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A priest offering the sacrament of reconciliation listens to a young woman at SEEK25 in Salt Lake City Jan. 3, 2025. Each year the Fellowship of Catholic University Students, known as FOCUS, holds the annual SEEK conference to bring together thousands of its campus missionaries and college students from across the nation. For 2025, it was held Jan. 1-5 in Salt Lake City and Jan. 2-5 in Washington. (OSV News photo/courtesy FOCUS)

5 things to know about the sacrament of reconciliation


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OSV News Filed Under: Commentary, Worship & Sacraments

Looking around at the evil and suffering we encounter on our screens, in our communities, in our families and even staring back at us in the mirror, it can be difficult to believe that Christ came 2,000 years ago to heal our world.

We sure don’t look redeemed.

The tension between sin and reconciliation, though, is at the heart of the mission of the Catholic Church. Christ told his apostles to teach “repentance and forgiveness of sins,” and he empowered them to be ministers of God’s mercy. It is carried on today in the sacrament of reconciliation.

Here are five things you might not know, others you once learned but perhaps forgot, and inspiration to recommit daily to seeking closer friendship with God through repentance and fighting sin, wherever it is found.

  1. Jesus instituted the sacrament of penance when he appeared to the apostles on Easter Sunday night. In the Gospel of John, Jesus breathes on the apostles and tells them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained” (20:22-23).
  2. The sacrament of penance looked a lot different in the early church. In St. Paul’s writings (for example, 1 Cor 5:3-5; 2 Cor 2:7-11), we see the apostles’ role in placing sinners under bans of excommunication and then reconciling them. It also seems there was an initial custom of public confession of sins, but that seems to have ended early on. By the fifth century, church leaders actively discouraged the practice. In some regions, it was common for people guilty of serious sins (like apostasy, adultery or murder) to be enrolled as “public penitents,” meaning they dressed in sackcloth and ashes and performed prescribed penances and almsgiving. They then would be reconciled publicly with the church on the Thursday before Easter.
  3. We owe it to Irish monks for several innovations that led to the practice of the sacrament of penance as we recognize it today. They formalized the practice of confession of sins made privately to a priest, and under a seal of secrecy, and absolution was granted before penance, usually also private, was performed. This Celtic practice of immediate absolution became very popular and was spread throughout Europe through the Irish monks’ missionary endeavors.
  4. During the Middle Ages, theologians all recognized penance as a sacrament of the church, but disagreed on fine points like whether forgiveness came about through the grace of the person’s sorrow, or through the grace of the priest’s absolution. St. Thomas Aquinas, using scholastic terms, defined the “matter” of the sacrament as the penitent’s sorrow, and the “form” as the priest’s absolution. The second Council of Lyons, France, in 1274 formally defined penance as a sacrament. But it was the Council of Trent, Italy, in the mid-16th century that really made extensive clarifications to the sacrament. It devoted some nine chapters and 15 canons on sin and penance. The Second Vatican Council also dwelled on the sacrament, emphasizing its healing nature.
  5. Why do we use both “reconciliation” and “penance” to describe the sacrament? Reconciliation and penance are two different aspects of the sacrament. Reconciliation refers primarily to the process by which someone who is in serious sin returns to the full communion of the church through confession and absolution.

Penance refers to the process by which someone who is guilty of lesser sins and who has not broken communion with the church through mortal sin continues his or her life in the church by spiritual growth and conversion via sacramental confession.

This distinction between reconciliation and penance also serves to orient people as they prepare for the sacrament. (The Catechism also refers to it as the “sacrament of forgiveness” and the “sacrament of conversion.”)

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