesis (Gk. ἐξομολόγησις). Acknowledging God’s gift, thanksgiving and praising God are nuances in the meaning of the word.[14] He considered all sins remissible. The repentance process took the form of a dialogue between God and the sinner who was assisted by a spiritual guide.[15] Presbyters and bishops functioned as healers. Later, Origen emphasized spiritual guidance, the medicinal effect of forgiveness through the “praying over” by the church elders and the laying on of hands by the Bishops as a sealing of the reconciliation process. By the fifth century, John Chrysostom indicates the evolution into private confession where the priest or the spiritual advisor takes the role of a physician, cleansing and healing through prayers and intersessions. The evolution of the rite in Syria was similar to the Alexandrian Church with an emphasis on the intercessory role of the Christian community as well as the laying on of hands by the bishop as conferring the Holy Spirit. In the East and the West, the penitents and the catechumens were the focus of the church prayers as a communal responsibility. Both catechumens and penitents were prepared to join the church in the Eucharist table once they fulfill the requirements of their obligations.[16]

In the West, in the first century, serious sins required separating the penitents from the rest of the community to be attended to in a different way. After their conversion, they were able to share the Eucharist. The second century witnessed the development of formal rituals of initiating new Christians and accepting penitents back in the Eucharistic feast. Irenaeus of Lyons mentions difficulties accepting certain sinners back in the church, but repeated penances were generally accepted.[17] In the middle of the century, following the Greco-Roman situation and the church expansion, the uniqueness of the faithful community lost its characteristics. Leniency and a diminished zeal were met with the growth of rigorists into the third century. Carthage has known the Montanists’ rigorism, according to which the church was unable to forgive the gravest sins. A penitential institution was established. In his Montanist stage, Tertullian singled out a triad of sins; apostasy, murder and adultery as irremissible, in his treatise De pudicitia (On Purity).[18] The penitent of grave sins was forgiven only by his own death. Following the Decian persecution in Carthage, while facing a stronger rigorists influence, bishop Cyprian developed a disciplinary system with penance rituals to deal with many lapsi[19] and libellatici.[20] Their return to the church was conditioned by a period of penance similar to a probation process, where contrition was proved by mortification deeds. The sacrificati[21] were granted reconciliation in their death beds. The Bishop laying on of hands had a sealing effect of exorcism and of granting the Holy spirit to restore the penitent back to the holy ecclesia.[22]

In Rome, the church schism took a more radical turn with five main figures dealing with the accrued tension; rigorists represented by Hermas, Hippolytus and Novatian versus moderates including Callistus and Cornelius. The rigorists called for exclusion of the apostates from the church for life. The moderates ended up allowing a one-time penance. The tension and the divisions in the church created an atmosphere of judgment and suspicion, similar to the legal proceeding and far from a healing intervention, with the Bishops acting as judges. The one-time penitent was considered a second-degree citizen in the church and was treated with condescension, he was even forbidden to be married or to be ordained.[23]

The early fourth century witnessed a widespread legal recognition of Christianity equipped with elaborate penance canons and liturgies. The church lost its personable approach to sinners as it became in partnership with the empire. The penance laws became stricter with longer times required while the focus changed from experiential rehabilitation to impersonal punishment. More legislations were needed to prevent penitents from exploiting the system and others to prevent inappropriate use of power by clerical authorities. The fourth and fifth centuries penance laws imposed more restrictions including young age, certain professions and occupations, to the extent that most people postponed penance to their deathbed. Public penance also resulted in involvement of civil punishment, revenge, social expulsion and domestic disruption.[24] In the fifth century, becoming penitent voluntarily and joining a monastery (converti or conversi) were both equivalent to a second baptism with similar ritual prayers. The sixth century was the turning time from public penance to private confessions, influenced by a trend to confess to monks in monasteries or to seek the council of a wise elder. Only in the seventh century that penance was allowed as many times as a person sins.[25] As baptism of children grew to be the norm, the catechumenate position became extinct by the tenth or eleventh centuries, when its only strong connection to penance was that the latter continued to be prominent during Lent, the old usual time of baptizing catechumens.[26]

The above historical account highlights the tension experienced by the church protecting the gift of sacramental reconciliation against rigorism, including non-repeatability, strict penalties and lifelong prohibitions. The resulting canons made the gift inaccessible to those who needed it most. The penitent was no longer treated as a child returning back to the father’s house, a house of reconciled sinners. [27] One of the strength of the ancient system is the faithful’s prayers for the penitents which is likened to a mother begging the father for her flesh and blood as the father, represented by the bishop, responded to reconcile his son to the family. The church holy yet sinful is in need of overtly acknowledging its brokenness by sins, so that it seeks in public the conversion that will liken her to Christ. This is the vertical ascension; to be Church is to be a sinful-repentant community seeking the healing and the transfiguration through Christ, a dimension that we lost through private confession. Since God established His entire rapport with humanity through sacraments, a balance between private spiritual guidance and public intersession for the fallen seems ideal. This is reduced in our liturgies to the kiss of peace.

