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Is Penance Relevant?

What San Jose Diocese Teaches Lay Leaders about the Sacraments

BY ROSEANNE SULLIVAN

What is happening in the diocese of San Jose? For the past few years, the San Jose diocese has been promoting lay leadership in parishes in a way that seems to equate lay and priestly ministry (see "Ordination's No Object," April 2005 Faith), chiefly through its Institute for Leadership in Ministry, which trains lay men and women for parish ministry. The institute' s teaching on the sacraments, as I experienced it as a student there, may shed some light on the theology that underlies the diocese's move toward lay ministry.

A course on the sacraments that I attended in Fall 2003 at the institute featured San Jose's Bishop Patrick McGrath in a class on the sacrament of penance. The following article is based on my notes from the bishop's class as well as related statements from the book Sacramental Theology, a General Introduction by Franciscan Father Kenan B. Osborne (emeritus professor of system atic theology at the Franciscan Theo logical Union, part of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley), and A New Look at the Sacraments by Father William J. Bausch. Both were required reading for the institute's four-week course.

Bishop McGrath began his Fall 2003 class by saying that the Church now knows that Jesus did not institute the sacraments. The bishop said, "the sacraments were not handed to us like the Ten Commandments on a piece of slate by Jesus;" rather, they evolved, and the "seven survived, blessed by the Church."

The bishop told us that theologians are currently reevaluating the sacrament of confession to "see if sacraments relate to the needs of our time." Father Bauch's book expands on this notion. Basically, the re-evaluators believe that in the beginning a community which constituted the Church celebrated the sacraments, but then the sacraments became the property of a hierarchical priesthood who used them to "tease out grace." "No longer the property of the celebrating Christian community at large, the sacraments became the preserve of the sacred specialist who dispenses them," writes Father Bausch.

Bishop McGrath defined the word sacrament, in harmony with the Church's tradition and St. Augustine's formulation, as a "sign," a "symbol," which should be understood with the more profound ancient understanding that symbol does not just stand for something; a symbol actually makes present the reality that it stands for. But then Bishop McGrath said that modern theologians don't accept that there are seven sacraments, as the Council of Trent defined. Rather, said the bishop, the number seven doesn't apply any more because several Vatican II documents use the phrase, the "Church is the primary sacrament of Jesus Christ." If you take this notion of the Church as sacrament literally, you could say there are eight sacraments. (The Catechism of the Catholic Church, incidentally, does not take it so. While speaking of "the seven sacraments" as "the signs and instruments by which the Holy Spirit spreads the grace of Christ the head throughout the Church which is his Body," it says the Church is a sacrament only in an "analogical sense.")

Father Osborne's book on sacramental theology puts the number of sacraments even higher than eight. According to Osborne, after World War I, a group of theologians, including the German Catholic theologian Karl Rahner, "approached the history of the sacrament of penance" and developed a "more balanced and clarified approach." Their approach, Osborne claims, found no evidence for the existence of most of the sacraments in the early Church documents. Osborne says, "if there is no historical evidence for a sacrament beyond a certain date, how can such a sacrament be considered to be instituted by Christ?" Osborne gives something of an answer to this when we says, "long before the church had developed a 'definition' of sacrament, the church had been living the sacraments." But curiously Father Osborne continues in the rest of the book denying that Christ instituted the sacraments.

According to Father Osborne, the idea of the Church as primary sacrament originated before Vatican II in the writings of Father Otto Semmelroth and Father Karl Rahner. Dominican theologian Father Edward Schillebeeckx added the idea that Jesus is a sacrament in his book, Christ, the Sacrament of the Encounter with God, which was widely read by theologians before the council. Father Osborne describes how the writings of Rahner and Schillebeeckx influenced the bishops at the council, so much so that "seven times explicitly and once equivalently, the documents state that the Church is to be considered as a basic sacrament." Because the Vatican II documents nowhere refer to the formulation that Jesus is the primordial sacrament, Father Osborne writes, "we are then able to say that the Church as a sacrament is the ordinary teaching of the Magisterium from Vatican II onward, and that the understanding of Jesus as a sacrament remains a theological position and no more."

The distinction between the "ordinary teaching of the Magisterium" and a "theological position" gave me a way to describe what I observed at the Institute for Leadership in Ministry, where the bishop and the other instructors teach many things as dogma that are merely theological positions.

Father Osborne's book explicates how important it is for ecumenical dialogue to remove the number seven from the sacraments. Osborns states that the new theology of the sacraments is especially desirable for making Catholic doctrine acceptable to Protestants: "the definition of the Church itself as a sacrament and especially of Jesus as the primordial sacrament helps to bind together word and sacrament in a way which Protestantism can find more acceptable. With Jesus as the primordial sacrament, the dominance of the word is evident...."

In a later book, Christian Sacraments in a Postmodern World: A Theology for the Third Millennium, Father Osborne adds still another possible sacrament. According to a review in the Jesuit magazine America, Father Osborne suggests "that the '[believer] in God and in revelation' must first understand 'the world itself as a possible sacrament,' that is, as the place where God enacts the divine purpose to save all people. Then the believer can begin to see that the church is a sacrament only because God is present there, revealing God's own self to those who assemble, in all their concreteness and intersubjectivity, in response to 'the prior act of a revealing God.' The universality of the church comes from God's universal saving love and presence, not from any absolute claims made by a finite church."

