As Lent, the collective penitential season, is upon us, Catholics often wonder why penance is so important if confession forgives sin. Usually in the confessional, a priest gives a small penance of specific prayers to say among other more difficult acts to a penitent, depending on the gravity of the sin and the sense of sorrow of the person confessing. Now, if we are forgiven of all sin in the sacrament of reconciliation, why is further penance necessary?
It is not by accident that confessing one’s sins to a priest has often been called the sacrament of penance because it is difficult to express shame of oneself to another sinner, a priest representing the Lord Jesus. It is also difficult to believe that a fellow sinner can hold such authority and power to forgive sin, which is greater than creating something out of nothing according to St. Thomas Aquinas in his commentary on St. John, 14, 12:
Christ is speaking of this result or work when he says that believers will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, for it is a greater thing to justify the impious than to create the heavens and the earth. For the justification of the impious, considered in itself, continues forever: “Righteousness is immortal” (Wis 1:15). But the heavens and the earth will pass away, as Luke (21:33) says. Further, effects which are physical are directed to what is spiritual. Now the heavens and the earth are physical effects, but the justification of the impious is a spiritual effect.
All sinning from the least to the greatest has an impact on the sinner as well as on the Christian faithful. We know by experience or theological knowledge of faith that the consequences of sin infiltrate the intellect (blindness), the will (weakness and self-centeredness) and the sensitive appetite (the emotions disordered) negatively. We need purification of these faculties to re-orient ourselves back to right reason, wise choices and strong guidance by reason and will over the disoriented feelings seeking to overpower reason and will. Traditionally, the call to penitential acts (also called acts of satisfaction) is found in both testaments and boils down to fasting, prayer and works of mercy (also called almsgiving), both corporal and spiritual. These virtuous actions with assisting grace tend to scrub away some of the disorders we have induced into our faculties. St. Thomas and spiritual theology also notes that scourges such as sickness and pain lovingly accepted (a virtue out of necessity) as permitted by Divine providence do the same (Suppl. 15, 2). When penance and sanctifying grace are linked together, they incline us to grow in loving moral and infused virtue with deep faith. Living by acts of penance in turn enables the Christian to dispose oneself from falling into grave sin, though one can never avoid all venial sins according to the teachings of the Church from the Council of Trent (Denz 1694, 43rd edition).
In other words, as Catholics sincerely say in the act of contrition, they will “avoid the near occasions of sin.” Now to resolve to do this, in part, is implicitly to do penance for a lifetime! Not monstrous or excessive penance necessarily but reasonable penance, which Aquinas calls a virtue deeply allied with the love of God. Prayer leads to contemplation and meditation. Fasting leads to rectifying one’s love of food and drink and sexual pleasure. Works of mercy leads one’s will to sacrifice and give oneself to ones neighbor. Without acts of penance, the human person soon forgets past resolutions, and slides back again into grave sin and/or deliberate venial sin. If I am sorry for sinning, I promise I will do what I can to avoid sin—as sweet as sin may appear to be. But is this not simply individualistic spirituality?
We are also reminded by Sacred Scripture and the teaching of the Church that acts of penance are also done for the sake of others as well, those whom we have perhaps inflicted injustice as well as those who suffer injustice at the hands of others (ST III 48, 2 ad 2). It fulfills the admonition of St. Paul: “Bear one another’s burdens” (Gal 6:2 ). In other words, the virtue of penance looks to the social component of one’s life. The family, state and Church are not simple appendages of one’s life, but integral since it is quite clear human beings are necessarily social beings by a fundamental inclination of human nature. We all develop in tandem with each other in different ways, degrees of dependencies and personal intensities of union. The so called “structures of sin” in a society flow from the personal sins of its members. Immoral laws, very impractical laws, immoral decisions of the courts, bad judgments on how to solve political international threats on the part of its leaders flows from sin. Whose sin? Usually, the members of a society and its leaders collectively.
Given the sexual revolution from the 1920s to the acceptance of contraception, then emerged the false freedoms and rights for pornography, abortion, the creation of embryos, and the like. Today, civil law either protects these acts or allows them by omission of a prohibitive law thereby creating these rights.
While it is true that the passion and death of Christ atoned for all sin, past, present and future objectively speaking, subjectively someone has to be willing to accept the graces of redemption through baptism and sustain oneself in fulfilling one’s baptismal promises through the sacraments and in a special way through the continuing virtue of penance.
