(n.) A means of repairing a sin committed, and obtaining pardon for it, consisting partly in the performance of expiatory rites, partly in voluntary submission to a punishment corresponding to the transgression. Penance is the fourth of seven sacraments in the Roman Catholic Church.
(v. t.) To impose penance; to punish.
Example Sentences:
(1) "Great Yuletide fun on ITV now: hilarious reparations as Dannii Minogue performs a selection of the biblical world's most hideous acts of penance in front of a panel of witheringly critical bisexual judges."
(2) The Vatican ordered O'Brien to undertake an unspecified period of "prayer and penance".
(3) The girls know they are expected to show a certain degree of penance.
(4) So next Sunday, he's going to murder blameless Father James as an enforced act of penance.
(5) On the contrary, I could name many ( many ) celebrities who I'd love to see forced into doing charity work and "giving back", as a penance for being smug, over-rewarded, self-obsessed wastes of space.
(6) In 2010, Admiral William McRaven, then the head of the Joint Special Operations Command, slaughtered a sheep in penance to a family that saw its members mistakenly killed by McRaven’s forces.
(7) The cardinal's resignation and removal from Scotland for six months of prayer and penance had cast doubt over an inquiry.
(8) But Harold Wilson, offended by a speech in which I had attacked the public schools, exiled me to the Foreign Office to do penance as minister of state.
(9) No longer obliged to play nice – as they did in the early hours of Wednesday morning, when they agreed to release €10.3bn in bailout money for Athens – they’d now be able to revive their demand that Greece live on ever more meagre rations in penance for its huge debts.
(10) The proposition also galvanized a generation of Latino politicians with long memories, who have effectively created a sanctuary state in California in subsequent years – offering driver’s licenses to folks without papers, providing in-state tuition for undocumented college students, officially telling la migra to butt out of state affairs – as penance for the sins of their predecessors.
(11) Though John’s midweek surgery leaves him sidelined for the season, Díaz has been working towards full fitness while Castillo has paid penance and was back in Pareja’s team for Sunday’s kickoff.
(12) The common understanding of prison is that it is a place of deprivation and penance rather than domestic comfort.
(13) Manchester United have got into the habit of treating their lopsided Premier League programme as a penance.
(14) But that old model is irreparably broken: the supermarket giant revealed last week that group pre-tax profits for the first six months of this year were almost completely wiped out by penance for past accounting sins and the collapsing profitability of the ailing UK chain.
(15) He paid the fines and, as a self-imposed additional penance, painted religious murals for various Baptist chapels around the city.
(16) Perhaps it was as a kind of penance that, under the Tories’ free schools programme, Hyman, now a qualified teacher, set up School 21 (a school for the 21st century, geddit?).
(17) O’Brien was Britain’s most senior Roman Catholic cleric at the time, and he was ordered by the Vatican to spend a period of time in “prayer and penance”.
(18) Given all this, it's not surprising that ICT came to be regarded by schools as an onerous obligation and by children as a tiresome penance inflicted on them by adults who seemed to have no idea about the online world.
(19) Now perhaps these same people have accepted the austerity measures largely because they see them as a form of penance; this is even the language that their politicians have couched their policies in to sell them.
(20) Having already ticked off the home secretary and the education secretary for conducting their private feud in public, he sent the bulk of Eric Pickles to separate them on the front bench as they did their two-hour penance on the naughty step answering urgent questions in the Commons on extremism in schools.
Sackcloth
Definition:
(n.) Linen or cotton cloth such as sacks are made of; coarse cloth; anciently, a cloth or garment worn in mourning, distress, mortification, or penitence.
Example Sentences:
(1) In that same National season, he teamed with Simon Callow (as Face) and Josie Lawrence (as Doll Common) in a co-production by Bill Alexander for the Birmingham Rep of Ben Jonson’s trickstering, two-faced masterpiece The Alchemist ; he was a comically pious Subtle in sackcloth and sandals.
(2) The matrix attached to the growth substratum had a "sackcloth-like" structure as seen by phase contrast, immunofluorescence, and scanning electron microscopy, and it had a vaguely filamentous ultrastructure similar to that seen in intact cell layers.
(3) Especially when Beyoncé on downtime is still a stunningly beautiful woman – it would take sackcloth and ashes to make her look truly awful.
(4) One would have thought that the Argentinian bishops would have seized the opportunity to call for pardon for themselves and put on sackcloth and ashes as the sentences were announced in Córdoba but that has not so far happened.
(5) Poor old Nick Clegg knows it’s all over but he hopes a mixture of sackcloth and ashes and disowning his past will save him.
(6) On our conditions, of course, in sackcloth and ashes: a small price to pay to save the European dream.
(7) The argument that recommends ankle-length sackcloth in order to allow men to get on with the real work?
(8) However, since this is the [Catholic church’s] jubilee year of mercy , I have forgiven these inspectors for their misjudgments, and they did not have to wear sackcloth and ashes all the way to Ofsted headquarters in London.
(9) An earthquake has happened in British politics and I did not foresee it,” he said, sackcloth and ashes just out of shot on College Green.
(10) Famed for his self-denial, Severinus is said to have slept on sackcloth.