America's Father James Martin SJ calls for Penance

The heretical editor of America Magazine is calling for penance. No, really, he advocates centering prayer. Isn't his interest in revivifying penance a lot like a cat burglar calling for stiffer penalties for breaking and entering? If we had stricter penance, we'd also have stricter disciplinary norms for dissident Jesuits as well. But this isn't something Pope Benedict just started talking about last week, it's part of an extensive consideration that the man has had throughout his Career as a Cardinal and as Pope.

If Jesuits hadn't collectively been working against the notion of penance, and sin as a real and pervasive evil whose author is a real angelic person i.e., the Devil, perhaps it wouldn't have to be as much of a point of discussion. The Irish Bishops were prepared to make a penitential act this Lent.

If real penance is called for, perhaps it should start with the Jesuits willingly offering a joint resignation in the dissolution of their Order, or at least make an admission that you and your bretheren were a big part of the problem.

One of the many deeply disturbing aspects of the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church has been the lack of discussion about penance. While public apologies from bishops who protected abusive priests are becoming more common, doing penance to atone for individual sins is still too rare.[No thanks to Jesuits like yourself who deny scriptural inerrancy and infallibility] This is even more confounding given that when confronting sin, the church has as an obvious model as a resource: the sacrament of reconciliation -- known by most people as "confession."

Every Catholic knows that forgiveness in the confessional demands penance. Reconciliation in the church requires the same thing.

This is why Pope Benedict XVI's remarks last week might be an important starting point. "[W]e Christians, even in recent times," he said, "have often avoided the word 'penance,' which seemed too harsh to us. Now [...] we see that being able to do penance is a grace and we see how it is necessary to do penance, that is, to recognize what is mistaken in our life, to open oneself to forgiveness, to prepare oneself for forgiveness, to allow oneself to be transformed. The pain of penance, that is to say of purification and of transformation, this pain is grace, because it is renewal, and it is the work of Divine Mercy."

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