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\"5 This is on a different order of magnitude from the two areas of \"official disagreement\" that are dealt with elsewhere: \"the marriage of a divorced person during the life-time of a former partner; and the permissible methods of controlling conception,\" and different as well from points where Anglican and Roman Catholic \"attitudes and opinions appear to conflict\" on abortion and homosexual relations.6 For its part, the later statement Growing Together in Unity and Mission simply lists the differing practice on private confession as one of a series of divergences that includes remarriage after divorce, abortion, contraception, and homosexual relations.7 What these two ecumenical documents do not provide is any account of the origin of private confession in the practice of public penance, a common history that points toward greater understanding and possible theological convergence. The idea of penance as a necessary reconciliation with the community persisted as well, but as Karl Rahner demonstrated, it was not seen as the primary effect of the sacrament but as one effect among others.11 In this sacrament Christians are not simply being reconciled to God, but reconciled to God in the community of the church.12 Rahner claimed that the practice of public penance kept this idea clearly in the mind of the Christian community, by emphasizing the loss of the privileges of church membership when one was undergoing public penance.13 Rahner showed that this truth is still present in private confession, as practiced in the Roman Catholic Church: confession to the church's representative, just as much as public penance, involves reconciliation with the church.14 This communal aspect of reconciliation as a part of the sacrament of penance received renewed emphasis in the documents of the Second Vatican Council.15 Private confession, in other words, is in origin a public rite, so adapted now in practice that its essential communal nature is easily overlooked.

[...] this afterword provides a response to these papers that may help people read them together. [...] in light of the contributions of these two papers, there is significant theological work to be done on the \"ascetica!\" dimension of marriage.

The Blackwell Companion to Catholicism offers an extensive survey of the history, doctrine, practices, and global circumstances of Roman Catholicism, written by a range of distinguished and experienced Catholic writers. * Engages its readers in an informed and informative conversation about Roman Catholic life and thought * Embraces the local and the global, the past and the present, life and the afterlife, and a broad range of institutions and activities * Considers both what is distinctive about Catholic life and thought, and how Catholicism overlaps with and transforms other ways of thinking and living * Topics covered include: peacemaking, violence and wars; money, the vow of poverty and socio-economic life; art by and about Catholics; and men, women and sex