During the 12th century, two procedures were gradually distinguished within the Church, one for crimes and one for sins. A product of the joint discussion of theologians and canonists, their dissociation lead to the separation of the judicial sentence from the economy of salvation, which dealt only with penance, and to the affi rmation of the respective autonomy of the judicial and penitential fora. Freed from its relationship to the transcendent ideal, criminal canon law seems, therefore, to be solely ordered for its temporal end.