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This is a nice and laudible sentiment - especially the last three "ifs". As for the first, rather just seems like a dig. You get the sense a lot of Catholics these days are running around "counting" indulgences? (I am not even sure how you would count them....)

In turn, if anyone you knew who had wracked up a lifetime ledger book of days toiling under the error they had accumulated X-thousands of years, do you think that there prayers were without any edification? Somehow those who reject any notion of indulgence alternately pray better?

We know different people, of course... But in my odd years I have never heard any Catholic mention doing any of the following with motivation of indulgence, even though - for those concerned - indulgence is attached:

* Recitation of the Marian Rosary (or Akathyst)
* Exercise of the Way of the Cross
* Adoration of the Most Blessed Sacrament (includes simple prayer before tabernacle
* Reading of Sacred Scripture! (30 min a day)

Indulgences, this has been a �hot potato� item that has had much negative publicity since the 16th century. While I personally do not subscribe to the �time off� aspect, I do have some personal thoughts regarding it.

Have indulgences in the past been abused, I am sure they have been, but the church has taken great pains to redefine and clarify the use and intentions. From my understanding, the way indulgences are promoted at present, it involves acts of prayer, pilgrimage, piety, and good works. To me, the act of placing by the church importance by encouraging an emphasis on these devotions or acts is a way in today�s society of encouraging the faithful to maybe focus on things spiritual. We have one poster that makes regular trips to Lourdes, and it is not for any indulgence, but that she has found spiritual nourishment in this act of sacrifice on a regular basis. I believe these trips have lead to her renewal of faith and actual conversion. I know of others that post here, that have once introduced to a particular service or devotion have had their prayer and spiritual life transformed.

Indulgences in this case, may be the church�s way of encouraging faithful to come back into the spiritual life of the church and developing a relationship with God, by promoting it with this term. I believe the emphasis is not to be focused on �time off�, but rather invigorating the faithful to be what they are called to be by their baptism. The church for its reasons thus places an importance on these acts, so as to indicate a special importance to them.

You certainly can debate �time-off� and whether they are right or not, but the real focus is the intent of what is being encouraged, not the actual personal selfish motivation that is achieved by it. I am sure my comments will not please some, but if they help some rediscover the spiritual life by the church placing an importance on them, then aren�t we better off than we were before?

I really would not care to comment any further on the issue. I offer my personal observations for whatever they are worth.

In IC XC,
Father Anthony+

I am glad that we can clear this up for several in one fell swoop here!


I am saying that there was misunderstanding. Who did the misunderstanding - the students or the teachers - is now what is to be considered. I have no doubt you were taught this as you claim - many people misunderstood it, included those charged with teaching it!



I would be very suprised if you did not. Catholics in posession of any materials of a certain age have such. One still finds it even on prayer cards here and there still given out. Again, no one is denying day-counts were on there or you were taught this error.


Who is pretending anything?

Dare I suggest that the reform of the presentation may well have been to prevent more inaccurate and errant teaching? Let's not make it sound like on this matter we have some colassal conspiracy when all things being equal, it really is just as likely that seeing this methodology confused many people (some confusion demonstrated right here) it was just as well to end the use for the reasons actually and officially given?


Who is blaming?


This really makes me all the more glad again that we can clear this up for several in one fell swoop here!

So I should take Fr. Steele's word for it? I don't think that we discussed the issue in depth. Do Catholics today understand indulgences to be based on the surplus merits of Christ and the saints?

Joe

Elizabeth Maria:

In respect to one of your earliest posts in which you suggested how few of us receive plenary indulgences because few of us are completely unattached to sinful things, I agree. In fact, it�s hard for me to see how the concept of earning �plenary indulgences� for oneself has any meaning any more. The Latin Church seems to have redefined the concept of �temporal punishment� from some type of objective retribution by God to that of freeing us from subjective lingering attachments to sin. Pope John Paul II explained this in a general audience in 1999. (Here is a link to a rendering of it: http://www.ewtn.com/library/PAPALDOC/JP2INDLG.HTM.)

Purgatory exists, it seems, to purge one of all attachment to sin that one still has when one leaves this world in death. The purging process is no longer seen as moral punishment but more as a healing of impairment. This healing involves pain and suffering because it hurts to give up one�s attachments, including the attachment to oneself. When one gives up everything, including his own life and self, then one finds life�-life in the Lord. Indulgences in this view are extraordinary aids in the healing process. They are like the healings at Lourdes and other miraculous healings. (By the way, the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes is today in the Latin Church.) A plenary indulgence means, I would say, that the Lord heals one totally, faster than one would normally be healed, because of the indulgenced prayer and pious act as defined by the Church through the Holy Father.

