Penance and plague: How the Black Death modified considered one of Christianity’s most significant rituals

The 14th century is understood for catastrophe. By midcentury, the primary wave of plague spread through a Europe already weakened by successive famines and the Hundred Years War between England and France. And crises just kept coming. After the primary wave, which has come to be called the Black Death, the disease returned at the least 4 more times before 1400. All the while, fresh conflicts kept erupting, fueled partially by the rising number of soldiers available for hire.

As a medieval historian, I study ways in which community leaders used Catholic practices and institutions to reply to war and plague. But amid the uncertainty of the 14th century, some Catholic institutions stopped working the best way they were presupposed to, fueling frustration. In particular, the unrelenting crises prompted anxiety concerning the sacrament of penance, also known as “confession.”

This uncertainty helped spark critics like Martin Luther to ultimately break from the Catholic Church.

Saints and sacraments

During this era, European Christians experienced their faith predominantly through saints and sacraments.

In art, saints were depicted as standing near God’s throne and even speaking into his ear, illustrating their special relationships with him. Pious Christians considered saints energetic members of their communities who could help God hear their prayers for healing and protection. Throughout Europe, saints’ feast days were celebrated with processions, displays of candles, and even street theater.

Fourteenth-century Christians also experienced their faith through Catholicism’s most significant rituals, the seven sacraments. Some occurred once in most individuals’s lives, including baptism, confirmation, marriage and extreme unction – a set of rituals for people who find themselves near death.

There were two sacraments, nonetheless, that Catholics could experience multiple times. The first was the Eucharist, also referred to as Holy Communion – the reenactment of Christ’s Last Supper together with his apostles before his crucifixion. The second was penance.

Catholic doctrine taught that priests’ prayers over bread and wine turned those substances into the body and blood of Christ, and that this sacrament creates communion between God and believers. The Eucharist was the core of the Mass, a service which also included processions, singing, prayers and reading from the Scriptures.

Religious Christians also encountered the sacrament of penance throughout their lives. By the 14th century, penance was a non-public sacrament that every person was presupposed to do at the least annually.

The ideal penance was labor, nonetheless. People needed to recall all of the sins that they had committed for the reason that “age of reason,” which began after they were roughly 7 years old. They were presupposed to feel sorry that that they had offended God, and never just be afraid that they’d go to hell for his or her sins. They needed to speak their sins aloud to their parish priest, who had the authority to absolve them. Finally, that they had to mean to never commit those sins again.

After confession, they performed the prayers, fasting or pilgrimage that the priest assigned them, which was called “satisfaction.” The whole process was meant to heal the soul as a form of spiritual medicine.

Broken up by Black Death

Waves of plague and warfare, nonetheless, could disrupt every aspect of the perfect confession. Rapid illness could make it unimaginable to travel to 1’s parish priest, remember one’s sins or speak them aloud. When parish priests died and weren’t immediately replaced, people needed to hunt down other confessors. Some people had to admit without anyone to absolve them.

Meanwhile, Europe’s frequent wars posed other spiritual dangers. Soldiers, for instance, were hired to fight wherever war took them and were often paid with the spoils of war. They lived with the constant weight of the commandments to not kill or steal. They could never perform an entire confession, because they might never intend to not sin this fashion again.

These problems caused despair and anxiety. In response, people turned to doctors and saints for help and healing. For example, some Christians in Provence, in present-day France, turned to a neighborhood holy woman, Countess Delphine de Puimichel, to assist them remember their sins, protect them from sudden death, and even leave warfare to turn out to be penitents. So many individuals described feeling consoled by her voice that a medical doctor who lived near the holy woman arrange meetings so people could hear her speak.

But most individuals in Europe didn’t have a neighborhood saint like Delphine to show to. They searched for other solutions to their uncertainties concerning the sacrament of penance.

Indulgences and Masses for the dead proved the preferred, but additionally problematic. Indulgences were papal documents that would forgive the sins of the holder. They were presupposed to be given out only by the pope, and in very specific situations, corresponding to completing certain pilgrimages, serving in a crusade, or doing particularly pious acts.

During the Fifteenth century, nonetheless, demand for indulgences was high, they usually became common. Some traveling confessors who had received religious authorities’ approval to listen to confessions sold indulgences – some authentic, some fake – to anyone with money.

Catholics also believed that Masses conducted of their name could absolve their sins after their death. By the 14th century, most Christians understood the afterlife as a journey that began in a spot called Purgatory, where residual sins could be burned away through suffering before souls entered heaven. In their wills, Christians left money for Masses for his or her souls, in order that they might spend less time in Purgatory. There were so many requests that some churches performed multiple Masses per day, sometimes for a lot of souls at a time, which became an unsustainable burden on the clergy.

The popularity of indulgences and Masses for the dead helps scholars today understand people’s challenges throughout the Black Death. But each practices were ripe for corruption, and frustration mounted as a sacrament meant to console and prepare the faithful for the afterlife left them anxious and unsure.

Criticisms of indulgences and penance were a spotlight of reformer Martin Luther’s famous “95 Theses,” written in 1517. Though the young priest didn’t originally intend to separate from the Catholic Church, his critiques launched the Protestant Reformation.

But Luther’s challenges to the papacy weren’t ultimately about money, but theology. Despair over the concept of never having the ability to perform a great confession led him and others to redefine the sacrament. In Luther’s view, a penitent could do nothing to make satisfaction for sin, but needed to depend on God’s grace alone.

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For Catholics, alternatively, the sacrament of penance stayed much the identical for hundreds of years, although there have been some changes. The most visible was the creation of the confessional, an enclosed space throughout the church constructing where the priest and the penitent could speak more privately. The experience of penance, especially absolution, remained a central ritual meant to heal Catholics’ souls in times of trouble, from the Black Death to the COVID-19 pandemic today.