Yesterday, in his address to clergy, Benedict spoke at length about the identity and calling of the priest. However, more attention in the long run will probably be paid to this passage:

On the occasion of the Great Jubilee, Pope John Paul II frequently exhorted Christians to do penance for infidelities of the past. We believe that the Church is holy, but that there are sinners among her members. We need to reject the desire to identify only with those who are sinless. How could the Church have excluded sinners from her ranks? It is for their salvation that Jesus took flesh, died and rose again. We must therefore learn to live Christian penance with sincerity. By practising it, we confess individual sins in union with others, before them and before God. Yet we must guard against the arrogant claim of setting ourselves up to judge earlier generations, who lived in different times and different circumstances. Humble sincerity is needed in order not to deny the sins of the past, and at the same time not to indulge in facile accusations in the absence of real evidence or without regard for the different preconceptions of the time. Moreover, the confessio peccati, to use an expression of Saint Augustine, must always be accompanied by the confessio laudis – the confession of praise. As we ask pardon for the wrong that was done in the past, we must also remember the good accomplished with the help of divine grace which, even if contained in earthenware vessels, has borne fruit that is often excellent.

Is this a clarfication/corrective? On the First Sunday of Lent in 2000, the Jubilee Year, John Paul II led an extraordinary moment in which God was asked to forgive past sins of the Church:

An excerpt from the liturgy:

. CONFESSION OF SINS COMMITTED IN ACTIONS AGAINST LOVE, PEACE, THE RIGHTS OF PEOPLES, AND RESPECT FOR CULTURES AND RELIGIONS

Archbishop Stephen Fumio Hamao: Let us pray that contemplating Jesus, our Lord and our Peace, Christians will be able to repent of the words and attitudes caused by pride, by hatred, by the desire to dominate others, by enmity towards members of other religions and towards the weakest groups in society, such as immigrants and itinerants. [Silent prayer.]

The Holy Father: Lord of the world, Father of all, through your Son you asked us to love our enemies, to do good to those who hate us and to pray for those who persecute us. Yet Christians have often denied the Gospel; yielding to a mentality of power, they have violated the rights of ethnic groups and peoples, and shown contempt for their cultures and religious traditions: be patient and merciful towards us, and grant us your forgiveness! We ask this through Christ our Lord. R. Amen. R. Kyrie, eleison; Kyrie, eleison; Kyrie, eleison.

[A lamp is lit before the Crucifix.]

VI. CONFESSION OF SINS AGAINST THE DIGNITY OF WOMEN AND THE UNITY OF THE HUMAN RACE

Cardinal Francis Arinze: Let us pray for all those who have suffered offences against their human dignity and whose rights have been trampled; let us pray for women, who are all too often humiliated and emarginated, and let us acknowledge the forms of acquiescence in these sins of which Christians too have been guilty. [Silent prayer.]

The Holy Father: Lord God, our Father, you created the human being, man and woman, in your image and likeness and you willed the diversity of peoples within the unity of the human family. At times, however, the equality of your sons and daughters has not been acknowledged, and Christians have been guilty of attitudes of rejection and exclusion, consenting to acts of discrimination on the basis of racial and ethnic differences. Forgive us and grant us the grace to heal the wounds still present in your community on account of sin, so that we will all feel ourselves to be your sons and daughters. We ask this through Christ our Lord. R. Amen. R. Kyrie, eleison; Kyrie, eleison; Kyrie, eleison.

[A lamp is lit before the Crucifix.]

Vittorio Messori, co-author of The Ratzinger Report, wrote yesterday that he thought it was: (scroll down)

I predicted msyself – and it did not take much to do that – that the next Papacy would take a distance from that liturgy, which was not isolated but the start of more than a hundred “requests for pardon” addressed to everyone by the Polish Pope, such that it became an object of cartoons and satirical comments as if it was a sort of tic.

If it was possible to predict a reopening of this page, it certainly was not foreseen that the first moves would take place in Warsaw no less, in front of the clergy of the native land of him who was nevertheless – it must be made clear – truly for Ratzinger his “beloved and venerated oredecessor,” as he never tires of saying and whose cause for beatifcation he has been firmly pursuing.

Perhaps even this is part of the transparency of a man who, right in Poland, wished to recall frankly the major point among a number of legitimate dissents he had with the Polish Pope to whom he is linked by a quarter century of fertile and generally harmonious collaboration.

Benedict XVI, in his address to the Polish clergy yesterday, above all brought back the requests for pardon to the ground of traditional doctrine: to avoid any ambiguity, he made clear – as a Catholic always knew – that “the Church is holy, and who sins and makes mistakes is not the Church but its faithless sons."

Moreover, it would be wrong and unjust to “indulge in judgments of preceding generations, who lived in other times and other circumstances.” Therefore, it would be a sin of anachronism and injustice to judge the Church by the current popular Atttiude that holds sway, that of political correctness. More: he who would judge history should know it well, and as such, “should not indulge in easy accusations in the absence of real proof or ignoring the mindset of times which were very different from ours.”

Finally: "As we ask pardon for the wrong that was done in the past, we must also remember the good accomplished with the help of divine grace which, even if contained in earthenware vessels, has borne fruit that is often excellent."

Ratzinger’s statements were obviously not a retraction of John Paul’s confessions but a reproposal of clarifications which he had requested once and which he can now pronounce himself with pontifical authority.

He reminds us that Catholics should never forget that sin is ever present and that it is our duty to confess and seek to mend our ways. But the misery of sin which is common to all men, including believers, does not touch the pure vestments which clothe that Church in which St. Paul saw the person of Christ Himself taking part in history.

Maria-Teresa Manuel, who is instrumental in the Papa Ratzinger Forum which is the source for that translation, sends this along as well:

I forgot to say – there’s one other commentary worth translating on the subject, and it goes farther to speculate that the Pope also wished to refer to cases like the accusations against Pius XII or the current charges against Polish priests who may have been informants for the communists. And a third writer suggests that the wholesale confession of Catholic sins out of context and without mentioning the good that the Church does, only serves to reinforce anti-Catholics like Dan Brown and his legion of believers who choose to see onlt the negative history of the Church