I’ve been studying a little Catholic theology, mainly by going through the Catechism of the Catholic Church. In what I have read in this wonderful work and in other sources, I encounter a belief in penance or satisfaction and Purgatory (where people are purified of their sinfulness). It seems that the grace and atonement of Christ, in Catholic theology, does not cover all of a Christian’s sins.
Now, in the Protestant perspective I am familiar with, there is no need for penance or Purgatory. Once a person confesses and is forgiven, usually by relying on the grace and atonement of Christ’s sacrifice and work, it is as if the sin never occurred, as far as God is concerned. The person’s sins are washed away, as it were, by Jesus’ blood.
But this does not seem to be the case here. I understand the doctrine behind absolution: Catholics believe that Jesus gave unto His ministers the power and authority to forgive sins when they are repented of. This power and authority the priesthood (priests and bishops) exercises. But if a person is absolved, by does he/she need to do penance or make satisfaction? What role does Jesus’ sacrifice play in this forgiveness or the penitent’s cleanliness if the penitent still needs to do stuff to be rid of the sin?
And why, do people need to spend time in Purgatory? I understand that those who go there are purified: how are they purified? Why do they need purification? What role does Jesus’ sacrifice play in this purification or need for purification?
I think the idea is, while your sins are forgiven if you ask for them to be, as you describe, sin also has consequences. It’s like when you were a kid and you did something wrong. You were sorry you did it, and your parents forgave you, but you still got grounded/spanked/punished somehow for what you did.
It’s the same way with purgatory. You’ve been forgiven, but the sin still, first, has to be paid for, and second, you need to be purified of it. Both purgatory and penance help to do that.
I don’t want to sound critical, but I am a but confused (I’m more familiar with Protesant theology than Catholic). What does it mean, then, when Catholics say that Jesus died for our sins? If we have to pay for them anyway, how does Jesus’ sacrifice affect us at all? Could God forgive us of our sins after paying for them if Jesus had not died on the cross?
I’m pretty sure that, according to Catholics, Jesus’s death (and the Communion he initiated) makes it possible for sins to be forgiven. From Matthew 26:
In Purgatorial Christian theology, Christ’s death & resurrection cancels out Eternal Damnation/Death for all who trust Him, but the Purgatorial experience is also part of Christ’s saving work to bring believers into maturity & to teach them that Saving Grace doesn’t mean getting away with sinning.
If as a child, I broke a $1000 window, my Dad knows I have no way of paying for that window, so he takes care of it. However, he does suspend my allowance for a month so that I don’t take breaking windows for granted.
This is an enormous and very interesting issue. The rise of purgatory in Catholic consciousness was very slow and gradual and was informed to a much greater degree by popular imagination and literature than by theology.
If you are seriously interested in this, you simply have to read Jacques Le Goff’s The Birth of Purgatory, tr. Arthur Goldhammer. It is authoritative on this subject.
My attempt to describe the issues of sin, forgiveness and redemption go like this:
Humans sin. God forgives. (That was easy. Oh? We’re not done, yet? ::: sigh ::: OK.)
When a person sins, he or she is separated from God in the Body of Christ, the Church—not any specific denomination, but the body of all those who believe). To be reconciled with the Body of Christ, one must express contrition and make restitution of some sort.
At this point, we immediately run into an objection from many of our Protestant brethren who insist that Jesus has removed all sin for all time. The Catholic Church does not dispute this. From the perspective of Salvation, Jesus has removed our sin so that we might enter Heaven. However, the Catholic Church sees the need for the person to actually take responsibility for his/her actions. It refers to the “temporal punishment” due to sin. This is actually viewed as the healing aspect of the wound of sin. Remember, in sin, the Body of Christ is damaged because, to the extent that one sins, one is not open to God’s Grace and is not able to share God’s love with other people. The “temporal punishment” is the action on the part of the sinner that is intended to heal the heart and open oneself more fully to God’s Grace.
Since the “temporal punishment” is intended to be a spiritual healing, the penance handed out by the priest at the Sacrament of Reconciliation often takes the form of prayer. (This, of course, shows up in the inadequately explained and too often given without explanation “Three Our Fathers and Three Hail Mary’s”. The intent is supposed to be that the penance is a healing act of prayer, but it has sometimes slipped into a brief and meaningless punishment, as people were not taught the meaning of what they were being asked.)
