Reconciling reconciliation (part 1):
Learning from the sacrament's history

Catholics would certainly agree with the statement that "reconciliation is a sacrament of the church." But I suspect most Catholics would be perplexed by the statement, "The church is the sacrament of reconciliation." And yet this is what the Second Vatican Council proclaimed in Lumen Gentium (11). It taught that sinners do not experience the merciful embrace of God apart from the community of believers. However, for too many Catholics, the community plays no pivotal role at all in the sacrament of reconciliation. The diminished role of the community defies the scriptural and foundational theology that shaped the early history of this sacrament. It is to this history and theology that the sacrament must now be reconciled if it will have a vital place in the life of the church.

A brief history of the sacrament of reconciliation

The early church

In the writings of St. Paul, we read that, as baptized believers, we are all members of the Body of Christ (1 Cor 12:12-13) and what each individual does affects the whole Body (2 Cor 2:5). For this reason, Paul sees the sin of one member as yeast that infects the whole mass of dough, that is, the whole community (1 Cor 5:6-8). Holding fast to the legacy of Paul, the early church understood sin as a violation of the community (common-union). Therefore, to participate in the common-union of the Eucharist was to experience reconciliation as well. The church that gathered at Eucharist mediated the mercy and love of God and drew each believer into a deeper experience of conversion in Christ, whose Body is the church. However, as Christianity became a persecuted church, standing in holiness against the sin of the world, a question arose: How should the church reconcile those members who commit serious sins that deeply violate the holiness of the church?

Canonical penance (2nd to 6th centuries)

The pastoral response to this question became canonical penance. During this time, acts of murder, adultery, and apostasy (denying the faith to save oneself from persecution) severely offended the church's self-understanding as the Body of Christ and a community of holiness. These sins were regarded as a betrayal of the community. Those who committed them were publicly enrolled in the order of penitents and excluded from the Eucharist for a time. More importantly, however, the entire Christian community repeatedly prayed for the penitents and supported them in their process of conversion. Finally, these penitents were reconciled to the community on Holy Thursday when, in a powerful ritual that expressed the whole community's sorrow for sin and offer of God's mercy, the bishop laid hands on them and welcomed them back into the Body of Christ.

However, canonical penance did not last for several reasons. Since it could only be received once in a lifetime, it gave rise to "deathbed penance" and even "deathbed baptism" for the many who did not want to commit to a life of Christian conversion but wanted to commit to Christ as a final option. Second, the ritual became impractical as more and more people were becoming Christian and the tangible experience of common-union waned considerably. Finally, fewer people were willing to endure such a process when other options became available.

Notice how sin, in these first two periods of the history of the sacrament of reconciliation, was defined in a "horizontal" way: The sin of any individual believer was seen as affecting the whole community; therefore, to reconcile with the community was the means of being drawn into the mercy of God. All this changed when Christianity shifted from being a persecuted religion to being the privileged one in the Roman Empire.

Monastic penance (5th to 11th centuries)

In its privileged position, Christianity grew in leaps and bounds; yet something was lost. Smaller, close-knit communities of believers were no longer able to mediate the reconciling and healing life of God. So penitents sought out spiritual mentors - holy men and women living in monasteries who would assist individuals in examining their lives in light of the Gospel. Penitents sought from these spiritual guides a religious encounter in which they could explore the process of conversion in their lives. Many of them still sought out the bishop for a ritual of reconciliation, but it was a ritual that had less and less to do with the community.

Over time, sin became understood in a "vertical" way: as something private between the individual and God. This practice of monastic penance eventually influenced entire regions around monasteries and beyond. It shifted from the monasteries to the local churches in which monastics were replaced by priests.

Tariff penance (9th to 20th centuries)

As the church moved into the early Middle Ages, it quickly adopted the European sense of law and justice that dominated Western culture. At that time, order in society was maintained by "tariff justice" (wrongdoers must pay the price, that is, a "tariff," for what they have done). This affected people's notions of sin and reconciliation. It was no longer enough to experience God's forgiveness through an encounter with a confessor; now one needed to make amends (pay the price) for one's sins. To that end, private penance was contracted between the penitent and the priest after the confession of sins. The priest's role became one of "absolver" and "judge" (with "the power of the keys" given to Peter in Matthew 16:19 to release people from their sins) rather than "reconciler to the community" as was the role of the bishop in canonical penance.

At this time, sin was considered a personal offense that upset the order of one's relationship with God and for which one had to make amends. It is important to note how the role of the community was completely lost in practice, though it remained in theory since the confessor was a public leader of the church. Also important to note is the reduction of the conversion experience to the endless cycle of: sin-guilt to confession-absolution-penance to return to a life in which the same sin-guilt recur.

