The Sin of lust, the sacrament of penance, and the 19th century penitential books : between jansenism and social reshape

Abstract

A lot has been written about the Sacrament of Penance and its evolution through the centuries. Numerous scholars, studying the practice of Confession, focused specifically on penitential books - lists of rules, sins and penances. However, most of these researchers denied attention to the handbooks for confessors of the 18th and 19th centuries claiming that the ‘literary genre’ of penitential books was fading in that period. Even though this decline is undeniable, the reasons behind the fact have not been explained convincingly yet. The chapter aims at filling this gap offering a historical profile of the evolution of the ecclesiastical debate on Confession. The contextualisation of these books in the coeval doctrinal and scientific debate and a study of two representative cases - Jean Baptiste Bouvier’s handbook for confessors Venus and Hymen to the Tribunal of the Penance and St. Alphonse de Liguori’s Avvertimenti a' Confessori Novelli - makes clear why it was impossible for the Church to approve, distribute and use these manuals after the crisis of the Ancien Régime. First of all, there were moral problems connected to the distribution of manuals for the confession that were so detailed that they were verging on indecency: as a matter of fact, the definition of the case record of lustful acts implied the meticulous description of the acts themselves. Secondly, due to the nature of these texts, they were often produced secretly and without consulting religious authorities reflecting, by consequence, personal interpretations of the doctrine, not the canonised dogma. Finally, with specific reference to the 19th century, the mechanical approach to the definition of the sins and penances was in blatant contrast with the position of the Catholic Church that was attempting to reform the Augustinian rigourism, adopting a more flexible and conciliatory attitude towards the interpretation of sins.