Making My Way to Forgiveness-Part 1

I completed a reading of this year’s [2025] release, ​​For I Have Sinned: The Rise and Fall of Catholic Confession in America just a week ago, and at this juncture I would put it near the top of the books I have reviewed this year. To tell you the truth, with my concentration in grad school theology, twenty years as a priest confessor, and a quarter century as a psychotherapist, I still learned much from this work about the developments [plural] of the sacrament of Penance and the concerns of bishops and priests about confessional experience over the centuries. I need to add here that any Catholic reader of this book may feel naturally more inclined to reflect upon Jesus’ Resurrection appearance to the Apostles in John 20:23, Easter Sunday evening, in the light of this book. As the Gospel writer records,
 
[Jesus] said to them again “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”  And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them “Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.” NABRE Translation.]
 
Penance is a big deal. Jesus equated it with the reception of the Holy Spirit! Let’s talk about it.
 
FROM THE BEGINNING
 
James M. O’Toole’s For I Have Sinned provides an intense examination of the post-Reformation [roughly 1600-present day] theology and pastoral practice of the Sacrament of Penance. Much of the book covers confessional practice in our lifetimes, including the pre and post Vatican II rites of Confession. The author’s treatment of the radical decline in confessions is addressed in distressing detail. He does not lay out a “master plan” for filling those confessionals again, but he is for the most part on target with his critiques.
 
The Church needs a top to bottom evaluation of how we celebrate [or, more appropriately, don’t celebrate] the rites of forgiveness, because there is a massive gulf between the Sacred Scriptures’ revelation of mercy and our current-day practice of confession. It makes sense, then, to go back to the roots of the Christian Era and see what our evangelists and the other leaders of the earliest days to celebrate redemption from sin with the glory of the Holy Spirit.
 
Jesus himself was Jewish and never “converted” to anything else. Rather, as a descendent of Abraham, as St. Matthew’s Gospel records, Jesus saw himself as the son of the Father, come to fulfill the entire Hebrew Scripture of promise of the reign of God. As a devout Jew, Jesus would have embraced the ethical conduct of the Chosen People delivered to Moses as it was understood and enforced in Jesus’ day. Some precepts of the Law came to be perceived as too harsh; executing homosexuals or wayward daughters by their fathers were not enforced in Jesus’ time though they still appear in your home Bible [see Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13.]
 
Jesus certainly had difficulty with misuses of the Law, which led many who heard him to identify him with the classical prophets, such as Isaiah, Amos, Ezechiel, etc. For Jesus preached that contemporary law and worship were missing conversion of the heart, and by example he taught that the law of love superseded an inflexible and unreasonable interpretation of law. Jesus performed healings on the Sabbath, ate and drank with unclean sinners, and evangelized among Samaritans and Romans with the blessing of his Father.
 
For our purposes here, it is Jesus’ extension of the Father’s saving mercy and forgiveness that underlies what time and tradition would evolve into the Catholic institutional/liturgical sacrament of mercy. Jesus was no antinomian; he publicly upheld the Ten Commandments, and in many of his cures and personal encounters he gave a serious but encouraging charge to “sin no more” or “avoid this sin.” His perfect love of his Father’s truth made him an evangelist of the heart. “Purity of heart” underwrote his mission upon earth. It is hard to understand Jesus without his passion for justice and “love thy neighbor as thyself.”
 
It should be no surprise, then, that the first New Testament pen put to parchment, St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, would in large part address the lifestyle of new baptized Christian communities in terms of how they loved one another. The Gospels, for their part, were written later than the Epistles, roughly 70-100 A.D., but they, too, exalt a morality that calls for an imitation of the Father’s love between Christians, coupled with an apocalyptic expectation that when the kingdom of God reveals itself at the end of time, those who have lived an imitation of Christ’s love and fidelity to God’s law will find their place in a chosen seat of honor at the eternal banquet.
 
By 100 A.D. we can safely say that the “forgiveness sacrament” was Baptism, received once in a lifetime. Given that there were no “second baptisms,” some potential converts elected to wait until their deathbeds to receive baptism and admission to the Kingdom, a risky choice then as today. Christians identified post-baptismal “grave sins” as adultery, apostacy, and murder. Over the years the early Christians appear to have followed a variety of rites or gestures to restore unity among themselves and make reparations for minor offenses, including fasting, giving alms, and prayer.
 
THE LAST PLANK
 
It became clear, as the Church expanded in numbers, that some kind of post-Baptismal moral/liturgical rite was necessary, i.e., a second chance for salvation for those baptized persons who had gravely sinned at some point in their lives after their baptism. Theologically speaking, this was a major step forward for the Christian Church: a new sacrament with the same saving effects as Baptism. In a real sense, the concept of repeatable forgiveness bestowed by an ordained minister dates to the second and third centuries, but only in rare cases cited above.
 
It should be noted, though, that most baptized Christians never experienced this second rite of conversion, as most were not guilty of adultery, apostacy, or murder. The reason these three sins received so much attention then was their destructive influence upon a small community of believers centered around the Eucharist. The gravity of apostacy is particularly understandable in an age of periodic Roman persecutions. An apostate denied membership in a Christian community while his or her fellow Christians were tortured and martyred. There was no way an apostate was going to return to the local church without passing through a rite that literally began from the beginning.
 