By the mid-20th century, the church was experiencing a tremendous scriptural, theological, and liturgical renewal. All this reawakened the awareness that religious experience in Catholicism is necessarily linked to the community of believers. In addition, after centuries of tariff penance, people began to raise the question: If sin is an offense against God, then why does the penitent need to confess to a priest? Also, the impersonal nature of the confessional box no longer resonated with the more personal sense of God highlighted by the renewal movements within the church. Furthermore, the utter devastation of two world wars and the Holocaust, the injustices that gave rise to the civil rights movements, and the threat of nuclear annihilation from the Cold War made it painfully clear that sin is not merely a personal offense against God - it greatly affects God's people. 

Vatican II

One might say that the Second Vatican Council sought to reconcile the sacrament of reconciliation to its own history, particularly to the foundational periods of the early church and canonical penance. Yet the Council also sought to maintain the pastoral value of the spiritual guidance offered by a confessor in a one-on-one sacramental encounter, which monastic and tariff penance provided. This is why the 1973 rite of penance offers three options:

• Rite 1: For the reconciliation of individual penitents (for example, the Saturday afternoon confessions)
• Rite 2: For the reconciliation of several penitents with individual confession and absolution (for example, the Advent and Lent penance services)
• Rite 3: For the reconciliation of several penitents with general absolution (only allowed in exceptional cases in the United States)

Theologically, the 1973 rite of penance seeks to retrieve the horizontal dimension of sin and reconciliation. In quoting Lumen Gentium, the introduction to the new rite teaches:

In the sacrament of penance the faithful "obtain God's mercy pardon for having offended him and at the same time reconciliation with the Church, which they have wounded by their sins and which by charity, example, and prayer seeks their conversion" (4).

In addition, the words of absolution in the new rite clearly express that penitents are reconciled to God "through the ministry of the Church."

The difficulty with the 1973 rite of penance is that experientially the first two rites differ only modestly from tariff penance. I have found that the majority of penitents remain unaware that their sins diminish the community of believers and that reconciliation occurs through the church. For most, it seems that absolution from a priest is all that is necessary for sacramental reconciliation. Moreover, the de facto suppression of rite 3 by current church practice further reduces the sacrament to a one-on-one encounter with the priest-confessor. The result of the Vatican II ritual still being reduced to tariff penance has been devastating. Many penitents remain trapped in the cyclic mentality of tariff penance mentioned earlier, in which there is no transformation in a person's life. In addition, there does not seem to be a strong sense that this is a sacrament of healing and that the community of believers plays an essential role in bringing God's healing to bear in people's lives. When rite 2 is used, it is most often celebrated incompletely when, for instance, many penitents deliberately arrive late in order to "skip all that preliminary stuff" or when the planners leave out the communal prayers of praise and thanksgiving that are to follow the time for individual confessions. Hence, no true communal sense of the celebration develops. Finally, the tariff penance style of celebrating the sacrament in impersonal confessionals leaves many still longing for a deeply personal experience of God. 

Reconciling the sacrament to its own history

One of the marvelous things about the church is that it is an organic reality - it grows and adapts to the needs of each age because of the amazing pastoral instinct that lies at the heart of the church. We see this in our review of the history of the sacrament of reconciliation. The church restructured the way the sacrament was celebrated to meet the concrete needs of the people of God in every age. When those needs were no longer effectively met in the way the church celebrated the sacrament, the ritual was adapted. But each period of the sacrament's history has taught the contemporary church something about reconciliation:

Sin affects not only one's relationship with God (vertical) but also one's relationship to the Body of Christ, the church (horizontal).

Therefore, the sacrament is not merely about the forgiveness of sins (a personal experience between a penitent and God); it is supposed to celebrate and effect reconciliation, which is a communal, structural reality that graces us with the ability to be the Body of Christ more effectively.

However, the sacrament must be able to bring about a personal encounter with God, mediated by a spiritual mentor (priest-confessor), that furthers a penitent's lifelong conversion.

While the privacy of confession to a priest is important, the dynamic of reconciliation is a public reality since it involves the church community in some way.

The rite of penance has to be a liturgy that genuinely expresses how a parish recognizes itself as a reconciling community in which every member is a sinner in need of God's mercy and all members are responsible for bringing the mercy of God to bear on one another's lives.

In part 2 of this article, I will offer some modest proposals on how a parish community might bring about some of the shifts that are needed to reconcile the sacrament of reconciliation to its own history and to its own theological premise that the parish community is the real sacrament of reconciliation.ML