the rector wants us to do Penance

[ethereal hope]

Serious beans, this is the second time he's brought it up in a sermon in the last few months, which for him is like standing on the street corner with a bullhorn. The first time, I half-suspected he meant reciting the General Confession group prayer, because half our congregration pride themselves on being "Protestant-leaning", and because he has no set "confession hours" listed anywhere.

And I don't mind doing confession (though I prefer confessionals so I don't have to look anyone in the face), but because he has never set up any "confession hours" I'm a little nervous about introducing the discipline to my children without knowing more about how it works in the Anglican church.

So, what typically is expected regarding Penance? Weekly confession before Eucharist? What kind of "penance" is typically meted out? If you miss it, should you avoid the Eucharist? What exactly do you say ("forgive me father for I have sinned...etc")? Do ALL priests take confessions? Do you kneel?

AND, what makes me really nervous, it IS secret, right? Our rector is pretty infamous for "talking freely". So does anyone know if he's officially restricted in his "ordination rites" to keep your Confession a secret?

[PaladinValer]

A priest is supposed to keep any confession to himself/herself.

As for penance, unless you did something truly horrible, I wouldn't expect anything harsh. Sometimes it is to pray and at othertimes, it is a pilgrimage. It can also be a service, either to the church (usually to your parish) or to the community you live in. It can even be a mixture of everything I've said, or it could be something else entirely.

If you miss penance, I would not receive Holy Communion, unless your priest offers an indulgance, although it would only be if extreme circumstances warranted your non-performance (ie: you suddenly fall ill/someone dies that was close to you/unforseen idiocy from your boss/etc).

[Mysterium_Fidei]

Penance is not a necessity. It is recommended for some, but by no means should it keep anyone from the Eucharist.
I think the attitude of lifting the minor sacraments so high can be dangerous to ones spiritual health, especially when they prevent someone from Communion.

[Fish and Bread]

Confession can be a holy and blessed right, because it allows people to feel assured of God's forgiveness and gives them a way of working out their sins, both in terms of discussion with a priest and in terms of amendment of life. Though I don't know if a priest is officially bound by oath to keep what happens in the confessional a secret, I do know that through long-standing Christian tradition a priest is absolutely bound by the seal of the confessional. In fact, priests have routinely refused to testify about things which may have been confessed to them, even when facing criminal penalties for their lack of disclosure, and even when the thing confessed as been as significant as murder. Granted, those have mostly been Roman Catholic priests, but I would hope that Anglican priests would hold themselves to at least that high of a standard.

That said, confession before a priest can not be held to be mandatory, as to hold it as such would be to say that God needs an intermediary to forgive and has not the power to forgive on his own. We know that God can and does forgive those who humbly ask forgiveness and seek to do better, even when they simply do so in private prayer. So, it is important that we understand confession as a good tool, but not something that one must do, in my view. Some folks are very shy about confessing before a priest, but God loves and forgives shy folks, too. :) If confession before a priest is a huge psychological hurdle for someone and they don't need it to work their sin out, then they should not feel any pressure to do it. It's something that should be ultilized only if it is helpful and not used if it is depermental in any way to one's spiritual or psychological health.

John

[AveMaria]

A former rector of mine recommended the book Reconcilliation: Preparing for Confession in the Episcopal Church, by Martin Smith, to anyone with questions about confession.

[Aymn27]

Confession can be a holy and blessed right, because it allows people to feel assured of God's forgiveness and gives them a way of working out their sins, both in terms of discussion with a priest and in terms of amendment of life. Though I don't know if a priest is officially bound by oath to keep what happens in the confessional a secret, I do know that through long-standing Christian tradition a priest is absolutely bound by the seal of the confessional. In fact, priests have routinely refused to testify about things which may have been confessed to them, even when facing criminal penalties for their lack of disclosure, and even when the thing confessed as been as significant as murder. Granted, those have mostly been Roman Catholic priests, but I would hope that Anglican priests would hold themselves to at least that high of a standard.