A serious sinner would seek the bishop, confess his sins, and then if the bishop judged him sincere, he could enter a lengthy period of penance—minimally a year, sometimes several years. What the local church was looking for was evidence that the sinner grieved his past and embraced a turn toward austerity and charity—sitting by public buildings collecting alms for the poor, etc. At an appropriate time, the bishop would receive the sinner back into full communion with the Church through the laying on of hands to forgive the sin[s], often on Holy Thursday so that the forgiven member could participate in the Easter Eucharist.
 
The above-described rite of forgiveness could not be repeated. The unfortunate individual who sinned gravely after the above-described rite was consigned to the judgment of God, period. Not for nothing was this protracted rite of conversion and forgiveness nicknamed “the last plank.”
 
THEY DID IT DIFFERENTLY ON THE EMERALD ISLE
 
Anyone who took history in high school has at least some idea of the “barbarian invasions” and the “dark ages” as the Western Roman Empire collapsed during the first millennium. There was one site, however, where the thought and practice about sin and ritual forgiveness made enormous strides—and where “confession” as we know it today began to take form. If you have ever visited the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Dublin, Ireland, you may have noticed that its next-door neighbor is a pub called “The Confession Box. “Neither structure was standing in the fifth century when an intrepid missionary named Patrick set foot on the island of Ireland in the late 400’s A.D. In the early days of the Irish mission, the goal of Christian missionaries who followed Patrick was quite basic: baptize and preach peace to the warlike Celtic tribes.
 
This mission must have been successful, for within a century or two there were enough baptized Christians to begin the establishment of numerous monasteries and thus an extraordinary period of devotion, charitable service, and the healing of sinful acts. Ireland had no cities; the monastery was the bulwark around which the development and the governance of society.
 
It is in this milieu that the monks were inspired—incrementally—to make the single greatest theological and liturgical change in the history of what we know today as the Sacramental Penance. The change was not sudden; in fact, its gradual development reveals it to be a response to the penitential needs of all the baptized as the Irish Church intensified its evangelization.
 
The beginnings of the change were utterly simple. It should not surprise anyone that, in a typical monk’s day, the community gathered for readings and psalms at least six times per day, exclusive of the Eucharist. The final prayer of the day, sung before retiring, is “Compline.” It seems that in the earliest days of monasteries St. Benedict in Italy included in his universal monastic rule a provision that the day’s prayer include an examination of conscience, a public confession of the day’s faults by each monk, and an acknowledgement/blessing from the abbot.
 
But the Irish gradually expanded the scope of this chapter of faults/penance rite because of two insights. First, Irish society, being tribal, looked to the guidance of a wiseman, a brehon, as a personal and community source of wisdom and order. As Irish priest-monks expanded their pastoral work into the countryside, converts began to view the priest in a brehon-esque sort of way, as a guide to a more wholesome life. Beyond that, Irish Christian thinkers came to agree that sacramental Penance was not reserved for grave sins but belonged at the heart of every believer. This indeed was a radical step; Ireland went out on a limb by initiating repeated confession and absolution, a change we take for granted in 2025 although few take advantage of it today.
 
To ensure that multiple confessions and absolutions helped the Irish Christian to grow in Christ, the penitent--monks, and then laypersons-- were instructed to confess all sins and failures since the last confession. Curiously, the Irish moralists did not depend upon the Ten Commandments as the root of moral principles, as we might expect, but rather, the seven deadly sins. Of course, no one had faced the challenge of establishing pastoral/moral guidelines for a full multitude of sins before, except the adultery-apostacy-murder triad on the continent. The more I think about that, there is considerable wisdom in the Irish approach to the examination of conscience in terms of the seven deadly sins: the seven deadly sins are pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. [You knew that already, I’m sure.]
 
Using these seven categories of sinfulness, a confessor was able to function something like a modern therapist in getting to the heart of the penitent’s moral challenges, using open-ended questions on each category of behavior. Also, there is the “brehon” element, the confessor on journey with each penitent toward a stronger faith and deeper holiness. Commentators on this era of Irish history note the balance in the penitential process. On the one hand, the penitent is called to do appropriate penance [acts] for confessed sins depending upon the nature of the acts and the attitude of the penitent. On the other hand, the penance is geared, depending upon the sin[s], toward the specific sinful opposite. The goal of the sacrament of forgiveness is precisely to turn sinful attitude into a saving grace in the following of Jesus Christ. [Can this be accomplished in our 2025 method of hearing confessions? A good question, which will be pursued in the next posts on the subject. Stay tuned.]
 
The Irish Church took great pains to identify sin and the appropriate “penance” or follow-up, which led to a series of guides for priests to use in their encounters with penitents. Many of these “Irish Penitentiaries,” as the books came to be called, have survived to this day. A useful source if you are interested is The Irish Penitentials [1995] by Hugh Connelly. I reviewed this work twenty years ago and I admit, I didn’t get everything right back then.