{"id":59,"date":"2008-04-16T15:31:57","date_gmt":"2008-04-16T15:31:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/benedictions\/2008\/04\/penance-and-the-pope.html"},"modified":"2008-04-16T15:31:57","modified_gmt":"2008-04-16T15:31:57","slug":"penance-and-the-pope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/2008\/04\/penance-and-the-pope.html","title":{"rendered":"Penance and the Pope"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday’s strong and welcome words by Benedict XVI to reporters on the papal plane saying he was “deeply ashamed” at the clergy sexual abuse scandal set the tone for his visit–first impressions are important, and those words did a great deal to signal to Americans that Benedict “gets it” in a way too many, though not all, bishops did not, or do not. (Read the transcript<\/a> of the in-flight at CNS.)
\nMore words are expected along these lines. Welcome as they are, over at the New York Times blogs, Father James Martin, a Jesuit and editor at America magazine and author of popular books like “My Life with the Saints,” points out that the Rite of Reconciliation, a.k.a. confession, has three distinct aspects, each of which must be fulfilled. Martin writes:<\/p>\n

Let me explain. Traditionally, the \u201cRite of Reconciliation\u201d in the Catholic Church (better known as \u201cconfession\u201d) included three steps for a person seeking forgiveness. First, repentance. That is, you must be truly sorry for your sins. Second, a \u201cfirm purpose of amendment,\u201d which means your pledge not to sin in the same way again. Those two aspects of the sacrament have been tried, by various bishops and by various superiors of religious orders, with varying degrees of success, as a way of making amends for their actions. (You may think that they haven\u2019t been done well, but my point is that those two steps have been tried in some places.)
\nBut what about the third part of the sacrament: penance?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

IRead the rest of this excellent piece here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday’s strong and welcome words by Benedict XVI to reporters on the papal plane saying he was “deeply ashamed” at the clergy sexual abuse scandal set the tone for his visit–first impressions are important, and those words did a great deal to signal to Americans that Benedict “gets it” in a way too many, though…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nPenance and the Pope - Benedictions: The Pope in America<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/2008\/04\/penance-and-the-pope.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Penance and the Pope - 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}