Temporal Punishment Due to Sin Following the Sacrament of Penance

          According to the Council of Trent, 1547.

Canon XXX


If anyone says that the reception of the grace of justification the guilt is so remitted and the debt of eternal punishment so blotted out to every repentant sinner, that no debt of temporal punishment remains to be discharged, either in this world or in Purgatory, before the gates of Heaven can be opened, let him be anathema.

Canon 12.

If anyone says that God always pardons the whole penalty together with the guilt and that the satisfaction of penitents is nothing else than the faith by which they perceive that Christ has satisfied for them, let him be anathema.

Canon 13.

If anyone says that satisfaction for sins, as to their temporal punishment, is in no way made to God through the merits of Christ by the punishments inflicted by Him and patiently borne, or by those imposed by the priest, or even those voluntarily undertaken, as by fast, prayers, almsgiving or other works of piety, and that therefore the best penance is merely a new life, let him be anathema.


Canon 14.

If anyone says that the satisfactions by which penitents atone for their sins through Christ are not a worship of God but traditions of men, which obscure the doctrine of grace and the true worship of God and the beneficence itself the death of Christ, let him be anathema.

Canon 15.

If anyone says that the keys have been given to the Church only to loose and not also to bind, and that therefore priests, when imposing penalties on those who confess, act contrary to the purpose of the keys and to the institution of Christ, and that it is a fiction that there remains often a temporal punishment to be discharged after the eternal punishment has by virtue of the keys been removed, let him be anathema.

Anathema: It acquired the meaning of excommunication, the phrase Anathema Maranatha ( I Cor.xvi.22) being used to signify the severest form of excommunication. In canon law, Anathema is the name given to excommunication inflicted with the full ceremonial of the "Pontifical Romanum," and is the word used instead of excommunication in the condemnatory doctrinal decrees of councils.