- 55 - 8. 12 Repentance – Confession - Absolution d. “The Catholic Church has a Sacrament of Penance. According to the teachings of the New Testament, ‘penance’ signifies a change of heart. John the Baptist preached repentance as a means to obtain forgiveness for sins, and of Christ it is related: Matthew 4: 17: ‘From that time on, Jesus began to preach the message of salvation, saying, Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ ‘Repent’ literally means: ‘Change your manner of thinking.’ Repentance is therefore a spiritual change, by which the mind ceases to harbor evil thoughts and turns to God. • Whoever lays aside a former evil habit and acquires a good one gives evidence of a change of heart and is one of the penitents. The Catholics give a far wider scope to the sacrament of penance. They do not regard reformation in thought and conduct as sufficient. The Catholic Church demands, rather, as a condition for such reformation and reconciliation with God, the confession of each individual grave sin before a Catholic priest, who alone, according to its teachings, has the power to act in God’s place in granting pardon. For Catholics, there can be no pardon without priestly absolution, and in this way the Church tightly binds its adherents to the priesthood and to the church organization. This is the spiritual power by which it exercises unrestricted domination over their souls. • ‘ N o o n e c a n f o r g i v e s i n s , s a v e G o d a l o n e . ’ In making this statement to Christ, the scribes were right. No mortal and no priest can grant absolution Even Christ could not. It is true that God can commission a mortal as His instrument to tell a particular sinner that his sins are forgiven. A commission of this kind was given by Him to the prophet Nathan, whom God sent to David to say that He had pardoned him for the sins of adultery and murder. Similarly, Christ had been specially empowered by God in those individual cases in which he told the sinners that they had been forgiven. He did not grant this pardon himself or at his own discretion, but announced it only to those whom God, through His spirit messengers, had designated as being worthy of forgiveness. This is confirmed by Christ, when he expressly tells his opponents that his Father had authorized him to do so – not given him authority to cover all cases at his own pleasure, but only specific authority in each individual instance. The Catholic priest, however, asserts that he has been invested by his bishop with the power to grant or deny absolution to the faithful a c c o r d i n g t o h i s o w n h u m a n judgment. How can he tell whether God has pardoned the sins of one person and not those of another? Or do you delude yourselves into thinking that God will pardon one sinner because he has been absolved by a priest, and deny pardon to another because a priest has refused to absolve him?
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