Plenary Indulgences

Full Explanation

An indulgence is one of the most misunderstood things the Church does, and almost all of the confusion comes from a single mistake: thinking it has something to do with being forgiven. It does not. Guilt is forgiven in confession, and only there. What an indulgence touches is what remains after forgiveness — what the Church calls the temporal punishment due to sin. The intuition behind it is ordinary enough. If you break a neighbour's window and they forgive you, the window is still broken. Sin damages the person who commits it and the world around him, and being forgiven does not by itself undo that damage. The healing of it is what an indulgence applies to. A plenary indulgence remits all of that punishment; a partial indulgence remits some of it. In each case the Church is not performing a transaction but drawing on what tradition calls the treasury of merit — the superabundant satisfaction of Christ and of the saints — and applying it to someone who has done a prescribed act in the right disposition. The conditions are where people get stuck, partly because different sources count them differently. Three of them are the usual conditions and are always the same: sacramental confession, Eucharistic Communion, and prayer for the intentions of the Holy Father — traditionally an Our Father and a Hail Mary, though no particular prayer is required. To these is added the prescribed work itself, whatever act the indulgence is attached to. Some pages count four, some five, some three; they are describing the same thing and dividing it up differently. But there is a further condition, and it is the one that actually decides the matter: complete detachment from all sin, including venial sin. Not merely being sorry for it, and not merely intending to avoid it — being genuinely unattached to it, including the small habitual ones nobody thinks about. This is difficult, and honest teachers say so plainly. If any attachment remains, the indulgence is not lost; it becomes partial. That is worth knowing, because the alternative is people either presuming they have gained a plenary indulgence when they have not, or giving up on the practice because they cannot be sure. Neither is right. Do the work, fulfil the conditions, and leave the accounting to God. One further thing, because it is the reason many people are suspicious of the whole subject. Indulgences cannot be bought. The trade in them in the late Middle Ages was a genuine abuse — the one that helped set off the Reformation — and it was condemned not by the Church's critics but by the Church herself, at the Council of Trent, which forbade all fees connected with indulgences. Anyone offering to sell you one today is either mistaken or lying.