Penance and reconciliation

Church teaching holds that only God forgives sins, writes Cathal Barry

The Church teaches that sin is, before all else, an offense against God. The Catechism of the Catholic Church refers to sin as “a rupture of communion with him”.

“At the same time,” the key teaching document of the Church states, “it damages communion with the Church”.

“For this reason conversion entails both God’s forgiveness and reconciliation with the Church, which are expressed and accomplished liturgically by the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation.”

Church teaching holds that only God forgives sins. “Christ has willed that in her prayer and life and action his whole Church should be the sign and instrument of the forgiveness and reconciliation that he acquired for us at the price of his blood,” the Catechism states.

However, the document notes that he entrusted the exercise of the power of absolution to the apostolic ministry which he charged with the “ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor 5:18).

The apostle is sent out “on behalf of Christ” with “God making his appeal” through him and pleading: “Be reconciled to God.” (Cor 5:20)

Sinners

During his public life, the Church teaches that Jesus not only forgave sins, but also made plain the effect of this forgiveness. The Catechcism states that he “reintegrated forgiven sinners into the community of the People of God from which sin had alienated or even excluded them”.

“A remarkable sign of this is the fact that Jesus receives sinners at his table, a gesture that expresses in an astonishing way both God’s forgiveness and the return to the bosom of the People of God,” the document says, citing Luke’s Gospel.

In imparting to his apostles his own power to forgive sins, the Catechism states that the Lord also “gives them the authority to reconcile sinners with the Church”.

This ecclesial dimension of their task, according to the Church, is expressed most notably in Christ’s solemn words to Simon Peter:

“I will give you the keys of the kingdom of Heaven, and whatever you bind on Earth shall be bound in Heaven, and whatever you loose on Earth shall be loosed in Heaven (Mt 16:19).”

The Church teaches that the words bind and loose mean: Whomever you exclude from your communion, will be excluded from communion with God; whomever you receive anew into your communion, God will welcome back into his. “Reconciliation with the Church is inseparable from reconciliation with God,” the Catechism states.

Christ instituted the Sacrament of Penance, according to the Catechism, for all sinful members of his Church.

“Above all for those who, since Baptism, have fallen into grave sin, and have thus lost their baptismal grace and wounded ecclesial communion.

“It is to them that the Sacrament of Penance offers a new possibility to convert and to recover the grace of justification,” the document states.

The Fathers of the Church present this sacrament as “the second plank [of salvation] after the shipwreck which is the loss of grace” (Tertullian).