Search

The term mercy is currently omnipresent in Catholic debates. It dominates at events such as the recent Family Synods and the Jubilee Years. At the same time, it poses a significant problem for cases dealing with sexual abuse. Mercy calls to consider an individual's needs and this conflicts with justice necessitating equal treatment for everyone. Mercy applies to the fallible individual deserving of punishment, but who is saved by grace. This is most apparent in the Sacrament of Penance and other forms of penitence, forgiveness, and reconciliation where mercy both transcends and undermines justice. This problem, widely ignored in church teaching, is addressed by Dirk Ansorge, James Dallen, Judith Hahn, Atria A. Larson, Sandra Lassak, Michael A. Nobel, Rosel Oehmen-Vieregge, Heike Springhart, and Gunda Werner.

Penetrating behind the seal of medieval confession is among the most formidable historiographical challenges. One route is through confessors'manuals. This is the first full-scale scholarly study of a fourteenth-century confessor's English example. It contributes significantly to the European-wide research on pre-Reformation confessional practice and clerical training. On another level, the Memoriale Presbiterorum's peculiarly intense concern with social morality affords pungent commentary on contemporary English society. Michael Haren analyses a remarkable treatise both as a vehicle of social doctrine and as a mirror of the milieu to which it is directed. While presenting it against its general intellectual background, continental and English, he also argues for its setting within a vigorous and largely neglected episcopal regime, that of Bishop Grandisson of Exeter. His wide-ranging exposition will interest students of moralizing literature - including Chaucer and Piers Plowman - as well as historians.

The sexual ethic of the early Christian church was simple: sexual relations were permitting only between a man and a woman married to one another and then only for the purpose of procreation. It soon became necessary to articulate and then to refine this ethnic, to analyse departures from it, and to provide for a range of penances suitable to each kind of sexual sin. The penitential -- a confessional manual for the guidance of the priest -- played an important role in this process. Payer argues, despite modern orthodoxy, that the penitentials reflect reaction to actual practice and are not simply a record of the wild imaginings of monkish minds or the abstract categorizing or legal minds. He traces the history of the penitentials from their early Irish origins in the sixth century through their ninth-century descendants in continental Europe and Anglo-Saxon England, to the great legal collections of the tenth and twelfth centuries. In the process he illuminates an increasingly sophisticated treatment of a wide variety of sexual situations, from the heterosexual life of the married and the unmarried, through homosexuality and lesbianism, bestiality, and masturbation, to the preservation of chastity. Sex and the Penitentials is a systematic inquiry into one of the richest sources of sexual teaching in the early church. It represents a major step towards an understanding of the nature of that teaching and its role in the transformation of the classical ethic into a Christian one.