I’m not about to try to answer every point raised, here, but let’s at least put the RCC teachings into a coherent form so that it appears to make sense from someone’s perspective.
First a note on sources:
The Catholic Encyclopedia that is found on-line is the version that was originally written between 1910 and 1919. It is an excellent source of historical information. The major points of theology have not changed. However, the explanations of theology are couched in the mindset and the language of the American Catholic Church in the days far prior to the Second Vatican Council. There is an open hostility to non-Catholic views and a “circle the wagons” mentality that is alien to the views of the Church in 2000. The language also assumes a certain knowledge of Catholic religious jargon. Periodically, a word or phrase will be used that is totally alien to the apparent meaning in plain English.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church is a much better document for discovering how the Church expresses what it believes, today. It still has the issue of the religious jargon, but there are a number of attempts to write without the jargon and there are, frequently, explanatory notes (at least in the printed version–I have not noticed them in the on-line version, but I have not been looking for them).
On to the issues:
My attempt to describe the issues of sin, forgiveness and redemption go like this:
Humans sin. God forgives. (That was easy.) When a person sins, they are separated from God in the Body of Christ (the Church–not the RCC, 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 our Protestant brethren who insist that Jesus has removed all sin for all time. The RCC does not dispute this. From the perspective of Salvation, Jesus has removed our sin so that we might enter Heaven. However, the RCC 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 in 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 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 will open their hearts 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 because it was not included in the Jewish canon. (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 RCC and the Protestants to even discuss the issue was seriously hamstrung. (I am not claiming Luther was wrong in his decision, only pointing out that 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 certainly 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 that Phil cited, you will note that what JPII stated was 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 JPII, 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 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia was at pains to explain that an indulgence did nothing to remove sin, but it then goes on to “explain” indulgences in incomprehensible jargon.)
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 whole “die without confession” scenario, 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 RCC has stopped 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, and the rest of the biggies were assumed to be mortal sins because they were very bad. If someone could choose to take a life or choose to violate their vows of faithfulness to their spouse, 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. As noted in the earlier post, there is a Scriptural basis for that decision (John 20:22-23). 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 commited 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 ourselves open ourselves to God’s healing.
Minor point:
The theological speculation place is Limbo (Dante’s First Circle of Hell). The idea was that a person who had lived a righteous life did not deserve to go to hell, but there are those famous passages that some fundies like to quote about no one getting in to see God without uttering particular words regarding Jesus. One thought was that those righteous pagans 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 RCC Doctrine (although I knew 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 mis-interpreted his Scripture.
