BRITAIN is a society “overwhelmed by sin” and the Church of England has a duty to help people to make confession, the General Synod in York was told yesterday.

Many people are looking for new ways of being penitent and finding healing, the synod heard, shortly before giving its backing to new rites for individual confession and public penance.

The synod endorsed the rites for individual and group reconciliation — or confession — after hearing of society’s growing need for absolution for its wrongs. The rites will be re-examined by the Church’s bishops and then commended for use in parish churches across the land.

Individual confession, a practice normally associated with the Roman Catholic Church, is provided for in the Church of England and encouraged by some Anglican priests. But until now they have invented their own forms of service for it, using absolutions authorised in other parts of the liturgy.

Introducing the debate, the Bishop of Stafford, the Right Rev Christopher Hill, soon to be Bishop of Guildford, said the Church has been accused of “soft-pedalling penitence” in its public services. He said the bishops had “no intention of eliminating penitence”.

The discipline of penance in the primitive Church consisted of sinners being cast out of Communion during Lent and sometimes for longer periods.

In words which still stand in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer said that until such penance was restored, “which is much to be wished”, passages of God’s cursing against impenitent sinners should be read from the service of commination on Ash Wednesday at the start of Lent.

Bishop Hill said the new rites were not an alternative to the service of commination. Whereas that service was still authorised in the Church’s liturgy, the new rites would merely be commended for use.

He said: “I would point out that the commination is a denunciation of unrepentant sinners, whereas these services are about the reconciliation and restoration of penitent sinners.

“The commination excludes — these services include. Cranmer may have envisaged a restoration of public penance and restoration, but until this could be done he provided something quite different.”

Beatrice Brandon, from Kettering in the Peterborough Diocese and an adviser on the healing ministry to the Church’s bishops, said: “Used wisely, these rites will meet a profound need in our society.”

She said research into the pastoral priorities faced by clergy showed that the need for forgiveness was one of the most important.

“The introduction of these rites is much needed. We need wider preaching and teaching on the ministry of reconciliation. We need to understand better what it is about. We need to rebuild society’s confidence in our ability to keep confidences.”

The Rev Richard Seabrook, Vicar of St Peter and St Paul’s in Hockley in the Chelmsford Diocese, said: “This broken and divided world in which we live has many casualties along the roadside. As a priest I deal with these casualties every day, as does every other priest here.

“The pace of life and the self-centred culture in which we live means that the place for reconciliation and restoration is ever more needed. It is one of the most valuable gifts of God to the Church for a world that cannot save itself.”

He continued: “There are those who need to be reassured by a priest, by the authority given to him, that that person’s sins are forgiven.”

Lady Gore-Booth, of the Durham Diocese, said that as someone who makes confession regularly, “I hope many people will learn the discipline and then the joy from these new rites.”

However, the Rev Karen Goreham, priest-in-charge of St Paul’s, Maidstone, said she felt overwhelmed by the number of new rites being introduced and gave warning that the Church was in danger of getting “liturgical indigestion”.

The Bishop of Woolwich, the Right Rev Colin Buchanan, at his last Synod before retirement, called on the Church to get its theology right.

“Do we actually think that Jesus was setting up a range of confessional boxes across the Mediterranean?” He added: “The Church itself only found out that was what he meant hundreds of years later.”

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