Penitential

A penitential is a book or set of church rules concerning the Christian sacrament of penance, a "new manner of reconciliation with God" that was first developed by Celtic monks in Ireland in the sixth century AD. It consisted of a list of sins and the appropriate penances prescribed for them, and served as a type of manual for confessors.

In the Early Christian Church absolution for sin was granted after confession and absolution; reconciliation was followed by readmission to the Eucharist. Absolution was granted once in a lifetime, and at set seasons of the year. Public penance did not necessarily include a public avowal of sin, but was decided by the confessor, and was to some extent determined by whether or not the offense was sufficiently open or notorious to cause scandal to others. Oakley points out that recourse to public penance varied both in time and place, and was affected by the weaknesses of the secular law. The ancient praxis of penance relied on papal decrees and synods, which were translated and collected in early medieval collection. Little of those written rules, however, was retained in the later penitentials.

The earliest important penitentials were those by the Irish abbots Cummean (who based his work on a sixth-century Celtic monastic text known as the Paenitentiale Ambrosianum),Columbanus and Archbishop of Canterbury, Theodore of Tarsus. Most later penitentials are based on theirs, rather than on earlier Roman texts. The number of Irish penitentials and their importance is cited as evidence of the particular strictness of the Irish spirituality of the seventh century. Walter J. Woods holds that "[o]ver time the penitential books helped suppress homicide, personal violence, theft, and other offenses that damaged the community and made the offender a target for revenge."

According to Thomas Pollock Oakley, the penitential guides first developed in Wales, probably at St. David's, and spread by missions to Ireland. They were brought to Britain with the Hiberno-Scottish mission and were introduced to the Continent by Irish and Anglo-Saxon missionaries.

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