Indulgence

An instrument that purportedly enables the excess of Christ's merits, as well those earned by the goods works of the saints and Mary (mother of Jesus), to be made available for easing off the time that sinners have to spend in purgatory. It was first issued by Pope Urban II (r1088-1099) in the 11th Cent in order to "buy" participation in the Crusades; those who went on crusades would have their sins wiped clean.

As bad as the theology was, worse still was its abuse by the Renaissance popes to make it an instrument for raising funds to feed their greed and appetite for grand living. It became the spark that set the Reformation on fire.

The indulgence system, Dermaid MacCullough explains,

depends on linking together a number of assumptions about sin and the afterlife, each of which individually makes considerable sense, First is the assumption which works very effectively in ordinary society, that any wrong requires an act of restitution to the injured party. So God demands an action on the part of the sinner to prove repentence for a sin. Second is the idea that Christ's virtues or merits are infinite since he is part of the Godhead, and therefore they are more than adequate fo the purpose of saving the finite world from Adam's sin. Additional to his spare merits are the merits of the saints, headed by Christ's mother Mary: clearly these are worthy merits in the sight of God, since the saints are known to be in heaven. This combined 'treasury of merit' is therefore available to assist the work of a faithful Christian's repentance. Since the Pope is the Vicar of Christ on earth, it would be criminal meanness on his part not to dispense such a treasury to anxious Christians on earth. The treasury of merit can then be granted to the faithful to shorten the time spent doing penance in Purgatory: that grant is an indulgence.

Martin Luther seemed to have held on to the belief of purgatory for quite some time even after 1517. What he challenged in 1517 in his famous Ninety-Five Theses was the abuse that indugences represented in the light of the righteousness that Christ's death had brought us. The thing was, the indulgences offered for sale by the Pope that that time were not available where he lived. But, though his publication of the theses was meant to be an academic exercise, he also sent a copy of the theses to Albrecht, the Archbishop of Magdeburg of the neighbouring principality, where they were selling like hot cakes. But Albrecht was deep in cahort with the pope to enrich himself, and to make sure that there would be money for the completion of St Peter's. Albrecht duly sent his copy to the pope. The rest, as the cliché goes, is history.

Though the subject of indulgences was quietly moved into the background, its validity was reaffirmed by the Council of Trent, and remains an official Roman Catholic tenet.