Before the thirteenth century it was the custom to bless the sac which was worn in public penance, and hence it derived the epithet of bendito (blessed).
If among those who pressed forward to the confessionals, there happened to be any one whose crime was publicly known, though of a kind which the civil law could not reach, he behoved, first of all, to do public penance.
Clemensa Paresa was fined ten ducats and penanced for saying "You see me well enough off in this world and you will not see me punished in the other," and Juana Seralvis, for the same utterance was condemned to public penance.
Illustration: Public Penance] In our own day penance has been done in the Scottish Church.
Bishop Meade, in his history of the Virginia church, tells of offenders who stood in church wrapped in white sheets with white wands in their hands; and other examples of public penance in the Southern colonies are known.
The Chancellor "decreed the defendant to do public penance in the parish church, and to be condemned in all costs.
Writing of his earlier years spent in his native village, he describes two cases of public penance which he witnessed.
So late as 1709, the Kirk Session of Kilmorie summoned before it a woman accused of "the horrid sin of the hellish art of riddle-turning," and sentenced her to public penanceon three several Sundays.
The above list will hopefully provide you with a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "public penance" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this group of words.
