The Sacrament of Penance and Religious Life in Golden Age Spain explores the practice of sacramental confession in Spain between roughly 1500 and 1700. One of the most significant points of contact ...between the laity and ecclesiastical hierarchy, confession lay at the heart of attempts to bring religious reformation to bear upon the lives of early modern Spaniards. Rigid episcopal legislation, royal decrees, and a barrage of prescriptive literature lead many scholars to construct the sacrament fundamentally as an instrument of social control foisted upon powerless laypeople. Drawing upon a wide range of early printed and archival materials, this book considers confession as both a top-down and a bottom-up phenomenon. Rather than relying solely upon prescriptive and didactic literature, it considers evidence that describes how the people of early modern Spain experienced confession, offering a rich portrayal of a critical and remarkably popular component of early modern religiosity.
Medieval Italian communes are known for their violence, feuds, and vendettas, yet beneath this tumult was a society preoccupied with peace. Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy is the first book ...to examine how civic peacemaking in the age of Dante was forged in the crucible of penitential religious practice. Focusing on Florence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, an era known for violence and civil discord, Katherine Ludwig Jansen brilliantly illuminates how religious and political leaders used peace agreements for everything from bringing an end to neighborhood quarrels to restoring full citizenship to judicial exiles. She brings to light a treasure trove of unpublished evidence from notarial archives and supports it with sermons, hagiography, political treatises, and chronicle accounts. She paints a vivid picture of life in an Italian commune, a socially and politically unstable world that strove to achieve peace. Jansen also assembles a wealth of visual material from the period, illustrating for the first time how the kiss of peace - a ritual gesture borrowed from the Catholic Mass - was incorporated into the settlement of secular disputes. Breaking new ground in the study of peacemaking in the Middle Ages, Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy adds an entirely new dimension to our understanding of Italian culture in this turbulent age by showing how peace was conceived, memorialized, and occasionally achieved.
L'articolo ripercorre la storia delle indulgenze partendo dalla prassi penitenziale in uso nella Chiesa antica e facendo particolare riferimento ai libri penitenziali con le loro commutazioni delle ...penitenze. Si fa notare come intorno al XII secolo, nel campo delle penitenze, la Chiesa si trovasse in un vicolo cieco, a motivo delle pêne pendenti su gran parte dei fedeli, i quali non potevano avère accesso all'Eucarestia e non avevano neppure alcuna speranza di potersi liberare dalle pene in questa vita. Le indulgenze, promulgate in connessione con le crociate, ma quasi subito allargate ai pellegrinaggi, furono per i fedeli una vera Buona Novella di salvezza: venivano loro condonate le pene ecclesiastiche, potevano tornare alla Chiesa e perciò contare con il perdono di Dio, secondo il «potere delle chiavi». Lo sviluppo successivo del sacramento della penitenza, con l'accento messo sempre più fortemente sul perdono personale da parte di Dio, anche se «per mezzo del ministero della Chiesa», sposta l'asse prospettico e fa di quest'ultimo la «chiave» della porta alla comunione ecclesiale. The present article traces the history of indulgences, starting from the penitential practice of the ancient Church and with a particular reference to the penitential books and commutations of penances. Around the twelfth century, in the field of canonical penance, the Church found itself in a blind alley because of the penances imposed on most of the faithful who could not receive the Eucharist and also had no hope to be able to free themselves from them. The indulgences, initially promulgated in connection with the crusades, but almost immediately extended to pilgrimages, were, for the faithful, truly good news for salvation. Their ecclesiastical penalties could now be remitted and they could return to the Church and, through the «Power of the Keys», receive God's forgiveness. The subsequent development of the sacrament of penance, with the accent increasingly stronger on God's personal forgiveness, even if «through the ministry of the Church», moves the perspective axis and makes of the latter the «key» to the door of ecclesial communion.
Confession reached its peak attendance in the early 1950s, but by the end of the Second Vatican Council, the popularity of the sacrament plummeted. While this decline is often noted by historians, ...theologians, priests, and laity alike - all eager to provide possible explanations - little attention has been paid to another dramatic shift. Coincident with the decreasing popularity of the sacrament of penance in the United States were changes to non-sacramental penitential practices, including Lenten fasting, Ember Days, and the year-round Friday meat abstinence. American Catholics - sometimes derisively called Fisheaters - had assiduously observed Friday abstinence, regardless of ethnicity or geographic location.
The authors address the questions of whether and how corporate social responsibility (CSR) relates to firm performance and, in so doing, identify four mechanisms pertaining to this relationship: (1 ) ...slack resources lead to CSR (i. e., slack resources mechanism) (2) CSR improves performance (i. e., good management mechanism), (3) CSR makes amends for past corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) (i.e., penance mechanism), and (4) CSR insures against subsequent CSI (i.e., insurance mechanism). Using an integrative approach, the authors incorporate the four mechanisms in their empirical model specification. Specifically, to model the interplay among CSR, CSI, and firm performance and to test the four mechanisms simultaneously, they propose a structural panel vector autoregression specification. In support of the good management mechanism, results from an unbalanced panel data set of more than 4,500 firms and up to 19 years suggest that firms that engage in CSR are likely to benefit financially from their CSR investments. Moreover, the authors do not find support for the slack resources or the insurance mechanism. In contrast, and in support of the penance mechanism, often firms' CSR seems to trail their CSI. However, the results also suggest that the penance mechanism is ineffective in offsetting negative performance effects due to CSI.