One of the distortions concerning the “seamless garment” thinking was to embrace a dialectic against abortion, human rights violations, the death penalty, the arms race, discrimination against race, relations, sexual orientation and the like. If one could be opposed to abortion, then one must be against all anti-life problems without making proper distinctions. Worse still would be to think that each evil is on the same par, as if there were no hierarchy of moral disvalues. And even more disjunctive was the notion that one could compromise positions in the political order. As Cardinal Mueller put it in his conference to the Pontifical Academy of Life on February 22, 2013:
…the image of the “seamless garment” has been used by some theologians and Catholic politicians, in an intellectually dishonest manner, to allow or at least to justify turning a blind eye to instances of abortion, contraception or public funding for embryonic stem cell research, so long as these were simultaneously accompanied by opposition to the death penalty or promotion of economic development for the poor – issues which are also part of the fabric of Catholic moral teaching.
Given the various moral and social justice evils against human life, directly and indirectly, spread throughout the world, the responsibility of the believer to do penance for the perpetrators of moral evil is quite strong. Most people cannot do much politically or economically to solve the world’s moral ills of turpitude, much can be done spiritually through acts of penance. As Aquinas so wisely says in the Summa Contra Gentiles:
Now, what we do by our friends, we do apparently by ourselves: because friendship, especially the love of charity, binds two persons together as one. Wherefore as a man can satisfy God by himself, so can he by another; especially when there is urgent need for it. For a man looks upon the punishment which his friend suffers for his sake, as though he suffered it himself: and so he is not without punishment, seeing that he suffers with his suffering friend, and he suffers all the more, according as he is the cause of his friend’s suffering. Again, the love of charity in him who suffers for his friend makes the satisfaction more acceptable to God, than if he suffered for himself: for the former comes of the eagerness of charity, but the latter comes of necessity. Hence we infer that one man may satisfy for another, so long as both remain in charity: wherefore the Apostle says (Gal. vi. 2): Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so ye shall fulfil the law of Christ. (III SCG, Ch. 158)
Even our personal enemies and the enemies of virtue are potentially apt to change their hearts and minds since the will is fickle or changeable by nature not yet possessing infinite goodness, the object of the will. Perhaps one could make a case that the grave social injustice in the countries of the world is in part due to a lack of penance on the part of Christians but only known to God. If all Catholics in the world went to Mass every Sunday and Holy day as well as frequented the sacrament of penance often, perhaps greater peace the consequence of a just society would exist in the workplace and among nations as well. As the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church clearly teaches:
577. Faith in God and in Jesus Christ sheds light on the moral principles that are “the sole and irreplaceable foundation of that stability and tranquillity, of that internal and external order, private and public, that alone can generate and safeguard the prosperity of States”[1210 Pius XII, Encyclical Letter Summi Pontificatus: AAS 31 (1939), 425].
Life in society must be based on the divine plan because “the theological dimension is needed both for interpreting and solving present-day problems in human society”[1211 John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Centesimus Annus, 55: AAS 83 (1991), 860-861. ]. In the presence of serious forms of exploitation and social injustice, there is “an ever more widespread and acute sense of the need for a radical personal and social renewal capable of ensuring justice, solidarity, honesty and openness. Certainly, there is a long and difficult road ahead; bringing about such a renewal will require enormous effort, especially on account of the number and gravity of the causes giving rise to and aggravating the situations of injustice present in the world today. But, as history and personal experience show, it is not difficult to discover at the bottom of these situations causes which are properly ‘cultural’, linked to particular ways of looking at man, society and the world. Indeed, at the heart of the issue of culture we find the moral sense, which is in turn rooted and fulfilled in the religious sense” [1212 John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Veritatis Splendor, 98: AAS 85 (1993)]. As for “the social question”, we must not be seduced by “the naive expectation that, faced with the great challenges of our time, we shall find some magic formula. No, we shall not be saved by a formula but by a Person and the assurance that he gives us: I am with you! It is not therefore a matter of inventing a ‘new programme’. The programme already exists: it is the plan found in the Gospel and in the living Tradition, it is the same as ever. Ultimately, it has its centre in Christ himself, who is to be known loved and imitated, so that in him we may live the life of the Trinity, and with him transform history until its fulfilment in the heavenly Jerusalem”[1213 John Paul II, Apostolic Letter Novo Millennio Ineunte, 29: AAS 93 (2001), 285 ].
The social injustices of this present world should be cleansed by the penance of the faithful not only during lent but even throughout the year.
Father Basil Cole, O.P. is currently a Professor of Moral and Spiritual Theology, Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception, at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. Father is also author of Music and Morals, The Hidden Enemies of the Priesthood and coauthor of Christian Totality; Theology of Consecrated Life. A native San Franciscan, Father has been a prior in the Western province of the Dominicans, a parish missionary and retreat master, and invited professor of moral and spiritual theology at the Angelicum in Rome.
