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Penance
From Spanking Art
Doing penance usually refers to an act of self-punishment or self-humiliation to demonstrate that one is sorry for a committed wrong. This can be anything as long as it is in some way painful. The penance can be imposed by oneself or by another person (such as a guardian or Confessor). It can be done in privacy or in the presence of others.
Penance, even when a second person helps to impose it (as in the picture to the right), is different from punishment in that the person is fully compliant and not only accepts, but asks for it to wipe the guilt from their soul.
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[edit] Religious penance
Penance, in a religious sense, is the "desire to be forgiven". It means the repentance of sins in general, as well as the Catholic Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation/Confession.
In a sacramental understanding of the term, "penance" applies to the whole activity from confession to absolution. Generally speaking, however, it is used to characterize the works of satisfaction imposed or recommended by the priest on or to the penitent. Traditionally, penance has been viewed as a punishment (the Latin word poena, the root of penance, means "punishment"), and varying with the character and heinousness of the offences committed.
[edit] History
In the feudal era, doing penance often involved severe and/or public discipline, which could be both harsh and humiliating but was considered edifying. Public penances have, however, long been abolished. Traditional forms still include prayers, while corporal punishments such as the wearing of a cilice and public humiliations have become rare, even in monastic practice. More recently, taking in account the insights of pastoral theology and psychology, penances have tended to move towards acts that positively or negatively reinforce the penitent's behaviour.
[edit] Penance in parenting
The concept of penance can also be used in parenting, although this is rare. A child who has done a misdeed can be given the choice of either getting a punishment for it (such as a spanking), or doing a penance - a task to show that they are sorry for what they have done. The idea is that self-punishment is psychologically more effective than punishment imposed by someone else because it requires full and conscious cooperation. For the same reason, a penance can also be more humbling than a punishment.
[edit] See also
| This page uses content from Wikipedia. The original article was at Penance. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with Spanking Art, the text of Wikipedia is available under the GNU Free Documentation License. |
