Confession of guilt
An admission of guilt is the admission of personal or collective guilt before God in Christianity . It aims at asking for forgiveness , for example in the main prayer of Christians, the Our Father :
"And forgive us our debts, just as we forgive our debtors [those who are guilty of us]."
The Christian confession of guilt is primarily the response of the community of Jesus Christ to God's assumption of guilt, which became evident in the crucifixion of his Son . In contrast to individual confession , the confession of guilt has a public, communal character.
Confession of guilt in the service
Catholic tradition
The confiteor is a prayer used in the liturgy . It is spoken in the Holy Mass after the opening. It is highly recommended for the celebration of Compline . The wording of the general confession of guilt before and after the liturgical reform of 1970:
| Version up to 1970 (Latin) | Version up to 1970 (German) | Version since 1970 (Latin) | Version since 1970 (German) |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Confiteor Deo omnipotenti, Ideo precor beatam Mariam semper Virginem, |
I confess to God the Almighty, That is why I ask the Blessed Virgin Mary, |
Confiteor Deo omnipotenti |
I confess to God Almighty |
When saying “mea culpa” or “my fault” it is customary to hit your chest.
Since the liturgical reform of 1970 after the Second Vatican Council, the following can also be used as a confession of guilt:
V: Have mercy, Lord our God, have mercy.
A: Because we sinned before you.
V: Lord, show us your grace.
A: And give us your salvation.
An expanded form of the Kyrie eleison can also be prayed or sung instead of the confession of guilt, although the Kyrie originally represents a call of homage and is spoken after confession of guilt and request for forgiveness.
Following the confession of guilt, the celebrant requests forgiveness . On Sundays the penitential rite can be replaced by the Sunday baptismal memory .
Before the liturgical reform as a result of the Second Vatican Council, only the longer version was prayed in Latin, the use of which was prescribed. The prayer was part of the step prayer that the priest prayed alternately with the acolyte or the congregation before approaching the altar at the beginning of Holy Mass. If priests and acolytes alternated, the acolytes replied instead of “et vobis fratres”: “et tibi pater” and instead of “et vos fratres”: “et te pater”. The confession of guilt was actually a preparatory prayer of the clergy for Holy Mass , although the people could participate . The communicants prayed another confession of guilt after the priest's communion in preparation for their own communion . This was abolished in the liturgy of 1962 ; in the German communities that celebrate the mass in the extraordinary form of the Roman rite , it is carried on as a local tradition.
Protestant use
In the Protestant area, the confession of guilt occurs in three main liturgical forms:
- as a penitential prayer ( confiteor ) at the beginning of a penitential service
- in response to the church's sermon
- as preparation of the congregation for the sacrament celebration .
Since the Reformation , the so-called "open guilt" has been part of the liturgy of an ordinary sermon service. In the 19th and 20th centuries theologians and liturgy commissions formulated numerous different confessions of sins. Since 1960, the combination of confessions of guilt with social criticism has been popular, for example in the political night prayer at Protestant church days . The individualization of guilt to the self-knowledge of the sinner before God was defended and extended to the social and political realms.
In the Zurich church service reform of the 1960s, a confession of guilt was included in regular Sunday and festive services as a voluntary, non-compulsory liturgical offer.
In the hymn book of the Evangelical Methodist Church (edition 2002) there is a separate form with the title: The celebration of the renewal of the covenant with God . This celebration is a liturgically detailed form of a confession of sin, which combines several prayers of confession and penance and leads to the self-commitment to “seek and do” the perfect will of Christ.
Church confessions of guilt
The Christian confession of guilt is not only a central act of faith of the individual Christian, but also an act of the Church as a whole, which sees itself as a community of believers and, with self-critical naming of its concrete failure, confesses its worldwide responsibility for the salvation of all people. That is why churches as a whole have repeatedly expressed a specific confession of guilt in certain historical situations. Individual Christians have also expressed the guilt of the Church as a whole on its behalf.
A famous confession of guilt, unmatched in its radicalism, comes from the Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1940. At the height of Adolf Hitler's triumph after the victory over France, which should make Germany forget the defeat and war guilt of Germany in the First World War , Bonhoeffer spoke of the The Church's debt to the “weakest brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ”: the Jews . She handed them over to the injustices of the total state and encouraged the rulers to commit this injustice with reference to the blessing of the church.
After the end of the war, the Stuttgart confession of guilt of October 1945 was the starting point for a decade-long rethinking of the EKD with regard to the failure of Protestantism against National Socialism . This was followed in 1947 by a confession of specific Protestant “wrong ways” in the Darmstadt word, which was only accepted by parts of the EKD . The Evangelical Church A. u. HB in Austria only made a comparable admission of guilt in 1998.
A historical admission of guilt in the field of Catholicism was the mea culpa ("my fault") of Pope John Paul II of March 12, 2000, in which he admitted church misconduct in connection with religious wars , persecution of the Jews and the Inquisition . As early as March 16, 1998, in the document Reflecting on the Shoah , the Vatican announced that Christians were complicit in the Holocaust . This was followed on March 20, 1998 by the Pope on pilgrimage to Israel , Jordan and the Palestinian territories , during which he prayed at the Western Wall and celebrated the Eucharist in Bethlehem and Nazareth .
Single receipts
- ↑ General Introduction to the Roman Missal, 51
- ↑ General Introduction to the Liturgy of the Hours, 86
- ↑ Anselm Schott OSB: The complete Roman Missal in Latin and German Freiburg-Basel-Wien 1983, p. 438f.
- ^ Praise to God (2013) No. 582.4.
- ↑ Hymns of the United Methodist Church , 2002 edition, p. 1367
literature
- Georg May : Confessions of guilt and requests for forgiveness (= focus on theology . Volume 5 ). Sarto, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-932691-24-5 (see also: Priestly Society of St. Pius X. ).
- Franz Böhmisch: The Catholic Church's Confession of Guilt . In: Living Pastoral Care . tape 53 . Echter, Würzburg 2002, p. 115-119 .
- Guilt and reconciliation . In :: in religion . Teaching materials Secondary Volume I. 9 . Bergmoser + Höller , 2004, ISSN 1434-2251 .
Web links
- Current literature on the Pope's confession of guilt
- Alfred Ehrensperger: Confessions of Faith and Guilt in Divine Service (PDF file; 131 kB)
- The Confession of Guilt by the United Church of Christ in Japan for its conduct during World War II. March 26, 1967 - March 26, 2007. German East Asia Mission, accessed on November 16, 2014 .