That said, confession before a priest can not be held to be mandatory, as to hold it as such would be to say that God needs an intermediary to forgive and has not the power to forgive on his own. We know that God can and does forgive those who humbly ask forgiveness and seek to do better, even when they simply do so in private prayer. So, it is important that we understand confession as a good tool, but not something that one must do, in my view. Some folks are very shy about confessing before a priest, but God loves and forgives shy folks, too. :) If confession before a priest is a huge psychological hurdle for someone and they don't need it to work their sin out, then they should not feel any pressure to do it. It's something that should be ultilized only if it is helpful and not used if it is depermental in any way to one's spiritual or psychological health.

John
The term is sacrmental seal - and priests do not or rather cannot disclose what is said in the confessional - at least in the RCC, and since Anglicans recognize it as a sacrament, I think it would be the same. I don't know what the stipulations would be for revealing what was confessed in the Anglican church, but a RC priest would be defrocked.

John - question - if it is not necessary to tell to a priest, then why did Jesus give the apostles the power to bind and loose sin? I'm not arguing, just want your take on it...

[Fish and Bread]

John - question - if it is not necessary to tell to a priest, then why did Jesus give the apostles the power to bind and loose sin? I'm not arguing, just want your take on it...

What Jesus was primarily doing in those passages, in my view, was giving the Apostles a concrete amount of authority as representatives of the faithful (i.e. the Christian Church). It was a way of saying to the Christians that would come after that the Apostles were to be consider authentic representations of him in matters of faith and morals. In other words, what they declared a sin was in fact a sin and what they declared was not a sin would not be held against anyone in the kingdom of heaven.

In short, he's establishing the basis for people to trust the assertations the Apostles would make as they evangelized and so forth by saying their interpretation should be considered the definative interpretation of his life and work. Had he not done this, there'd be no doubt sects of Christianity that would have argued that Apostolic teaching was not reflective of Christ since, after all, the Apostles sometimes didn't really seem to understand Jesus' teachings all that well when he was actually alive and could just as easily be mistaken his teachings after his death and resurection. Jesus was in a sense preempting that argument and saying that the Apostles' words were as good as his.

So, when we talk about the apostles being given the authority to bind and lose, and forgiving and retaining sins, I think that at best the idea of them taking confessions needs to be considered a secondary point to the primary point of what Christ was trying to convey. The fact that sacramental confession as we understand it today seems not to date to Apostolic times as a normative and regular practice is evidence to me that the Apostles themselves understood Jesus to be granting them the power to bind and lose in a larger sense in order to run the church and that any power they were given over individuals was secondary and not necessarily necessary to use on a regular basis. Yet, we understand as Christians that we're all sinners in need of forgiveness and that God is all merciful, so if sacramental confession were the only method by which forgiveness could be conveyed, it'd have to have been the normative everyday practice of the Apostolic Church, which history does not seem to reflect it having been.

John

[ethereal hope]

Thank you for the responses. I'm in the "it's necessary" camp, but the only Penance "format" I'm familiar with is the RCC version, and I'm hoping they're the same (Act of Contrition-type prayers, etc), because otherwise, I'm not sure what's expected.

Fish&bread, to me, Purgatory is still a big possibility, and even if not a purging of sins in the afterlife, one might agree that there is a purging by the end of one's earthly life. It's always seemed reasonable to me that if one confesses and does penance sooner than later, you should have less to purge on down the road.

My husband calls it "hedging my bets"; I call it getting closer to God. We disagree. :-)

Btw, I've always thought of Penance and Purgatory as closely related, which is why I'm so surprised that the Anglicans do confessions at all. (There's a really nasty little blurb about "Purgatory" at the end of the BCP, in the 39 Articles)

[Fish and Bread]

Btw, I've always thought of Penance and Purgatory as closely related, which is why I'm so surprised that the Anglicans do confessions at all. (There's a really nasty little blurb about "Purgatory" at the end of the BCP, in the 39 Articles)

Anglicanism is a pretty "big tent". Historically, we've tried to be a church where both Catholics and Protestants and everyone in between can feel comfortable. That is thought to stem from the reign of Queen Elizabeth I in England, who was a non-Roman Catholic Queen faced with ruling a country that had been Roman Catholic, then very Protestant, and then Roman Catholic again. She knew that to a certain degree restoring Edwardian Protestantism would leave a lot of people very disatisfied, and yet was supported by people who were disatisfied with Roman Catholicism. There were very large factions that were so diametrically opposed that they really couldn't fit seem together into one church under the models that existed to that point.

