Confraternity of Penitents

Confraternities of Penitents are Roman Catholic religious congregations, with statutes prescribing various penitential works. These may include fasting, the use of the discipline, the wearing of a hair shirt, etc.

By the mid 12th century lay individuals practicing penance in central and northern Italy had begun to join together in associations for mutual spiritual and material support. The converso was a layman who had made a "conversion of life" and was affiliated to a monastic order as a lay brother. "Penitents" were those who adopted asceticism. Gradually, the distinction blurred. They retained their personal property and worked to support themselves. They were not cloistered monastics. By 1210 some had, with clerical assistance, composed "rules" or forms of life. These rules generally proscribed blasphemy, gambling, haunting taverns, and womanizing. In 1227 Pope Gergory IX recognized and approved canonical status for groups he called "Brothers and Sisters of Penance". They observed the tradition fast of Wednesday and Saturday and St. Martin's Lent. This involved avoiding meat and dairy, and eating one meal a day, usually in the early afternoon. Those who could not fast were to provide food for a poor person for each day they themselves were dispensed from fasting. According to Augustine Thompson O.P., "Common penitential life and mutual fraternity gave the members their common identity, not some shared special devotion."

Most penitent confraternities took up some charitable activity. Around 1230, Florentine penitents established the Santa Maria Novella hospital. Over time, acts of charity began to replace the practice of self-flagellation. The Confraternity of Saint Lazarus in Marseille was founded in 1550 and undertook as its charitable work the maintenance of a local leper hospital.

Penitential confraternities developed in Italy and had spread to France by the end of the fifteenth century. Andrew E. Barnes describes Penitential Confraternities as initially "small exclusive associations for urban male elites, distinctive both for their robes and hoods which cloaked their members' identities and for the independence from parochial interference which their status as protégés of the mendicant orders permitted.

The penitential confraternities were a phenomenon typical of southern France. In the sixteenth century they were established in the French cities, and by the seventeenth had gained momentum in rural area, where women joined as well as men.

A degree of tension developed between the confraternities and the bishops as some members attended Mass in the confraternity chapel rather than the parish church. Some confraternities had their own chaplain, and even non-members would attend the shorter masses, where no sermon was given, drawing a number of parishioners from the local church. Curés would complain that the penitents were conducting a parallel religious cult separate and in competition with the parish. The penitents "used the baroque spirituality of the Counter-Reformation, with its taste for display and collective activities, as an expression of communal religious devotion and vitality." Their torch lit processions presented an alternative focus for religious life in the parish.

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