Koinonia (Gk, κοινωνία) refers to communion which is becoming the partaker of Christ. Baptism is the initial reception of the grace of healing. Communion with God is the goal and the fulfillment of man’s life, a relationship that is lost by repeated sinning. Thus, the remedy of sin is not in the cleansing rituals, mortification and the likes but in the restoration of the relationship with God and the cosmos, a communal approach to conversion. One member’s sin impairs the rest and one ’s righteousness enriches all.[28] “The Eucharist is the anaphora, the "lifting up" of our offering, and of ourselves. It is the ascension of the Church to heaven.” “But what do I care about heaven," says St. John Chrysostom, "when I myself have become heaven ?”[29] In the Eucharist we partake in God’s divine nature, realizing what St Athanasios taught, "God became man, so that man might become god."[30] The orthodox divinization or theosis is becoming holy which is the fulfillment of man’s life.[31]

Conclusion

The sacrament of reconciliation makes the church whole since her lost member is restored back which strengthen her as the mystical body of Christ. “Like Thomas, we meet the risen Christ by touching his wounded members.” The church cannot celebrate the sacraments unless it is able to reach out to reconcile the lost, the marginalized and the tormented. In the unity of its members, the church regains the power to break down the wall of sins. This is a communal responsibility. Only then is the church herself “a sacrament of the mystery of the God in Christ who reconciles the world to self.”[32]

The Church is a communal paradox of sin and grace. As Jesus bride, she sings with the bride of the songs of songs, “I am stained with sins, yet beautiful.”[33]Through Christ redemptive act, the church will remain the instrument of salvation to man and to the universe and will never be overcome by sin and evil.[34] The sacraments of baptism and the anointment of the sick are “personal Pentecost” as man receives the Holy Spirit Who ordains him as fully man, belonging to the Kingdom of God. From that moment on, the man in his totality is becoming God’s temple and his whole life is made a liturgy.[35]

[1]

[1] Matthew 4:17

[2] Paul Meyendorff, The Annointing of the Sick, (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, Crestwood, New York 2009), p 15

[3] Paul Meyendorff, The Annointing of the Sick, , (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, Crestwood, New York 2009), p 15

[4] Matt 8.5-13; Luke 7.1-ro; John 4.46-53; Mark 7.24-30, or that of the Canaanite woman in Matt 14.21-29

[5] John 13:10

[6] Joseph Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth: Part Two: Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011), 72.

[7] James Dallen, The Reconciling Community: The Rite of Penance, New York: Pueblo 1986, p 6

[8] F. L. Cross and Elizabeth A. Livingstone, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005)

[9] Clement of Alexandria, “Who Is the Rich Man That Shall Be Saved?,” in Fathers of the Second Century: Hermas, Tatian, Athenagoras, Theophilus, and Clement of Alexandria (Entire), ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, trans. William Wilson, vol. 2, The Ante-Nicene Fathers (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1885), 603–604.

[10] Mt 18:19--20

[11] James Dallen, The Reconciling Community: The Rite of Penance, New York: Pueblo 1986, p7

[12] Ibid, p 9

[13] F. L. Cross and Elizabeth A. Livingstone, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 191.

[14] F. L. Cross and Elizabeth A. Livingstone, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 591.

[15]Clement of Alexandria, Stromata II, p 13

[16] James Dallen, The Reconciling Community: The Rite of Penance, New York: Pueblo 1986, p 49

[17] Irenaus, Contra haereses(Againt Heresies) III, 4, 3 (p 7: 857).

[18] "De paenitentia" and "De pudicitia" translated by William P. Le Saint, Ancient Christian Writers 28 (New York: Newman Press, 1959).

