# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1859_S76
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

76 Extracts from Fr. Balduin's Tractatus De casibus conscientiae.

has himself promised Abraham that, if he found only ten righteous among
the unclean Sodomites, he would spare the whole city for the sake of
those ten, Genesis 32:2; 2) Christ does not wish the tares to be pulled
up, but commands that they grow together with the wheat in one field,
lest, while one pulls up the tares, the wheat be pulled up along with
them, Matthew 13:29. Augustine applies this saying to the present case,
teaching that whole congregations ought not be put under the ban, lest
the innocent, who are always mixed in among the ungodly, be struck at
the same time by this bolt of the ban; 3) that same Augustine, in the
passage cited, further holds that not even a single person, though he
deserve the ban, ought to be put under it if there is danger of a schism;
much less should whole congregations be excommunicated when there is
danger of a schism to be feared. Of whole congregations, however,
Augustine writes in the same place: but when the same sickness has
seized very many, nothing remains for the godly but mourning and
sighing; and shortly after: when a contagious sin has seized the multitude,
church discipline must consist in earnest compassion; thoughts of
separation are vain and harmful and godless, because they proceed from
a godless and haughty spirit and confuse the weak good more than they
improve the bold wicked. Augustine's opinion, then, is that when, in the
case of public sins of many, the ban cannot be carried out without a
schism, one should rather sigh over those public sins into which Satan
has entangled many, than rage against the whole church with the bolt of
the ban; 4) there is added the example of the Greek Church, which, after
being put under the ban by the Latin Church, never returned to the
fellowship of the Church, but rather they have attacked one another with
mutual anathemas, when it would have been far better had they been
kept in unity. To avoid this danger, Irenaeus admonished Victor that he
should not condemn all the churches of God which kept the old,
traditional custom at the celebration of Easter, lest they be torn away
from the unity of the Church; and to confirm this opinion he cites
examples of others who, although they were at variance on this point,
nevertheless kept peace with one another. See Eusebius, Church History,
Book 5, chapter 26.

III.

How should one deal with the banned when they do penance, and how
should one receive them back into the church?

Above we have said that the purpose and goal of the ban is not the ruin
but the conversion of the sinner. Therefore Paul writes concerning the
banned incestuous man at Corinth: it is enough that he has thus been
punished by the many, and he exhorts the Corinthians to forgive him,
lest he sink into excessive sorrow; and he adds...