So we now have a condition where people are supposed to be attempting to ask God for healing as an aspect of being Reconciled to the Body of Christ. However, it is pretty well recognized that no one is able to open his or her heart fully to God, even in prayer. In the concept of Purgatory, the Church recognizes that before a person may be fully united with God after death, they must be fully healed. The pain of Purgatory, usually represented as “hell lite,” is simply the remorse that people feel as they reconsider their lives and open themselves to God’s love. The pain is a healing pain.
There is Scriptural precedent for this. Unfortunately for harmonious discussion, the “Scripture” cited is among the Apocrypha/Deutero-Canonical works that the Protestants have set aside from their Scripture. (That is a different discussion.) In II Maccabees 12:39–45, Judas Maccabee arranges for prayers and sacrifices to be offered for the sins of several of his slain men in the hopes of the Resurrection. This raises two separate beliefs that are held by the Church: that people may be healed of the effects of sin after death, and that other people may, through petitions to God, aid in that healing.
Of course, once Martin Luther, who was already (legitimately) mad about the abuse of indulgences looked at Scripture and decided to exclude what became known as the Apocrypha, the ability of the Catholic Church and the Protestants to even discuss the issue was seriously hamstrung. (Regardless how right or wrong Luther may have been in his decision, There is a history, here, that gets lost when Catholics and Protestants battle over these issues.)
The indulgences that were so seriously abused were not “get out of Hell free” cards (although they were often sold that way). Anyone who has ever looked at one of the old prayer books that mentioned indulgences will see that they are usually tagged with a line such as “3 days”. This does not mean that the indulgence is good for getting out of Purgatory three days early. It is a reference to some arcane and archaic method of determining how much prayer and sacrifice should be offered for spiritual healing. The idea is that a person, having sinned, may tap into the spirituality of the Church to ask for the spiritual healing that one needs. If you look at the proclamation on indulgences that Pope John Paul II issued at the beginning of Advent for the 1999–2000 Liturgical Year, he stated that by acts of prayer and charity, the people may participate in the indulgence of the Jubilee Year. While I recognize the thread of belief that runs from II Maccabees through the statements of John Paul II, I also recognize that there is so much baggage associated with this stuff that I wish they would just stop talking about it. (Even the 1908 Catholic Encyclopedia was at pains to explain that an indulgence did nothing to remove sin, but it then goes on to “explain” indulgences in nearly incomprehensible jargon.) I do try to provide an explanation for indulgences, below, but I make no claim that the explanation is comprehensible.
The selling of indulgences against which Luther reacted was corrupt from the perspective of the Church in many ways–lying about what they were, Simony (selling blessings for profit), etc.–and is a shameful episode.
As to the scenario where one “dies without confession,” we have to look at a couple of other points. First off, the old “mortal and venial sins” dichotomy is not predicated merely on how “big” the sin appears to be. I will use mortal and venial because most people are familiar with the words, although the Catholic Church has backed away from categorizing sins in that fashion. The whole point of a mortal sin is/was that it was a deliberate separation from God. Here was an act that was so clearly evil that to choose to commit that act represented a deliberate choice to exclude God from one’s life. The old high school manuals that talked about how long a kiss could continue before it became a mortal sin were stupid and wrong. (Some author was trying to quantify how bad lust was–and doing a very bad job of it.)
Murder, suicide, adultery, apostasy, and similarly serious sins were assumed to be mortal (i.e., deadly to one’s spirituality) because they were very bad. If someone could choose to take a life or choose to violate their vows of faithfulness to their spouse or to God, it was a pretty good indication that they had rejected God’s Law and God’s Love.
However, the necessary trinity for mortal sin was always encapsulated in the phrase “Know it, Will it, Do it.” To truly separate oneself from God, a person had to understand how bad the act was, they had to choose to commit the act in spite of that knowledge, and they had to actually commit the act. So if a person, knowing that an act would separate them from God, chose to go ahead and then actually did the deed, they were doomed to Hell if they did not repent of their deed. A person who did not understand how serious the act was, or who did not do it recklessly ignoring the fact that it would separate them from God, or who ultimately turned away from doing the deed, would not have closed themselves off from God.
The Sacrament of Reconciliation (Confession) was the forum chosen by the church to provide a way for a person to repent of their deed. There is a Scriptural basis for that decision (John 20:21-23).
