Sacramental Satisfaction

SACRAMENTAL SATISFACTION. - In the language of the Catholic Church the expression indicates the prayers, good works or various practices of piety that the confessor imposes on the penitent before giving him absolution. It is also customarily called "sacramental penance," to distinguish it from the works of piety that each person can perform on his own account. This satisfaction is the condition of the forgiveness of sin. By accepting it, the sinner manifests the disposition in which he finds himself, or ought to find himself, to make reparation for the offenses committed against God. This makes clear the primitive sense of the term "to satisfy."

Etymologically it means: "to do enough" to content someone, to placate him, to obtain that he renounce willing the punishment of an injury or demanding the payment of a debt. The idea of justice is included in it, but not rigorous justice, because to satisfy a creditor is not equivalent to repaying in full the amount of a debt, but is equivalent to acknowledging oneself a debtor through the diligence employed to satisfy him as far as possible. The same holds in the reparation of an offense: to satisfy for it is not equivalent to undergoing the punishment it deserves, but to perform an act, more or less burdensome, in which is manifested the confession of having made oneself guilty and the intention of soliciting forgiveness. Now, in sin there is a bit of all this: a debt to be paid, an injury to be repaired, a wrath to be placated, a forgiveness to be solicited. The penitent's acceptance of the satisfaction imposed on him is like a confession of the debt he has contracted with respect to divine justice, and it completes his contrition and his confession. Therefore sacramental satisfaction belongs to those acts by which the penitent is asked to contribute in some way to the constitution of the Sacrament administered by the priest. It differs from the other two acts, contrition and confession, only in that it can be performed after absolution. Once accepted, one will commit a more or less grave sin by omitting the promised satisfaction; nevertheless the sins for which it was imposed remain forgiven. For if it is true that the intention of satisfying God is part of the repentance for having offended him, nevertheless the fulfillment of the satisfaction, as such, tends properly only to obtain the remission of the temporal punishment that remains to be expiated after the remission of the guilt.

This doctrine of sacramental satisfaction was defined by the Council of Trent against the Protestants, who insisted on denouncing in it an injury to the infinite efficacy of the satisfaction offered for us to God by Christ himself. But Christ, the Apostles, and the Church have always required penance on the part of the sinner; therefore no doubt can subsist regarding this obligation. Certainly Christ made forgiveness possible for us, but his formal will is that, in order to be able to enjoy it, we ourselves give proof of appreciating the gravity of the evil from which he obtained our liberation. Having returned to grace with God by virtue of the merits of the Redeemer and thus placed beyond the reach of eternal punishments, it does not follow without further ado that we can thereby escape the temporal punishments, with which God reserves to himself the right to make everyone feel how much it costs to have taken sides against him (sess. VI, chaps. 14 and 15; sess. XIV, chaps. 8 and 9; canons 13-15; Denz-U, 807-10; 901-906; 923-25).

Nevertheless this remission of the temporal punishment that remains to be expiated after the recovery of Grace does not constitute the sole purpose of sacramental penance, which, in the thought of the Church, is ordered also to other ends. For it serves not only to recall the gravity of sin, but must also contribute to correcting and reducing its consequences, which are many and at once of a natural and supernatural order. Indeed the capitulation of the conscience, represented by every sin, has repercussions on the whole of psychological and moral life. The will is left weakened by it; by dint of yielding or abandoning oneself to a passion, one becomes its slave; this produces an enslavement from which absolution by itself does not free one at all; a personal reaction is needed.

Once healed of the evil, which consists in the privation of Grace, there persist in the soul traces, almost wounds, sometimes quite deep, of the sin. Penance in general and sacramental penance in particular have as their purpose and effect to heal them, and absolution grants a right to special helps to assist this straightening and healing, which, however, are not completed except by means of sacramental satisfaction.

This multiplicity and variety of ends assigned to sacramental satisfaction explain the variety of forms that it can take, and in fact has taken, through the centuries. Without ever losing sight of the primary end, which is reparation for sins forgiven or to be forgiven, the ministers of the Sacrament of Penance have always considered it their own competence, indeed their own duty, to apportion it variously, taking into account not only the gravity of the faults committed, but also the mentality of the guilty and the conditions of life in which these found themselves; not all the sick are healed by the same remedies. Now, there is nothing more variable than the assessment of these factors.

At the time when multitudes of men were flocking into the Church, ignorant even of the notion of sin and of the necessity of keeping away from it or making reparation for it, the Church judged it opportune to impose on those who made themselves guilty of the graver faults penances that were long and manifest to all. And it did so by establishing, from the 3rd century onward, what is today called "public penance," and which in the language of the Church is designated by the expressions: "to ask for, impose, receive, perform penance." Fervent Christians had recourse to it even for lesser faults. This public penance, while it aimed at the amendment of the guilty party, also served to put one on guard against the temptation to imitate him, and the reparation for the offense committed against God also took on the aspect of reparation for the scandal given to the Christian community. Normally it had to be performed before absolution, but it was not rare for it to be performed afterward or even to be omitted. This happened particularly in the case, far more frequent than the others, in which it was imposed on the sick in danger of death. This also proves how the fulfillment of the penance was not considered indispensable for receiving absolution of the sin for which it was imposed; and it also entails the obligation to recognize in the form of penance thus practiced an institution or a custom of properly ecclesiastical origin, and consequently capable of modifications up to suppression. This was pointed out in the 17th century by Fr. Petau (v. PETAU) to the Jansenist A. Arnauld (v.), who in the disappearance of this practice found a proof of the corruption that had come about over several centuries in the Church. The authority, he was answered, that has approved and approves the current practice is no less infallible than the one that had adopted the practice of public penance. Therefore, some years later (1699), Pope Alexander VII proscribed the doctrine that claimed to trace the ancient custom of performing penance before absolution back to a "law of Jesus Christ" and not to a disposition of the Church (Denz-U, 1306); a proscription renewed by Pius VI in 1794 against the Synod of Pistoia (Denz-U, 1534).

It remains therefore that sacramental penance, as it is commonly imposed today, has rather a symbolic aspect. Like the whole Sacrament itself, it is a "sign"; it signifies, it recalls to the penitent the duty that remains to him of doing penance for the sins of which he receives absolution. Reduced, as often happens, to the recitation of a few prayers, it certainly owes to the virtue of the Sacrament the power to obtain a remission of temporal punishments greater than that which it could have obtained by itself; but it is at the same time an invitation to procure personally, with the help of Grace, one's own full liberation from the consequences of sin. As St. Cyprian said (Epist., 55, 20) and as the theologians recall, he who limits himself to performing the minimum of penance imposed by the confessor exposes himself or condemns himself to pay, after death, his debt toward divine justice, which he could already have paid in this life, had he himself applied himself to doing penance conscientiously.

Paolo Galtier