Penance

The Catholic Church's power to forgive sins is demonstrated from Scripture: Christ's promise of the power of the keys and of binding and loosing to Peter and the Apostles (Matthew 16 and 18), and its actual bestowal after the Resurrection (John 20:22–23), against Protestant restrictions of the power to the external forum or to mere preaching.

The Protestant Reformers, alone among all who came before them, denied in principle the Church's power to forgive sins, reducing absolution to a bare declaration; the Council of Trent's fifteen canons on Penance are summarized in response. The teaching of the Fathers of the second through fifth centuries — Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose, Pacian, Cyril of Alexandria, Chrysostom, Athanasius, Cyprian, Origen, Tertullian, Irenaeus, and Polycarp — is then surveyed against Novatianism and Montanism.

The Church's power to forgive sins is further evidenced by the unbroken existence of a penitential discipline from the earliest centuries: the fourfold kinds of penance (private, canonical, public, solemn), the historical debate between Church historians and dogmatic theologians over the ancient rigor toward the three capital sins, and the discipline's development through the penitential books, redemptions, and indulgences of the Middle Ages down to Trent.

Against Montanism and Novatianism, the Church's power to forgive sins extends to every sin without exception, including apostasy, murder, and fornication; against the notion that God forgives independently of the Church, this power is also a necessary means of salvation for the sinner guilty of mortal sin; and against the Protestant reduction of absolution to a bare announcement, the power is exercised in genuinely judicial form, with the confessor acting as judge over a true tribunal of conscience.

Penance is a true Sacrament, defined by Trent as instituted by Christ for reconciling the faithful after Baptism. Theologians dispute what constitutes its matter: the Thomistic theory holds that the penitent's own acts of contrition, confession, and satisfaction are the quasi-matter, while the Scotistic theory locates both matter and form in the priestly absolution alone. The Thomistic view is shown to have the stronger case, though the question remains open to debate.

The sacramental form of Penance lies in the words of absolution, 'I absolve thee,' which the priest must actually and effectively pronounce; the formula signifies both the remission of sin and the infusion of sanctifying grace, not a bare declaration of a pardon already granted in heaven. The historical question of the deprecatory versus indicative formula, and the requirement that the penitent be physically present, are also examined.

The chief effect of Penance is reconciliation with God through the infusion of sanctifying grace, which forgives all mortal sins at once and heals the soul as a gratia sanans; a secondary, non-essential effect is peace of conscience. The chapter also treats the reviviscence of merits lost through mortal sin and previously extinguished by it, and argues that sins once truly forgiven can never revive, against Hugh of St. Victor and William of Paris.

Only validly ordained bishops and priests can administer the Sacrament of Penance, and they must possess not only the power of order but also the power of jurisdiction, which the Church's superiors may limit by reserving certain cases to themselves. To receive the Sacrament validly one must be baptized, guilty of personal sin, and possess the three acts of contrition, confession, and satisfaction.

Contrition, defined by Trent as sorrow of heart and detestation for sin with the resolve to sin no more, must be internal, universal, supernatural, and supreme, joined to a firm purpose of amendment. Perfect contrition, inspired by a perfect love of God above all else, justifies the sinner immediately, even outside the Sacrament of Penance, provided a desire (votum) for the Sacrament is included — against Contritionism, which wrongly makes such perfect contrition a strict requirement for valid sacramental absolution itself.

Imperfect contrition, or attrition, may be inspired by the turpitude of sin or by fear of hell and punishment, and forms three stages depending on the interplay of love, fear, and hope; against Luther, Jansenius, and Quesnel, the Council of Trent teaches that attrition inspired even by the mere fear of hell is a good and salutary gift of God, sufficient — though not by itself justifying — for the valid reception of the Sacrament of Penance.

Attritionists hold that attrition inspired purely by fear of hell, without any formal act of love, suffices for valid absolution, though even they concede that genuine attrition virtually includes an inchoate love of God; orthodox Contritionists hold that a distinct 'initial charity' must accompany such fear. Pope Alexander VII left the controversy formally undecided in 1667, and it remains unsettled, with Attritionism the more widely held view.

Confession is the sorrowful declaration of one's own sins to a priest, made in order to obtain forgiveness through the power of the keys; it may be actual or virtual, and must ordinarily be complete unless physically or morally impossible. No Scripture text names sacramental confession explicitly, but its divine institution and necessity can be argued indirectly from the Biblical doctrine that the power of the keys is judicial and must be exercised on accurate knowledge of the penitent's sins.

Wiclif, Luther, and Calvin denied that confession is of divine origin, reducing it to a human or ecclesiastical invention; Trent condemned this in its sixth and seventh canons on Penance. The argument from prescription then traces auricular confession backward without interruption from the present day through the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), the penitential books, Pope Leo the Great, and the Novatian controversy, to a practice already presupposed by Montanism around A.D. 150.

Working backward from Pope Leo the Great through Augustine, Chrysostom, Pacian, Basil, Cyprian, Origen, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement of Rome, and the Didache, the Fathers of the first five centuries are surveyed as witnesses to the practice and duty of confessing sins to a priest, though the evidence for the earliest generations is necessarily less explicit than for the fourth and fifth centuries.

Against the Protestant claim that Christ's atonement removes all temporal punishment along with guilt, the Church teaches that the Sacrament of Penance remits the guilt and eternal punishment of sin but ordinarily leaves a temporal debt of punishment, which the penitent can cancel through prayer, fasting, and almsgiving imposed by the confessor as satisfaction — all of it, however, deriving its efficacy from the merits of Christ alone.

An indulgence is a remission, granted by the Church outside the Sacrament of Penance from the treasury of the superabundant merits of Christ and the saints, of the temporal punishment still owed by a penitent whose sins have already been forgiven. It presupposes rather than grants forgiveness of sin, and is valid not merely in the external forum but before God himself; indulgences are further divided into plenary and partial, universal and local, and for the living and for the dead.

Against Wiclif, Hus, and the Protestant Reformers, Trent teaches that Christ granted His Church the power to confer indulgences, a power traceable through the unlimited scope of the keys, through five historical periods from the martyrs' libelli pacis to the medieval jubilees and crusade indulgences, and grounded in the thesaurus Ecclesiae — the treasury of the infinite merits of Christ together with the superabundant satisfactions of the saints. Only the pope can grant plenary indulgences; bishops and others hold more limited faculties, and every grant requires a just cause and proper dispositions in the recipient.

Because the souls in purgatory are no longer subject to the Church's jurisdiction, indulgences reach them only indirectly, by way of suffrage, through the intercession of the living who first gain the indulgence for themselves and then offer it to God on the dead's behalf. It is certain, though not strictly de fide, that the Pope has the power to grant such indulgences; theologians differ on whether they take effect with infallible certainty or depend on God's free acceptance.