[metmom]

. During the first centuries the reconciliation of Christians who had committed particularly grave sins after their Baptism (for example, idolatry, murder, or adultery) was tied to a very rigorous discipline, according to which penitents had to do public penance for their sins, often for years, before receiving reconciliation. To this ‘order of penitents’ (which concerned only certain grave sins), one was only rarely admitted and in certain regions only once in a lifetime.

That's interesting because Jesus said that if they were forgiven, they were forgiven.

So what's with the years of penance the church piled onto people to keep them in bondage? Didn't they believe Jesus?

And then lo and behold, they CHANGED it. All from the church that never changes.....

[Elsie]

"One indeed is the universal Church of the faithful, outside which no one at all is saved, in which the priest himself is the sacrifice,

Jesus Christ, whose body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the species of bread and wine;

the bread (changed) into His body by the divine power of transubstantiation, and the wine into the blood,

so that to accomplish the mystery of unity we ourselves receive from His (nature) what He Himself received from ours."

 

--Pope Innocent III and Lateran Council IV (A.D. 1215)