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Early Dominican Confessional Practice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Romanus Cessario OP
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At the beginning of the 13th century, the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) sanctioned a number of fresh efforts at evangelization. Among the major pastoral concerns that the conciliar decrees addressed, the sacrament of penance figures in a prominent way. Having established the requirement of annual confession as a fixed element of Christian life, the conciliar Fathers at the same time recognized the need to supply qualified priests who could competently exercise the ministry of reconciliation.

With Bishop Fulk of Toulouse, St Dominic was present at the Fourth Lateran Council, after which he obtained official approbation for his newly-begun work of preaching and hearing confessions. In 1221, Pope Honorius III granted universal faculties to Dominic’s band of preachers-confessors. The international character of Dominic’s mission in the Church meant of course that his fiiars would hear the confessions of persons caught up in the displacement that marked the beginning of European cosmopolitanism. This circumstance explains the advice that, according to Paul of Hungary, St Dominic himself gave to his brother priests, namely, that they should discreetly enquire during the course of the confession from where the penitent came, so that their spiritual counsel could take account of certain regional differences, such as local fasting customs. Of course, such advice would be hardly necessary for a parish priest who heard the confessions only of those under his permanent pastoral care.

Recent scholarship suggests that we should not underestimate the importance that hearing confessions played in the pastoral ministry of the early Dominican friars.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 75 , Issue 885 , September 1994 , pp. 425 - 428
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 See Boyle, Leonard E., “Notes on the Education of the Fratres communes in the Dominican Order in the Thirteenth Century”, in Xenia medii aevi historiam illustrantia oblata Thomas Kaeppeli OP, ed. Creytens, R. and Künzle, P. (Rome, 1978), 2 vols., 1: 249–267Google Scholar, and reprinted in Pastoral Care, Clerical Education und Canon Law, 1200–1400 (London, 1981),Google Scholar no. VI.

2 See Goering, Joseph and Payer, Pierre J., ”The ‘Summa Penitentie Fratrum Predicatorum’: A Thirteenth‐Century Confessional Formulary,” Mediaeval Studies 55 (1993): 1–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The authors favour the hypothesis that associates this confessional guide with the Dominican Order, a view especially supported by a manuscript (Ms. 326) in Trinity College (Dublin) that calls the work “of the Friars Preachers.”