So, Elizabeth I, under something called the Elizabethean Settlement, helped bring about what is known as the via media (or "middle way") approach. The idea would be one church that brought together the finest elements of both Catholicism and Protestantism, in order that everyone might worship in unity as one church in England. Protestant reforms like church services in the venacular (language of the people), salvation by grace through faith, bibles published in English and made widely available, the elimination of indulgences, and so forth were combined with Catholic traditions like liturgies, liturgical calendars, apostolic succession, saints, and so forth. The roots of Anglicanism today are in this compromise -- we've always stood in the middle of the Roman way and the continental Protestant Reformers, cutting out the things that don't seem to hold up to scrutiny and retaining that which we believe is good and holy.

The informal Anglican motto on confession before a priest is "all may, some should, none must", which is a prime example of this idea at work. We retained the practice, which at it's best can be holy and lifegiving, but eliminated what have often been viewed as abuses, which at their worst can seem to mitigate the grace of God and put unbiblical requirements on people for salvation. By having confession but making it essentially optional, both Catholic and Protestant leaning Anglicans can in good conscience practice their faith in our church, each able to fulfill the dictates of their consciences.

John

[Robbie_James_Francis]

but a RC priest would be defrocked.

Indeed...and, I believe, excommunicated for his sacrelige. Revealing that which is hear in Confession is, for Catholics, both a serious betrayal of trust, a terrible mortal sin and a sacrelige.

Good luck with the Confession and Penance. :thumbsup: I highly doubt the priest will give you a very difficult penance. It can usually, from my experience (and I'll try to be vague since there is a line of thought that says penitents are also bound by the sacramental seal of confession) simly a few prayers that can be completed within ten minutes at the most.

God bless you! :)

Rob :liturgy:

[Father Rick]

Well, let me jump in here...

A couple of things to be aware of... first, the absolution given in the sacrament of reconciliation is conditional upon a) the penitent's faith (you have to actually be repentant) and b) fulfillment of the penance given.

Now I know that probably raised a few eyebrows, so let me explain.

First, reconciliation is not about having a priest 'remove guilt' so that you can continue to sin. It's about a person repenting (turning away from ) sin. This means more than just a mental assertion that the sin was wrong-- this means actually doing something to stop sinning. That 'doing something' can be anything from spending time in prayer or study of Scripture, to paying back money stolen, to whatever is appropriate for that particular sin.

'Real life' examples of penance given:
"I've been having an affair"-- penance- break off the adul.terous relationship and see what options are available for marriage counseling.

"I've been out of church for the past 2 years"--penance- look up churches in your area in the phonebook and make some calls to see which churches have 'young ' groups where you will be comfortable.

"I've been sleeping with my fiance (with whom I live and will be marrying in 6 weeks)"--penance- stop having s.ex, try to find your own place to live til the wedding and if that is not possible then move into the guest bedroom.

"I'm thinking lus.tful thoughts about someone"-- penance- look up scriptures that deal with keeping your thoughts pure and spend time meditating on those scriptures.

I could keep going (believe me, I've heard some doozies) but I think you get the idea. One of the reasons that there is a time allotted for 'counseling' immediately following the confession of sin and the imposition of penance/pronouncement of absolution is so that the priest can ask a few questions if necessary to get an idea of the situation to give good direction for the penitent to actually stop the sin.

editted to add: Yes I have filters on my computer, so I have to put periods in certain words or they get censored out.