A Penance Service

Extract

There is a trade of manners in the Church. The way one sacrament is celebrated influences, in time, the liturgy of others. This has been most evident in the recent history of the Eucharist and Penance.

Penance, in the days immediately before Pius X, had pretensions to be a private business between priest and penitent in a box. It was individual and it was frequent. When Pius X made Communion frequent a great many people set about making it individual. Often enough communion was taken from the community context, and men went daily to communion before or after Mass. Even when communion was received within the Mass, efforts were made to maintain privacy for the communicant. Everyone came up quietly (my seminary Rector made a huge fuss when some of us looked up open-eyed as he passed down the line) and, having been quietly given a host from yesterday’s ciborium, they went quietly back to make a little cave with their hands, opening them a little perhaps when the Leonine prayers warned them that a demon was wandering through the world for the ruin of souls, and quickly shutting them again.

All this is done with. The Eucharist has come out into the open again, and now in turn Penance is venturing forth.

Penance has become popular. And this in two senses of the phrase. More people are taking part in the ecclesial forgiveness of God, and they are more often doing so as members one of another rather than as single men.