From a reader…
QUAERITUR:
In Confession recently, a visiting priest went off script during the absolution and concluded with “I do absolve you in the name of the Father…”
Do you think this is valid? I trust in God’s mercy but left the confessional doubting the validity. Should I let the pastor know about ? Or the vicar general for the region? I am furious to think of souls left in sin by a priest playing fast and loose with our most sacred rites! Pray for the priest to be a better one!
A couple things first.
First, good for you for going to confession. I hope this is a regular part of your life, along with a frequent and thorough examination of conscience.
Next, the confessor was a “visiting priest”. That means that it could be hard to bring the issue up with him directly. If the priest is from a neighboring parish, it wouldn’t be hard to find him. However, if he was just at your parish that weekend to preach for a mission somewhere, then there isn’t a high chance of engaging him.
To the point: If what you report he said is accurate, then, yes, the form was valid.
The introduction of “do” would not change in any significant way the sense of the form of absolution. As a matter of fact, the Latin absolvo can be translated as “I absolve” or “I do absolve” or “I am absolving”.
The priest should NOT use his own translation, however.
That said, priests … how many times have I typed this?… should STICK TO THE APPROVED FORM!
FATHERS! Review occasionally the form of absolution.
Anecdote.
I was at supper with a priest and I remarked that, on my way there, I saw a bad car accident site being cleaned up. It must have been very bad, because there was a burned out car involved. I couldn’t see any injured person at the time so I didn’t stop, but it made me think of the form for Anointing and of the Apostolic Pardon at time of death. I started to repeat them – in Latin – to check my memory. That lead to the priest and I talking about the changes to the English translation of the form of absolution which took effect a while back. Since I don’t use English at all, I wanted to double check what the change was and he launched into the form. And he got it wrong. Mind you, this is an excellent, diligent, 100% reliable priest I’m talking about, and he left something out, even on repetition. He was a little horrified when I mentioned it. Mind you, he left out some little element of the long form that would not have had any impact on the validity of the absolution. Nevertheless, he got the form, as a whole, wrong. This just goes to show that priests should, from time to time, refresh and keep a copy of the form in the confessional, and a copy of the form for anointing and the pardon handy when going around.
FATHERS! This goes for celebration of Mass as well. STICK TO THE BOOK! That means, LOOK AT THE BOOK! That’s why it is on the altar.
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Obviously priests should stick to the form as printed.
That said, there’s an old translation of the extended absolution, the one that takes off excommunications, that does officially use language about “Christ absolves you, and I do absolve you” from the excommunications. It then goes on to absolve the penitent’s sins in the usual wording.
One of the weird things about English grammar is that, teeeechnically, there’s not much in the way of a straightforward past, present, or future tense.
They’ve all got helper verbs, implicitly or explicitly included.
There are various theories about why this is. Usually historical linguists blame the collision of Saxon with Old Welsh, during the formation of Old English.
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