But if we step back a minute, here�s what it seems to me we are faced with. We must be free of all attachment to sin in order to obtain a plenary indulgence, yet the purpose of a plenary indulgence is to heal us of all our attachments to sin. In other words, to obtain a plenary indulgence, it appears that we must have already attained the state of freedom from attachment to sin that a plenary indulgence is supposed to produce in us. Catch-22, anyone?

That leaves two more things, though. First is the concept of partial indulgences. Those are of great importance. They may not be total healings, but they are like salves, herbs, or antibiotics. They provide us great benefit by miraculously giving us relief and partial healing without going through all the ordinary pain that learning self-oblation involves after death. Nothing to sneeze at here. Yes, partial indulgences were once labeled with "days" and "years". I was taught that meant the number of days' or years' penance that the early Church prescribed which was being remitted by the prayer and pious act. The effect of the partial indulgence, then, was the same as the early Church's penances of that length of time. The numbers never measured one-for-one "time off" in Purgatory. Pope Paul VI did away with the somewhat misleading labels of days and years in his reform of the Enchiridion of Indulgences in the late 1960's.

Second, there is something else involved in the concept of plenary indulgences that saves the concept from being an oxymoron, in my view. We can earn plenary indulgences for others. In this teaching of the Latin Church, The Lord allows us to be the conduit of miraculous healing of our brothers and sisters who still need that healing after death. The healing is His, not ours; we just pray and do a pious act that is connected with obtaining it for them. So if we have obtained the blessed state of being completely free of attachment from sin, we can send the Lord's spiritual miraculous healings to our brothers and sisters who have not yet attained that state in Purgatory. And even if we are still attached to earthly things ourselves, so that the best we can send is partial indulgences, I am sure our brothers and sisters are grateful for whatever extra healing the grace of God allows us to direct toward them.

The new emphasis on healing our attachments to sin as the meaning of the term, �temporal punishment,� has a great benefit, it seems to me: it encourages us to act in outward-directed charity, forgetting about ourselves. An emphasis on remitting temporal punishment that does not explain its subjective nature, that is, how it applies to the condition of the forgiven sinner himself or herself, has the unavoidable effect, it seems to me, of encouraging self-centered acquisition and counting up of indulgences as if they were pieces of gold that we could use to buy our way into heaven. So does the terminology of "merits" that has been used in past, it seems to me, whatever the theological legitimacy of the term. It is the erroneous but easy-to-acquire bean-counter attitude toward indulgences that I think so many Eastern Christians and Protestants have objected to in the past.

Fr. Al Kimel, the Pontificator, has written more thoroughly and rigorously about this subject recently in the web site, De Cura Anima, and I have found his explanations very helpful.

One point of Christian life is to learn to forget ourselves and give everything to the Lord and our fellow humans. Properly understood, I think engaging in the prayers and pious acts that are graced as indulgences can help us during our time on earth and also our friends who have already passed away to undergo that process.

Silas

Perhaps it would be more charitable to simply state that you never wrote something instead of posting a couple paragraphs of sarcasm and arrogance.

Ditto.

So is the view that basis for indulgences the surplus merits of Christ and the saints part of the abiding teaching concerning indulgences or was this simply a theological explanation that is now passe?

Joe

Bless, Father Anthony!

You really have broken a log-jam here.

From Elizabeth Maria's POV, she is certainly right - the accountancy aspect of this is unsavoury and serves no good purpose.

In fact, your point meshes completely with the ideas behind the Vatican's reform of the indulgences.

Rome has made them less akin to spiritual accounting and has tended to reduce the main "plenary indulgences" under certain works of piety that take a while and some effort to perform, much like the ancient penances.

Thus, it takes some effort to read the Bible for half an hour or pray the rosary in church, or make the Stations of the Cross. One has to actually leave one's home and go to a church etc.

And since we can never be morally sure we are detached from serious sin, (unless we're super holy and blessed with true dispassion), then this is all "partial" and there is no "free time off" to be had for quite some time.

For me, as well, this hearkens back to the penances for various sins listed in the Rudder and how Confession itself was not the whole story of reconciliation. One could be excommunicated from attending Holy Communion for a number of sins, as you know, and one needed to spend the time apart from the communion of the Church in various penances and prayers.

The purpose of those spiritual exercises was to inculcate a deep sense of the seriousness of our sin and its consequences as well as develop the only real antidote to future sin - a strong prayer-life complete with fasting and mortifications.

