# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1861_S186
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

186 Excerpts as Contributions to Pastoral Casuistry.

on behalf of our most gracious lord aforesaid, that you instruct the pastor at
O. that he is to impose no further deprecation on the said wife of R., etc.““
Further, it is said, at the requisition of Caspar S. at T., on September 21,
1613, as follows: „„Your daughter Anna entered a short time ago into a promise
of marriage with Joh. E.; but these two betrothed persons came together before
the wedding and the marriage ceremony and had carnal intercourse with one
another, whence it came about that your said daughter, in the third month after
the wedding, in another village called A., whither she had gone about her
business and livelihood, came to her time, was delivered of a child, and had it
baptized there, and also kept the six weeks' lying-in in that village, and after
it had, at the pastor's demand, to perform the church penance customary there.
Now although the pastor at T., after she has come home again, would likewise
impose the public church penance upon her, and will also not admit her to the
use of the Lord's Supper before and until it has been performed by her — yet
since she has nevertheless, in the manner aforesaid, already performed church
penance at A., she is now with justice to be spared it at T. V. R. W.““ (by
right of law.) See op. cit., pp. 821, 822.

II. "Must the guilty party perform public church penance for the sake of a
crime committed elsewhere?"

To this the same author answers:

"It happens very often that those who move away from the village or town where
they have made themselves guilty of a crime, and settle elsewhere, ask to be
admitted to holy communion; whereupon the crime committed elsewhere and not
atoned for by public apology is held up against them, and it is then commonly
disputed whether on account of the crime committed elsewhere they must be turned
away from the use of the Lord's Supper until they have submitted to public
apology. And at first glance this seems to have to be answered in the
affirmative; for if public apology is reckoned among the kinds of punishment,
then nothing indeed stands in the way of imposing it on the guilty party for a
crime committed elsewhere. ... But even if this be so, it still cannot be applied
to public apology, as Nic. Rebhan rightly observes, who holds that on account of
a crime committed elsewhere it is by no means to be imposed on the guilty party.
(See Report on Public Church Penance, chap. 10, pp. 138, 139.) And we abide by
his decision: 1. For although in a certain respect and incidentally, in view of
the usages and ceremonies by which the good name of the guilty is to some extent
stained before the people, public apology is called a punishment, yet in itself
and by its nature it is not such, but rather an exercise of the fifth
commandment, an action and a virtue, not a suffering or a punishment — no more
than reconciliation with one's neighbor itself, which only a senseless man would
call a punishment