Penance, Confession, Reconciliation: A History

Commonweal has published an article entitled

How the Irish Changed Penance
The history of a sacrament 

by John Rodden, " a longtime contributor to Commonweal, writes frequently both on the history of Catholicism and on Irish cultural history and politics."  

In my opinion Rodden has written an interesting opinion piece about the Irish in relation to Penance but has not dealt with our post Vatican II poorly executed attempt to understand and reform this sacrament as Reconciliation.

"Most Catholics are probably unaware that what we today call the sacrament of Reconciliation existed in a completely different form during the early Christian era... all of the (Sacraments) have changed in important ways over the course of the Church’s history, and none has changed more than the sacrament of penance.

Sacrament of Public Penance

"For the Church’s first seven centuries, penance could be received no more than once in a lifetime....A formal system of public penance was devised to handle such setbacks. Typically, after penitents confessed to the local bishop, they were assigned an onerous penance that lasted several years. During this time they wore sackcloth and garments that scratched or tore the skin, as a modest reminder of Christ’s scourging. They were also required to leave Mass immediately after the homily and forbidden to receive the Eucharist. At least part of their penance consisted of long hours of prayer and fasting. Not until they had completed this long and arduous penitential period were they “reconciled” with the Church and welcomed back into full communion.

"But reconciled penitents were expected to continue some penitential practices, such as abstinence from sexual intercourse, for the rest of their lives. Those who had been thus reconciled could not be admitted to the clergy or to most public offices. They remained permanently in a somewhat inferior position within the Church, partly for social reasons and partly as an explicit reminder of their lapse. Moreover, such a reconciliation was permitted no more than once in a lifetime, and it was required only for what were regarded as mortal sins, such as murder, adultery, and apostasy. Those guilty of what we now call venial sins were not expected to undergo any formal process; instead, they found forgiveness for their sins by participating in the Eucharist, almsgiving, and seeking forgiveness from those whom they had offended."

Sacrament of Private Confession

"By the seventh century, it had become obvious to many that the Church’s rules for penance were not working as they were intended to, but there were still no plans in Rome to reform them. It was precisely at this time that Irish monks began to travel to the European continent to proselytize the heathen Franco-German tribes. At least a century earlier, these monks had developed a different practice of penance within their own communities, adapting a little-known tradition traceable to the first monastic communities in the Egyptian desert. St. John Cassian, who had lived with these desert monks, took their practices with him when he founded a monastery in France. His writings were later taken to Ireland and it is there that they found fertile soil. Traditional public penances of the kind practiced in the early Church were not an option for the desert monks: there were no Christian communities, let alone dioceses, in the Egyptian desert. Like the monks in Ireland after them, they were struggling to overcome venial “faults” in their quest for saintliness, not seeking reconciliation after committing grave offenses such as murder, adultery, and apostasy. "

Rodden does not tell us much about Egyptian monastic practices. Spiritual direction by a "father". i.e. a monk of advanced holiness (almost always not ordained) was a key practice that involved manifestation of conscience, telling the spiritual director all one's thoughts and emotions positive as well as negative. The spiritual father might make all sorts of suggestions, but these were not penances as the Irish developed them. 

"The Irish monks refined the work of Cassian, developing a system of confession in which the private recitation of sins was followed by the private performance of penance. Crucially, they not only adopted this practice themselves, but introduced it to the faithful outside the monastery, making it applicable to all sins and available to all sinners. Then, without formal ecclesiastical approval, the missionary monks shared these more relaxed and flexible practices with the new converts in Europe. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church summarizes it: “During the seventh century Irish missionaries, inspired by the Eastern monastic tradition, took to continental Europe the ‘private’ practice of penance, which does not require public and prolonged completion of penitential works before reconciliation with the Church. From that time on, the sacrament has been performed in secret between penitent and priest.” 

Rodden does not tell us much about the cultural background where these private penances were performed. My understanding is that the tribes of Northern Europe were very much into notions of tit for tat kinship justice, e.g., if someone killed your kinsmen you killed one of his kinsmen. My understanding is that these privately imposed but publicly known penances were intended to ward off blood feuds. So they were very much about reconciliation among Christians 

" In 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council established that penance would involve private confession and that all Christians in the Latin Church would be obligated to confess their sins at least once a year. It was also at this time that penance officially became a sacrament. (The “dark box”—the confessional booth located in the rear of most churches—wasn’t invented until the sixteenth century, during the Counter-Reformation.) 

Rodden does not emphasize how messy his history is for any modern attempt to craft a Sacrament of Reconciliation. The Public Penance sacrament was very much intended to deal with extreme cases such as murder, adultery, and apostacy which threaten local Christian communities. The NT has a lot about discord among Christians and ways to promote reconciliation among members. The power of church leaders, especially bishops, to bind (e.g. excommunicate people) and loose their sins, i.e. restoring them to unity was only about extreme cases. I suspect that presbyters were often involved in disputes about property, lies, accusations, etc. as something like an internal justice system, finding solutions and reconciling people with one another. 

When communities of solitaries formed in the desert around renowned monks, they likely exercised the same roles of reconciliation by charism as the presbyters exercised in city communities. In fact, we have evidence that people brought their problems including disputes to renowned monks. While I have an easy time imagining reconciliation processes that go back to NT times, the sacrament of holy orders was not so developed that holy but un-ordained people were viewed as incapable of spiritual direction and reconciliating people. 

What we had after 1215 was the clericalization of spiritual direction and reconciliation into a very juridical system which made Confession a private matter between God, the penitent and a priest rather than as public conversion and reconciliation.  Like the public penance system from the early church, and the private penance system of the Irish monks, private confession of sins was also poorly used by the laity. That is why there is a rule about annual confession for all those who have committed serious sins. Private confession was not popular either. 

The twentieth century practice of regular confession and weekly or daily communion is very recent. However, it also caused problems with many people plagued with scrupulosity, and unhealthy relationships with God and the clergy. Vatican II attempted to promote a more communal form of reconciliation but that was shot down by JPII by demanding that all absolution has to involve some form of private absolution by a priest.  

I am very concerned about the potential for abuse evident in relationships such a private confession, spiritual direction, and psychotherapy. 

A friend of mine who is a clinical psychologist is very concerned about what he calls the "silting effect."  He sees brief therapy in which therapist and client work on some problem that gets resolved in five to fifteen sessions as ideal. (most positive outcomes occur in that period). But what he has are many people who continue to come back again and again becoming dependent in an unhealthy way on the therapist. He calls it the silting effect because over time more and more of these clients occupy his caseload. 

A prominent Jesuit has reported the same problem in regard to spiritual direction. The idea of a retreat is to make a major decision about some area of one's life and then move on. Again, he found himself full of people who had become dependent upon him.  Now my friend and the Jesuit priest are really good guys who recognize the problem. What I am worried about are all the priests, spiritual directors, and therapists who become dependent upon these clients just as much as the clients become dependent on their confessors, directors, or therapists.  I don't think such relations are healthy for anyone.