NEWS STORY: Pope will lead unprecedented “Day of Pardon’’ for past faults

c. 2000 Religion News Service VATICAN CITY _ Pope John Paul II will mark the beginning of the Lenten season in the Jubilee year 2000 on Sunday by personally asking pardon for the sins committed by Roman Catholics over the past two millenniums, the Vatican said Tuesday (March 7). The Rev. Georges Cottier, a leading […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ Pope John Paul II will mark the beginning of the Lenten season in the Jubilee year 2000 on Sunday by personally asking pardon for the sins committed by Roman Catholics over the past two millenniums, the Vatican said Tuesday (March 7).

The Rev. Georges Cottier, a leading Vatican theologian, told a news conference the sweeping gesture of repentance John Paul will make during a mass in St. Peter’s Basilica has “no precedent” in church history.


An international panel of theologians, who prepared a document on the rationale behind the pope’s decision to make an act of “purification of memory,” acknowledged it has proved controversial.

“The unconditional trust in the power of truth, which the pope has shown, has met with a generally favorable reception both inside and outside the church,” the International Theological Commission said.

“Some reservations, however, have also been voiced, mainly expressions of unease connected with particular historical and cultural contexts in which the simple admission of faults committed by the sons and daughters of the church may look like acquiescence in the face of accusations made by those prejudicially hostile to the church,” the theologians said.

In their document, “Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past,” the theologians attempt to meet this concern by distinguishing between the church and its members. They assert that despite the faults of its members, the church itself remains “holy and immaculate.”

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and president of the commission of theologians, said the pope is seeking “to awaken the conscience” of Christians but not to put the past on trial.

“This act of self-purification serves to make us more credible to the world and if our contemporaries know without our confession that we have done evil, there is nevertheless the gift of reconciliation,” he said.

“We come as people of good will who want to be reconciled.”

Archbishop Piero Marini, master of pontifical liturgical celebrations, said the pope will not spell out in detail the faults for which he is seeking forgiveness.


“The reference to errors and sins in a liturgy must be frank and capable of specifying guilt,” the prelate said. “Yet, given the number of sins committed in the course of 20 centuries, it must necessarily be rather summary.”

Marini said the pope will refer to Pope Paul VI’s landmark gesture of making a “general confession of sin” during his visit to Jerusalem in 1964 and to his own previous admissions of sins.

These include sins committed during the Crusades and Inquisition and by missionaries; sins against women, races and ethnic groups; excommunications, persecutions and divisions; “contempt (and) hostility toward the Jews and “failure to speak out” against the Holocaust, and sins against “the defenseless, the poor and the unborn, economic and social injustices.”

The 79-year-old pontiff will make “the act of confession of sins and request for pardon” during the Prayer of the Faithful, an integral part of the Mass, and will embrace and kiss a 15th century crucifix, traditionally placed in St. Peter’s during Holy Years, “as a sign of veneration and the imploring of pardon,” Marini said.

“At the end of the celebration, following the solemn blessing, the Holy Father asks that the purification of memory and the request for forgiveness may be translated into a commitment of renewed fidelity to the gospel on the part of the church and each of her members,” he said.

In their document, the theologians point to four main areas “in which the behavior of the sons and daughters of the church seems to have contradicted the Gospel of Jesus Christ in a significant way.”


The first is “the division of Christians” in the schism between the Eastern and Western churches in 1054 and the Protestant Reformation four centuries later.

The document does not refer directly to the Crusades or the Inquisition, but it says, “Another sad chapter of history to which the sons and daughters of the church must return with a spirit of repentance is that of the acquiescence given, especially in certain centuries, to intolerance and even the use of force in the service of truth.”

It calls for “a special examination of conscience” on the “tormented” history of relations between Christians and Jews and, echoing a 1998 Vatican statement on the Holocaust, questions whether Christian anti-Semitism was in part to blame.

“The Shoah was certainly the result of the pagan ideology that was Nazism, a pagan ideology animated by a merciless anti-Semitism that not only despised the faith of the Jewish people, but also denied their very human dignity,” the document says.

“Nevertheless,” it says, “it may be asked whether the Nazi persecution of the Jews was not made easier by the anti-Jewish prejudices imbedded in some Christian minds and hearts.”

Saying that Catholics also must bear “responsibility for the evils of today,” the document cites “a series of negative phenomena, like religious indifference, the widespread lack of transcendent sense of human life, a climate of secularism and ethical relativism, the denial of the right to life of the unborn child sanctioned in pro-abortion legislation and a great indifference to the cry of the poor.”


DEA END POLK

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