To understand some of the words chosen by Bishop McGrath in his class on penance, it helps to remember that he and the theologians quoted in the assigned books assume the historical-critical interpretation of the meaning of the Scriptures. As Father Osborne said, those who don't follow the historical-critical approach, but who believe that Christ actually said the words in the Gospels and that the events recorded in the Gospels actually took place as they were written, are "fundamentalists."

In contrast to Osborne, Vatican II's apostolic constitution, Dei Verbum (Word of God), reads like a fundamen talist tract; the council says, "the Gospels ... are the principle witness for the life and teaching of the incarnate Word, our savior." It goes on to say, "the Church has always and everywhere held and continues to hold that the four Gospels are of apostolic origin...." The Gospels, whose "historical character the Church unhesitatingly asserts, faithfully hand on what Jesus Christ, while living among men, really did and taught for their eternal salvation" And Dei Verbum says that the Gospels always "told us the honest truth about Jesus."

Many of those who quote Dei Verbum claim it says the opposite, that the Gospels are reflections written by communities of believers who created stories that illustrated what the communities wanted to express about Jesus. Bishop McGrath appears to embrace this position. In a statement published in the February 18, 2004 San Jose Mercury News about the movie, The Passion of the Christ," McGrath says "the four gospels ... are not historical accounts of the historical events that they narrate." This may explain why Bishop McGrath did not quote the Scriptures themselves in his class on penance but could only say that "the Church knew from the beginning that it could forgive sins." For McGrath, "the Church" may not mean the apostles headed by Peter and those who succeeded them but the celebrating community from which they believe all doctrine and Scripture arose.

After reiterating that the "Church is the primary sacrament of Jesus Christ," Bishop McGrath told us that currently the sacrament of penance is "not part of initiation rites" of "baptism, Eucharist, confirmation," because baptism forgives all sin. The bishop than said that the early Church offered "baptism for the forgiveness of sins;" that baptism was the "sign of a reality: turning away, turning around, turning to;" and that "sin after Baptism wasn't considered as a possibility." From this, the bishop concluded, "the Church always knew it had the power to forgive sin" and now the Church is more aware of the "variety of ways to forgive sin." "Post-Vatican II theological reflection," McGrath said, "has brought forth the various forms of reconciliation."

In answer to his own rhetorical question, "where did penance come from?" Bishop McGrath, in line with Father Osborne's book, went on to say that, in the beginning of the Church, all Christians were preparing for the parousia, the Second Coming, which was thought to be so imminent that no provision was made for sinning Christians.

Speaking of public penance, which was reserved only for those who had committed the grave sins of murder, adultery, or apostasy, McGrath said it evolved when the Second Coming did not happen right away, because Christians who sinned after Baptism needed to be forgiven. But, said the bishop, ordinary people had no way to do penance after baptism for serious sins. Thus it was that "private penance evolved," where "the priest took the place of the commu nity." Penance then stopped being a one-time only thing, and it became repeatable and part of the "official tradition." Eventually, "the matter and form of the sacrament became all important, less important than repentance."

According to Bishop McGrath, the sacrament of penance is "for those who feel they 'need' the sacrament before they approach the Eucharist."

For Bishop McGrath, the Eucharist is one of the various forms of reconciliation, even where grave sin is involved. "Look for the area of forgiveness of sin in the Eucharistic Prayer," McGrath said, and then he quoted the parts of the Mass that are penitential. According to the bishop, the third-century Church Father, Origen, taught that "even grave sin could be forgiven" by the Eucharist.

"Because Eucharist celebrates the saving acts of Jesus," Bishop McGrath said, in "connecting ourselves" to His saving acts, "we are forgiven." There is "no mention of only venial sins being forgiven," the bishop claimed. It was only after the Reformation that the "Council of Trent emphasized the sacrament of penance, and other forms were lost."

Following Father Bausch's book, the bishop continued, "it's going to take a lot of catechesis to restore the idea of the Eucharist as a sacrament of reconciliation." The sacrament of penance has become an intrusion. Reconciliation is a lifetime process. Before the post-Vatican II Church, the "social relevance of the sacrament was gone," the bishop said. "The Church says that we have to make penance available to children who ask for it, so that is the reason [why penance has to be included in training for communion]."

However, the Catechism of the Catholic Church does not see the Eucharist as a sacrament of reconciliation for grave sin. "Anyone who is aware of having committed a mortal sin," it says, "must not receive Holy Communion, even if he experiences deep contrition, without having first received sacramental absolution, unless he has a grave reason for receiving Communion and there is no possibility of going to confession."

Further, Pope John Paul II affirmed that the Church's teaching on the sacrament of penance has not changed. In his 2003 encyclical, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, the pope wrote, "the Catechism of the Catholic Church rightly stipulates that 'anyone conscious of a grave sin must receive the sacrament of Reconcil iation before coming to communion.' I therefore desire to reaffirm that in the Church there remains in force, now and in the future, the rule by which the Council of Trent gave concrete expression to the Apostle Paul's stern warning when it affirmed that, in order to receive the Eucharist in a worthy manner, 'one must first confess one's sins, when one is aware of mortal sin.'"

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