And it could very well be that an individual has achieved this spiritual goal and need not go the entire length of his or her epitimia - an indulgence for certain works of piety and penance could indeed be usefully employed to lessen the time of one's penance.

The Kyivan Caves Paterikon makes mention of how when monastics would be given penances of certain practices for days and weeks, their brother monastics would agree to share their brother's penitential burden so that he would not be overwhelmed with either sadness or the length of the penance.

And if we can apply such penances/indulgences for the faithful departed so that the time of their complete union with God and Christ be consummated - that is certainly wonderful.

We cannot know God's Mind in this, but certainly there is a "good" way of using indulgences as there is a "bad" way as well. And the same applies to most other aspects of the spiritual life, in my view.

Kissing your right hand, I again implore your blessing,

Your unworthy servant,

Alex

Dear Friends,

I think the positive thing that indulgences do serve is that they remind us that Confession alone is not always what the Church has required of us to be fully reconciled with God in Christ.

The Rudder lists all sorts of penances which can still be applied by a Priest for the benefit of a sinner.

However, they can be abused as well. A friend of mine, a convert to Orthodoxy, was excommunicated three times in a two-year period - he just gave up and went to another jurisdiction.

Alex

Here is the Catholic encyclopedia on indulgences:

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07783a.htm

If this article is correct, then the doctrine of indulgences only makes sense if the doctrine of purgatory and the notion of "temporal punishments," to be expiated in this life or the next is true. Also, it seems that the notion of an infinite Treasury of the merits of Christ and the saints is also necessary for indulgences to make any sense.

Joe

Dear Joe,

Well, I've also read the Rudder and I think that indulgences would likewise make sense from its perspective too i.e. lessening the length of canonical penances imposed for specific sins. There are Orthodox priests, and I know two, who regularly impose those canonical penances and even refuse to absolve penitents if they feel they aren't truly sorry for what they did (in the case of one friend, he had just confessed the same sin three weeks prior and the Father Confessor told him that "Confession is no joke - don't be upset, but I won't absolve you and you can't go to Communion for three months." As he was about to leave, the Priest asked him, "Did you recite the Canon of St Andrew of Crete before you approached me for Confession today? No?" And he imposed another canonical penance right there and then.

Alex

I have no problem with the idea that an indulgence is simply the loosening of a canonical penance. But this is not what is taught by official magisterial teaching of the Catholic Church. Also, in Catholic magisterial teaching, only the pope can give indulgences or he may specify others to do so. Also, the notion inherent in the doctrine is that one accumulates temporal punishments that must be "paid" in purgatory. This is not what is behind the Orthodox practice of loosening canonical penalties for sins.

Joe

Yes. This would be my understanding also.

Thanks, Father Anthony, for a well written essay to guide us.


Yes, that was my objection and it is good to realize that plenary indulgences are not magically granted as a few with a poor education assume. And even partial indulgences are probably not granted if someone is not present to the moment and fully attentive to the readings or prayers. And yes, I have known "bean counters" or "bead counters" who had no clue, and who went around preaching indulgences. Worse, they have joined the SSPV or is it the SSPX, and so they continue to teach the pre-Vatican II ideas.

Yet, it is hard to be focused on our readings and prayers especially when one is sick and in pain. At those times, all one can do is to focus on Christ, the Lover of mankind, and try to remain in His Presence. And so, I have met older Catholics who lay dying in the hospital or hospice and who are trying to amass indulgences. They become so confused and upset that they cannot focus on prayers because they are struggling with thoughts that are not godly -- thoughts that torment them -- what we Orthodox would call logismoi. And if they have the misfortune to share a room with another patient who must watch those horrid soaps, it becomes a living hell for them.



Dear Alex,

Thanks for this explanation, as it does help.

I know some Orthodox Priests -- converts -- who strictly applied the canons of the Rudder, not utilizing economia. And yes, people have changed jurisdictions to avoid those priests. Sadly, those people have not learned from their mistakes, but continue to seek priests who will agree with them and who will pardon their habitual sins. This running from priest to priest is nothing new and happens in the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. St. Paul mentioned how with ears itching, people will seek teachers to fit their fancy.

However, sometimes people do need to reflect on their sinfulness and realize how every sin does have a cosmic effect. And yes, sometimes people do need to be given a penance and need to be forbidden from receiving Holy Communion for their own salvation and the salvation of others. It happened to me once, and I had to accept that bitter medicine, but it was ultimately very healing for my soul and now I am much more careful. However, if I had been allowed to receive Holy Communion without asking and receiving forgiveness from others whom I had offended, it would have damaged the Body of Christ as it would have caused scandal.

Please pray for me a sinner.

In Christ,
Elizabeth