However, forgiveness is from God, and the Church does not presume to say when God may or may not extend His forgiveness. The church expects that a person who committed a mortal sin and died without going to confession will go to hell, but if that person truly repented, then God will save them. (The Church does expect that they will do a fair amount of healing/penance in Purgatory, of course.)
The sins formerly called venial are those sins which are the result of our not being fully open to God, but not being closed to Him, either. They are the small choices we make that interfere with our ability to accept God’s love and share it with other people. The Irish monks got the idea of confessing those smaller faults so as to help us open ourselves to God’s healing and their tradition has become our Examination of Conscience and our practice of trying to recall all of our sins when we confess.
Minor point:
Limbo (Dante’s First Circle of Hell), was a place of theological speculation. The idea was that a person who had lived a righteous life or an innocent child who died, did not deserve to go to hell, but there are those famous passages that some biblical literalists like to quote about no one getting to see God without expressing faith in Jesus. One thought was that those righteous pagans and infants would be shut out from the presence of God, but would not be sent to torment. This became Limbo and is the source of our word for betwixt-and-between. It was never Catholic Church Doctrine (although more than a few people that believed it was). It is not even part of theological speculation any more. Generally we figure that God can bring in whomever he wants to heaven, regardless how we may have misinterpreted his Scripture in the past. The Catechism of the Catholic Church discusses, in paragraphs 836 through 848, the ways in which people outside the Church are brought to God through Jesus and His Church, even if they have never been members. (http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p123a9p3.htm#836 )
While the actions of the saints and all the faithful are “reckoned” in the Treasury of Merit described in the Catechism article, it should be noted that those actions are not the basis of the concept, but are considered to be additions. The basis is the outpouring of grace through the salvific action of Jesus as made present to the world in the Body of Christ–-the Church. (In other words, it is not a finite “bank” of good works in which nice people are making deposits and sinners are making withdrawals. It is the notion that through the Church, (the Body of Christ, not the organization), all people are able to call upon the Grace of Jesus for aid.) The concept behind indulgences is to encourage charity that we can ask be reckoned against “temporal punishment.”
The “temporal punishment” that is mentioned is the big sticking point. The language that developed to discuss it in earlier times was that of physical punishment. However, I would characterize it as the recognition by a person of the degree to which they have failed to accept and return the love of God. Just as when one offends a friend or parent or spouse, their forgiveness does not automatically erase the pain that one recognizes for having offended, so God’s forgiveness does not erase our pain in recognizing how far we have fallen short. That pain is the “temporal punishment” that we incur for sin, even after we have been forgiven. The notion of the Treasury, and the indulgences that flow from it, is that the Body of Christ can aid in the healing of that pain-–reducing the temporal punishment.
Note, this has nothing to do with forgiveness and is not a “step” toward salvation, which is freely given by God.
Indulgences were never a “get out of Hell, free” card. For one thing, the indulgences are only applied to the “temporal punishment” of sins that have been forgiven. Of course, that did not stop some people as treating them as instant redemption tickets. I suspect that Luther would have opposed indulgences regardless of the corruption that surrounded them, but it should be noted that the “selling” of indulgences was against church law, anyway. Selling anything “of God” is the sin of Simony. (I suspect that the practice started as a genuine call to donate to charity, then got twisted around by some sharpers to be a call for “so much money equals so much time off,” and was then just a short step to “…and I’ll keep the surplus.”)
While I can accept (not embrace) the teaching in the manner that I have outlined it, I am not prepared to defend any other versions you may encounter from other speakers on the subject.
If this sounds familiar to old-timers, an earlier draft appeared in the linked thread a few years ago: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?postid=623922#post623922
Thanks, Tom. I’ll have to go through it a few times more but already you explained it better than the nuns did. Maybe that is the basic flaw of a Catholic elementary education: the subtleties are lost.
On the other hand, our sins WERE forgiven by Jesus’ sacrifice, but a little penance never hurt anybody. Beyond the extent it was supposed to hurt, that is.
Every now and then, someone comes up with a post so complete it needs no addition. Braaa-vo!
We’ve had 2000 years of blind alleys and dead-ends, theologically speaking. It gets complicated after a while, and people’s inability to seperate pop from lit doesn’t help.