On Confession as power given to the clergy

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Hello,
we agree that evangelization “Go and make disciples…” is meant for every believer. Howw to show that “the sins you forgive will be forgiven…” is meant just for priests, and not every believer, as giver of the sacrament. In both cases, he talks to the disciples.
Thank you 🙂
 
I think that it is meant for everyone to some extent. We are all to forgive the sins of others. And this is a true forgiveness but not sacramental, nor is it done in the person of Christ, as a priest does it. St. Paul describes this in 2 Cor. 2:10 saying that he pardoned those whom were pardoned by the people, but that he did it in the person of Christ. There is a distinction, from the people’s forgiveness and St. Paul’s forgiveness. You could say the people forgive in the name of the community but Paul forgives in the name of God. And the people had already forgiven them, but St. Paul binds that forgiveness in heaven by forgiving in the person of Christ.

People really only have the authority to forgive the sins which were committed against them. If I commit adultery for example, my wife could forgive me, but I couldn’t seek forgiveness from a friend because I didn’t commit the offense against my friend, I committed it against my wife. My friend has no right or authority to forgive my sin. We can also commit sins that don’t affect anyone else directly, who can forgive those sins? Some sins affect others directly, but all sin is an offence to God. It is the priest that forgives on behalf of the community and God. Ideally if we offended another person we should also seek that persons forgiveness as well.

If we seek that other persons forgiveness and they refuse to forgive does that mean that it is also not forgiven in heaven (held bound)? God who knows the hearts and minds of all men has promised to forgive those sins for which we are sorry for (even if it’s not a perfect contrition). When a person goes to confession, there is almost always some amount of repentance, and it is on this the priest can absolve in the person of Christ. On rare occasions if someone shows no sign of repentance the priest will refuse to absolve. This is what is bound in heaven.

I find it rather a scary thought to think that my offence against anyone could be held bound in heaven just because they refused to forgive even if I was sincerely repentant.
 
No, we do not agree. The Great Commission is addressed to the Apostles and their successors, not to everyone.

Granted, “All Christ’s faithful are called to hand [the gospel] on from generation to generation, by professing the faith, by living it in fraternal sharing, and by celebrating it in liturgy and prayer” (CCC 3) – but the Apostles and their successors alone have the formal commission to teach and to baptize, with all the prerogatives, powers, and privileges pertaining thereto. Otherwise, there would be no such thing as the Magisterium.
 
Ad_Orientem said:
No, we do not agree. The Great Commission is addressed to the Apostles and their successors, not to everyone.

Granted, “All Christ’s faithful are called to hand [the gospel] on from generation to generation, by professing the faith, by living it in fraternal sharing, and by celebrating it in liturgy and prayer” (CCC 3) – but the Apostles and their successors alone have the formal commission to teach and to baptize, with all the prerogatives, powers, and privileges pertaining thereto. Otherwise, there would be no such thing as the Magisterium.
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This is the correct answer. The Great Commission is specific: teach, baptize. These are apostolic functions, which are even today properly vested in our bishops.
 
Ad_Orientem said:
No, we do not agree. The Great Commission is addressed to the Apostles and their successors, not to everyone.

Granted, “All Christ’s faithful are called to hand [the gospel] on from generation to generation, by professing the faith, by living it in fraternal sharing, and by celebrating it in liturgy and prayer” (CCC 3) – but the Apostles and their successors alone have the formal commission to teach and to baptize, with all the prerogatives, powers, and privileges pertaining thereto. Otherwise, there would be no such thing as the Magisterium.
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I surely wasn’t talking about baptism. It was then unclear. Just evangelization. Make disciples.
 
spiderweb said:
I think that it is meant for everyone to some extent. We are all to forgive the sins of others. And this is a true forgiveness but not sacramental, nor is it done in the person of Christ, as a priest does it. St. Paul describes this in 2 Cor. 2:10 saying that he pardoned those whom were pardoned by the people, but that he did it in the person of Christ. There is a distinction, from the people’s forgiveness and St. Paul’s forgiveness. You could say the people forgive in the name of the community but Paul forgives in the name of God. And the people had already forgiven them, but St. Paul binds that forgiveness in heaven by forgiving in the person of Christ.

People really only have the authority to forgive the sins which were committed against them. If I commit adultery for example, my wife could forgive me, but I couldn’t seek forgiveness from a friend because I didn’t commit the offense against my friend, I committed it against my wife. My friend has no right or authority to forgive my sin. We can also commit sins that don’t affect anyone else directly, who can forgive those sins? Some sins affect others directly, but all sin is an offence to God. It is the priest that forgives on behalf of the community and God. Ideally if we offended another person we should also seek that persons forgiveness as well.

