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International Theological Commission
Memory and reconciliation

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  • 1. The Problem: Yesterday and Today
    • 1.1 Before Vatican II
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1. The Problem: Yesterday and Today

1.1 Before Vatican II

The Jubilee has always been lived in the Church as a time of joy for the salvation given in Christ and as a privileged occasion for penance and reconciliation for the sins present in the lives of the People of God. From its first celebration under Boniface VIII in 1300, the penitential pilgrimage to the tombs of the Apostles Peter and Paul was associated with the granting of an exceptional indulgence for procuring, with sacramental pardon, total or partial remission of the temporal punishment due to sin.4 In this context, both sacramental forgiveness and the remission of temporal punishment have a personal character. In the course of the “year of pardon and grace,”5 the Church dispenses in a particular way the treasury of grace that Christ has constituted for her benefit.6 In none of the Jubilees celebrated till now has there been, however, an awareness in conscience of any faults in the Church’s past, nor of the need to ask God’s pardon for conduct in the recent or remote past.

Indeed, in the entire history of the Church there are no precedents for requests for forgiveness by the Magisterium for past wrongs. Councils and papal decrees applied sanctions, to be sure, to abuses of which clerics and laymen were found guilty, and many pastors sincerely strove to correct them. However, the occasions when ecclesiastical authoritiesPope, Bishops, or Councils – have openly acknowledged the faults or abuses which they themselves were guilty of, have been quite rare. One famous example is furnished by the reforming Pope Adrian VI who acknowledged publicly in a message to the Diet of Nuremberg of November 25, 1522, “the abominations, the abuses...and the lies” of which the “Roman court” of his time was guilty, “deep-rooted and extensivesickness,” extending “from the top to the members.”7 Adrian VI deplored the faults of his times, precisely those of his immediate predecessor Leo X and his curia, without, however, adding a request for pardon. It will be necessary to wait until Paul VI to find a Pope express a request for pardon addressed as much to God as to a group of contemporaries. In his address at the opening of the second session of the Second Vatican Council, the Pope askedpardon of God…and of the separated brethren” of the East who may have felt offended “by us” (the Catholic Church), and declared himself ready for his part to pardon offences received. In the view of Paul VI, both the request for and offer of pardon concerned solely the sin of the division between Christians and presupposed reciprocity.




4 Cf. Extravagantes communes, lib. V, tit. IX, c. 1 (A. Friedberg, Corpus iuris canonici, t. II, c. 1304).



5 Cf. Clement XIV, Letter Salutis nostrae, April 30, 1774, § 2. Leo XII in the Letter Quod hoc ineunte, May 24, 1824, §2 speaks of the “year of expiation, forgiveness and redemption, of grace, remission and of indulgence.”



6 This is the sense of the definition of indulgence given by Clement VI when in 1343 he instituted the practice of having a Jubilee every fifty years. Clement VI sees in the Church’s Jubilee “the spiritual accomplishment” of the “Jubilee of remission and of joy” in the Old Testament (Lv 25).



7 “Each of us must examine [his conscience] with respect to what he has fallen into and examine himself even more rigorously than God will on the day of his wrath” in Deutsche Reichstagsakten, new series, III, 390-399 (Gotha, 1893).






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