Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

Luther was right to focus on indulgences as a sign of the corruption in the Roman Catholic Church, not because indulgences were being sold for moeny for improper purposes, but because the very idea of indulgences elevates works over faith and imputes cruelty to God and to the Church. The idea of an indulgence is that the Church can make a special offer that if I perform action X within time period Y, I will spend Z fewer years in Purgatory having my sins punished. This presupposes that the Atonement on the Cross was insufficient atonement for sins– they need to be punished by Purgatory too and in fact our sins are small enough that Purgatory is sufficient punishment. It builds on that to say that some relatively trivial actions while living– say, visiting a shrine– can atone for sins that were bad enough to need years of suffering in Purgatory. That becomes true only because the Church (delegated by God) gives a special allowance, however, which leads to the final implication: the Church (and God) could wipe out all the sufferig in Purgatory with no harm to the universe, yet it chooses not to.

The Roman Catholic church very much still believes in indulgences and offers them now and then. Here a story about a recent one. “Spiritual gift for Catholics in Phila. Archdiocese is offering plenary indulgences” says:

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia is honoring its 200th anniversary by offering its members a plenary indulgence, a practice begun in the Middle Ages that remains controversial and often confounding today. An indulgence, according to the church, allows Catholics who perform certain acts to shorten the time after death that their souls will have to spend in purgatory to atone for their sins.

“It adds to the joy of the occasion, it allows each person a participation in the event, and it provides a lasting souvenir,” Cardinal Justin Rigali told the archdiocese’s 1.5 million members in a recent letter. Plenary indulgences are relatively rare and typically require a pilgrimage to a shrine. Pope John Paul II granted a worldwide plenary indulgence for the Jubilee Year of 2000.

Between now and the final bicentennial Mass of April 13, local Catholics seeking an indulgence must make a pilgrimage to an area shrine or special bicentennial Mass, make an act of sacramental confession and receive communion around the time of a pilgrimage, and pray for the intentions of the pope. …

The Catholic Church teaches that people who have received absolution for their sins from a priest may, through an indulgence, draw on the “treasury of merit” accumulated by Jesus, Mary and the saints to lessen or eliminate the punishment owed to God. …

Four decades later, the Catholic Church condemned the abuse of indulgences, but also replied with damnation of “those who maintain the uselessness of indulgences.”

Pope Paul VI reiterated that curse, or anathema, as recently as 1967, but the Vatican and the Lutheran World Federation revoked those curses in the 1999 Joint Declaration.

We have here yet another example of the supposedly infallible Pope (and Church) reversing church doctrine. Or perhaps the theory is that the Council of Trent imposed damnation for those denying the effectiveness of indulgences rather than just explaining that it would occur as the act of God, and the Vatican is ending that punishment as of 1999.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 19th, 2007 at 2:17 am and is filed under Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.