If we seek that other persons forgiveness and they refuse to forgive does that mean that it is also not forgiven in heaven (held bound)? God who knows the hearts and minds of all men has promised to forgive those sins for which we are sorry for (even if it’s not a perfect contrition). When a person goes to confession, there is almost always some amount of repentance, and it is on this the priest can absolve in the person of Christ. On rare occasions if someone shows no sign of repentance the priest will refuse to absolve. This is what is bound in heaven.

I find it rather a scary thought to think that my offence against anyone could be held bound in heaven just because they refused to forgive even if I was sincerely repentant.
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Ok, but how to show that sacramental Reconciliation is a power given to the church as an institution and not as the whole flock?
 
If you don’t want to appeal to magisterial teaching on the sacraments, you could use an historical argument–from the early Church onward it has always been understood as a sacrament administered by a priest. This was not questioned until the 1500s by radicals. Offhand I don’t have references but you could easily find them. Do you have a copy of Jimmy Akin’s “Fathers Know Best”?
 
John never uses the word Apostle at all in any of his writing. The word Apostle does not appear at all in John’s gospel. John uses the word disciple exclusively and we have to discern whom John is talking about from the context.

In John 20 we hear only about Peter, Thomas and “the other disciple” which is commonly accepted as John himself. These are Apostles. John uses the word brethren for the rest of Jesus’ followers in John 20.

-Tim-
 
Ad_Orientem said:
If you don’t want to appeal to magisterial teaching on the sacraments, you could use an historical argument–from the early Church onward it has always been understood as a sacrament administered by a priest. This was not questioned until the 1500s by radicals. Offhand I don’t have references but you could easily find them. Do you have a copy of Jimmy Akin’s “Fathers Know Best”?
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Ah this would be good. If you have any source about this in the early Church. I would appreicate that. I would love to purchase a copy…
 
Don’t forget that the apostles were also called disciples such as in John 21:7-8. The authority given to the church is given in John 20:21-23 where Christ breathed on them and said “receive the power of the Holy Spirit, whose sins you forgive…”. This is not clear if it is only given to the twelve apostles or to all disciples so we have to look at how it was used in practice and understood by the early church.

In the example I gave earlier were St. Paul forgives in the person of Christ, there would be no reason for him to do so if the other members of the church were able to loose their sins with the authority of God. This implies St. Paul had an authority that the other members of the church did not have. We also have in James 5:14-15 the prayers of the priest absolving the sins of the sick man and the people are told to call for the priest. Again why would that be necessary if any one could forgive sins with the authority of God. We also have St. Paul binding someone in their sins (1 Cor 5:5 and 1 Tim 1:20) “delivering someone over to satan”. When our sins are not forgiven, we are still bound in the slavery of sin and satan, instead of the freedom of absolution in the grace of God. We also have authority being passed on demonstrated in 1 Tim 4:14, 2 Tim 1:6, and Tit 1:5 through the laying on of hands.

The below quote is from the Apostolic Tradition written in AD 215:
[The bishop conducting the ordination of the new bishop shall pray:] God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. . . pour forth now that power which comes from you, from your Royal Spirit, which you gave to your beloved Son, Jesus Christ, and which he bestowed upon his holy apostles. . . and grant this your servant, whom you have chosen for the episcopate, [the power] to feed your holy flock and to serve without blame as your high priest, ministering night and day to propitiate unceasingly before your face and to offer to you the gifts of your holy Church, **and by the Spirit of the high priesthood to have the authority to forgive sins, in accord with your command **(Apostolic Tradition 3 [A.D. 215]).
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This is an interesting prayer. It is a formula prayer which implies that this was used long before we have it written down in this manuscript which records other formula prayers as well. It also mirrors the passages in John showing the authority being passed on from God the Father, to the Son, to the Apostles, and to their successors. So we have from the Bible Jesus giving the authority, St. Paul demonstrating the authority, and passing it on to others. We also have from the early church that this was passed on during the ordination of the bishop through the laying on of hands.

From the perspective that this authority was given to any and all disciples of Christ just doesn’t add up to the information and practice demonstrated in scripture and the early church. There is no indication either in the bible or the early church that everybody thought that they had this same authority.
 
The idea of priestly confession came long after that Scripture verse. We, of course, use it now to show the power of the priesthood to forgive sins which is a good thing.

One of the meanings of the author at the time it was written was to show that “the sins you forgive will be forgiven, the sins you retained will be retained,” is the fact that if you dont forgive people, the sin commited goes gets retained back on you. So this passage is more about foregiveness.
 