In Souls under Siege, Nicole Archambeau explores how the inhabitants of southern France made sense of the ravages of successive waves of plague, the depredations of mercenary warfare, and the ...violence of royal succession during the fourteenth century. Many people, she finds, understood both plague and war as the symptoms of spiritual sicknesses caused by excessive sin, and they sought cures in confession. Archambeau draws on a rich evidentiary base of sixty-eight narrative testimonials from the canonization inquest for Countess Delphine de Puimichel, which was held in the market town of Apt in 1363. Each witness in the proceedings had lived through the outbreaks of plague in 1348 and 1361, as well as the violence inflicted by mercenaries unemployed during truces in the Hundred Years' War. Consequently, their testimonies unexpectedly reveal the importance of faith and the role of affect in the healing of body and soul alike. Faced with an unprecedented cascade of crises, the inhabitants of Provence relied on saints and healers, their worldview connecting earthly disease and disaster to the struggle for their eternal souls. Souls under Siege illustrates how medieval people approached sickness and uncertainty by using a variety of remedies, making clear that "healing" had multiple overlapping meanings in this historical moment.
In the 20th century, research on Christian source texts was again undertaken, thanks to which essential ecclesiological and sacramentological elements were discovered. Bernhard Poschmann (1878–1955), ...Karl Rahner (1904–1984), Herbert Vorgrimler (1929–2014) and Reinhard Meßner (1960) are considered to be the most influential researchers of penance and confession of those times. Throughout the years, between the development of the patristic and scholastic thoughts, they discerned many significant changes. The connection between the Church and the excommunicated, the possibility of second penance in one’s life as well as a spiritual nature of penance and of the entire process of reconciliation were particularly underscored in patristics. In the further years of Christianity, during the Celtic evangelization mission in Europe, the influence of monastic life played a central role in overcoming human weakness. In scholasticism, in turn, the focus was placed rather on the significance of sin’s essence and on the process of forgiveness. The reality and forgiveness of sin during confession were expressed through the concepts of matter and form. The specified accents of the 20th century theological-historical research, in relation to understanding of penance and confession throughout the years between patristics and scholasticism, indicate a changing approach to understanding of sacramental forgiveness. With time, a spiritual nature of this sacrament was more and more underlined, which became particularly observable in the terminological conceptual shift from penance to confession.
Reconciliation Risto Saarinen
St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology,
08/2022
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
In Christian theology and political philosophy, five partially overlapping areas of meaning are treated in terms of reconciliation. (1) Dogmatic theology often operates with an umbrella concept ...covering the entire work of Christ. (2) Philosophical theology employs a concept of atonement/reconciliation that attempts to explain the overall rationality of Christian faith. (3) Reconciliation procedures in peacebuilding work typically employ a pragmatic set of contextual measures. (4) The Roman Catholic sacrament of reconciliation provides an institutional forgiveness of personal sins. (5) The New Testament concept of reconciliation elucidates God’s justice and Christ’s work, and these theological realities bear comparison with the Graeco-Roman practices of mediation and peacebuilding. While the present article attempts to explain the historical roots of all these meanings, its theological focus is on (3), (4) and (5). Meanings (1) and (2) are treated in more detail in the entry on ‘Atonement’. The article proceeds from the Greek terms katallassein, katallagē and closely-related words (apokatallassein, diallassein). In Christianity, these words are normally translated into Latin with reconciliare, reconciliatio. The English words ‘reconcile’ and ‘reconciliation’ are understood as being related to these roots. This approach means that other overlapping concepts, such as ‘atonement’ and the German Versöhnung (reconciliation), are treated insofar as they express this Greek and Latin tradition. At the same time, the article pays attention to the recent popularity of reconciliation discourses in political science and peacebuilding, considering that they express an autonomous continuation of this tradition.
This piece explores the concept of “pagan” and the idea of “pagan survivals” in Burchard of Worms’ Corrector sive medicus. The Corrector sive medicus, also known as Corrector Burchardi or Da ...poenitentia was written between the year 1000 and 1025 by Burchard, bishop of Worms, born around the year 965. The Corrector is a penitential manual, the 19th chapter of the Decretum, which recommended penance for those who performed unchristian acts such as murder, adultery, magical practices and others. This article discusses the blurry concept of "pagan" as an initial attempt to shed a light on Burchard's understanding of magic. This article discussed the methodological problems of the idea of “pagan survivals” and “popular beliefs” and argues that trying to find the archaic origins of certain beliefs is not particularly useful to uncover the way medieval writers thought about and saw them.
