Folia Theologica et Canonica 11. 33/25 (2022)

Ius canonicum

MANDATORY REPORTING LEGISLATION AND THE SEAL OF CONFESSION... 145

today, a disciplinary penalty in the Church to punish serious external breaches of God’s law, but as exclusion from Holy Communion;123 the purpose of both excommunications are, however, the same: conversion and healing.

At all times the exclusion from communion with accompanying penance could be either imposed by an authority, or accepted by voluntary submission. By the middle of the fifth century, voluntary penance was everywhere becoming rare, and penance imposed by authority was tending to become restricted to notorious offenders condemned in a course of a formal procedure.124

In his Letter Pope Leo I, however, rebuked the bishops of Vienne for hasty excommunications, saying, “the excommunication should be inflicted only on those who are guilty of some great crime, and even then not hastily. No Christian should lightly be denied communion, nor should that be done at the will of an angry priest which the judge’s mind ought to a certain extent unwillingly and regretfully to carry out for the punishment of a great crime.”125 Pope Innocent I (402—417) attempts to clarify the change in the penitential practice of the Church by writing about the contrast between the leniency of his own day in admitting capital offenders to restoration, and the greater rigor which had prevailed in a past age.126 By the 6th century, disciplinary excommunication was not inevitably the integral part of the penitential discipline, as Theodore of Tarsus, Archbishop of Canterbury (668), attests.127

c. Satisfaction

The second stage of the early public penitential discipline was satisfaction, which consisted in the fulfillment of the penance imposed by the bishop or priest at the time of the confession,128 after which the penitents were enrolled in the “ordo paenitentium”129 by the imposition of hands130 of the bishop, in the presence of the priests and faithful, and accompanied by the prayers of the congregation.131

113 See Augustine, Sermo 351: PL XXXIX. 1536-1538; cf. Riga, R, Sin and Penance, 96.

124 See Watkins, O., A History of the Penance, I. 418.

125 Leo I., Letter VIII: Schaff, Ph., SS Leo I. Magnus — Epistolae, Documenta Catholica Omnia, 36: http://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/01p/04400461,_SS_Leo_I._Magnus,_Epistolae_

[Schaff], _EN.pdf (consulted: 1/26/2023).

126 See Watkins, O., A History of the Penance, I. 414.

127 Paenitentiale Theodori I: 13; cf. Bussakrament, in Neues Handbuch theologischer Grundbegriffe, I. München 210.

128 See Eberhardt, N. C., A Summary of Catholic History, 107.

129 For example a Synode of Orange (441) Can. 3: stent in ordine paenitentium. Cf. Synod of Arles II (443 or 452) Can. 11, and see Poschmann, B., Penance and Anointing of the Sick, 87.

un which is according to Poschmann the characteristic and essential feature of “canonical penance” (See Poschmann, B., Penance and Anointing of the Sick, 87).

131 Tertulian, De poenitentia 9-10. Augustine in his writings and Sozomen, provide a detailed description of the “order of penitents”.