I too would like proof of LittleFlower378’s claims, including the claim that “the passage is more about forgiveness” (meaning that it is less about the sacrament of Penance than about the consequences of not forgiving your neighbor).

As to resources, John Salza has put together this page which quotes scriptures and early Christian sources on the sacrament of Penance.
 
LittleFlower378 said:
One of the meanings of the author at the time it was written was to show that “the sins you forgive will be forgiven, the sins you retained will be retained,” is the fact that if you dont forgive people, the sin commited goes gets retained back on you. So this passage is more about foregiveness.
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In some sense this is correct, just as in the Lord’s prayer, “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Or in another place Jesus says that if you don’t forgive the sins of others neither will your heavenly father forgive you.

Having said that, that pertains to our responsibility to others to forgive them on our own behalf. But the priests has the authority to forgive on behalf of God. As St. Paul demonstrates in 1 Cor 5:1-5 that there was a man who slept with his father’s wife (5:1) and St. Paul binds him in his sin (5:5) and does not forgive. There is no indication that this gets reflected (or retained) back onto St. Paul.

There is a difference between personal forgiveness that I can give on behalf of myself, and the forgiveness of the priest which can be given or retained on behalf of God as St. Paul again states, “in the person of Christ” (2 Cor. 2:10).
 
I am sorry, I am not saying this scripture verse is more or less about anything. Scripture can be used in different “senses.” So all the things Salza writes about confession are true, but the scripture verse in its literal sense is not about priestly confession. To interpret scripture we must come from the literal sense which includes what the author at the time was trying to convey to the community and his listeners. What Salza writes under “Tradition and Church Fathers,” is mostly written after John’s Gospel where we see "“the sins you forgive will be forgiven…” By the time of the Fathers writings it seems they are starting on the path of the idea of priestly confession, but I am not sure. It would be a good idea to look into Church history to see when priestly confession came into existance. I believe that the Irish monks started individual preistly confession.
 
Littleflower, you are at variance with Church teaching. The Council of Trent, Session XIV states:

Canon 1. If anyone says that in the Catholic Church penance is not truly and properly a sacrament instituted by Christ the Lord for reconciling the faithful of God as often as they fall into sin after baptism let him be anathema.

Canon 3. If anyone says that those words of the Lord Savior, “Receive ye the Holy Ghost, whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them, and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained,” are not to be understood of the power of forgiving and retaining sins in the sacrament of penance, as the Catholic Church has always understood them from the beginning, but distorts them, contrary to the institution of this sacrament, as applying to the authority of preaching the Gospel, let him be anathema.

Canon 6. If anyone denies that sacramental confession was instituted by divine law or is necessary to salvation; or says that the manner of confessing secretly to a priest alone, which the Catholic Church has always observed from the beginning and still observes, is at variance with the institution and command of Christ and is a human contrivance, let him be anathema.
 
Wow this is a deep subject, thank you, Ad. Few points: I am not saying that Christ did not mandate this Sacrament, nor am I going against any of the points highlighted in Trent. I am not saying that there was no such thing as reconciliation given by the Church from the time of Christ. But the sacrament as we know it today, ***private confession ***where a priest in the Church in a confessional giving individual confession, was not the common practice in the early Church. In the early Church, for the most part confession was public and the penance could take years or even a lifetime to fufill.

Was John’s first intention when he wrote this passage to establish the sacrament of penance or to convey Jesus establishment of the sacrament. According to the Church it seems like the anwer is “yes” so it seems like the interpretation I give falls into second place here. Sorry, I do not ever want to lead any one astray.

More points by St.Pius X to note:
**Belief and practice of the early Church
Among the modernistic propositions condemned by Pius X in the Decree “Lamentabili sane” (3 July, 1907) are the following:

•“In the primitive Church there was no concept of the reconciliation of the Christian sinner by the authority of the Church, but the Church by very slow degrees only grew accustomed to this concept. Moreover, even after penance came to be recognized as an institution of the Church, it was not called by the name of sacrament, because it was regarded as an odious sacrament.” (46)
•“The Lord’s words: ‘Receive ye the Holy Ghost, whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them, and whose sins you shall retain they are retained’ (John 20:22-23), in no way refer to the Sacrament of Penance, whatever the Fathers of Trent may have been pleased to assert.” (47) **

Read under:Belief and practice of the early Church
newadvent.org/cathen/11618c.htm
 
Littleflower, thanks for clarifying; sorry if I misjudged your remarks. That’s a great quote!
 
No, thanks for keeping me on my feet. I learned a lot because you questioned me. The way I explained it saying it wasn’t years later until they realized the sacrament was misleading.
 
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