[19] “Lapsi”are those who apostasized during the Decian persecution

[20] “Libellatici” are those who had by bribery obtained false certificates testifying to apostasy

[21] “Sacrificati” are those who had offered pagan sacrifice

[22] James Dallen, The Reconciling Community: The Rite of Penance, New York: Pueblo 1986, p 39

[23] Ibid, p 42

[24] Ibid, p 76

[25] In the acts of the Council of Chalon-sur-Saône (644–655), canon 8.

[26] James Dallen, The Reconciling Community: The Rite of Penance, New York: Pueblo 1986, p 70

[27] Bruno Hidber, “From Anguish to Refound Freedom: Penance in the Tension between Sacraments and Ethics,” p13

[28] Rite of Penance 5, in Rites of the Catholic Church, supra, at 528.

[29] Alexander Schmemman, For the Life of the World, , (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, Crestwood, New York 1998), p 10

[30] Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 54.3; cf. Athanasius, On the Incarnation (PPS 3; Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1977), 93

[31] Paul Meyendorff, The Annointing of the Sick, (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, Crestwood, New York 2009), p 24

[32] James Dallen, “Reconciliation in the Sacrament of Penance,” Worship Journal 64 no Sep 1990 p 405.

[33] (Song 1:4)

[34] Joseph Ratzinger, Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith: The Church as Communion, ed. Stephan Otto Horn and Vinzenz Pfnür, trans. Henry Taylor (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), 283.

[35] Alexander Schmemman, For the Life of the World, , (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, Crestwood, New York 1998), p 76

Bibliography

[1] Matthew 4:17

2 Paul Meyendorff, The Annointing of the Sick, (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, Crestwood, New York 2009), p 15

3 Ibid, p 15

4 Matt 8.5-13; Luke 7.1; John 4.46-53; Mark 7.24-30, or that of the Canaanite woman in Matt 14.21-29

5 John 13:10

6 Joseph Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth: Part Two: Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011), 72.

7 James Dallen, The Reconciling Community: The Rite of Penance, New York: Pueblo 1986, p 6

8 F. L. Cross and Elizabeth A. Livingstone, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005)

9 Clement of Alexandria, “Who Is the Rich Man That Shall Be Saved?,” in Fathers of the Second Century:Hermas, Tatian, Athenagoras, Theophilus, and Clement of Alexandria (Entire), ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, trans. William Wilson, vol. 2, The Ante-Nicene Fathers (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1885), 603–604.

10 Mt 18:19--20

11 James Dallen, The Reconciling Community: The Rite of Penance, New York: Pueblo 1986, p 7

12 Ibid, p 9

13 F. L. Cross and Elizabeth A. Livingstone, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p 191

14 Ibid, p 591

15 Clement of Alexandria, Stromata II, p 13

16 James Dallen, The Reconciling Community: The Rite of Penance, New York: Pueblo 1986, p 49

17 Irenaus, Contra haereses III, 4, 3 (PG 7: 857)

18 "De pudicitia" translated by William P. Le Saint, Ancient Christian Writers 28 (New York: Newman Press, 1959)

19 “Lapsi”are those who apostasized during the Decian persecution

20 “Libellatici” are those who had by bribery obtained false certificates testifying to apostasy

21 “Sacrificati” are those who had offered pagan sacrifice

22 James Dallen, The Reconciling Community: The Rite of Penance, New York: Pueblo 1986, p 39

23 Ibid, p 42

24 Ibid, p 76

25 In the acts of the Council of Chalon-sur-Saône (644–655), canon 8.

26 James Dallen, The Reconciling Community: The Rite of Penance, New York: Pueblo 1986, p70

27 Bruno Hidber, “From Anguish to Refound Freedom: Penance in the Tension between Sacraments and Ethics,” p13

28 Rite of Penance 5, in Rites of the Catholic Church, supra, at 528.

29 Alexander Schmemman, For the Life of the World, , (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, New York 1998), p 10

30 Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 54.3; cf. Athanasius, On the Incarnation (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1977), 93

31 Paul Meyendorff, The Annointing of the Sick, (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, Crestwood, New York 2009), p 24

32 James Dallen, The Reconciling Community: The Rite of Penance, New York: Pueblo 1986, p 504

33(Song 1:4)

34 Joseph Ratzinger, Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith: The Church as Communion, ed. Stephan Otto Horn and Vinzenz Pfnür, trans. Henry Taylor (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), 283.

35 Alexander Schmemman, For the Life of the World, , (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, New York 1998), p 76