THE PROFIT OF INDULGENCES

T he question of Indulgences — their meaning, their value — suffers from a two-fold disadvantage. To those outside the Church probably no Catholic dogma is responsible for so much misunderstanding, the fruitful source of a theological hatred that it would be hard to equal. The very name “indulgence” conjures up to the Protestant imagination dark spectres of the past — Tetzel selling barefaced licenses to commit, absolutions to pardon, every sin; the wealthy salving their consciences by strips of parchment purchased by their gold; the poor handing over their little all, with the credulity of superstition, to the greedy vendors of spiritual wares, in the fond hope that Heaven’s gates will open to their happy possessors; Luther, in “words that are half-battles,” denouncing this hellish traffic in pardons that drowned men’s souls in perdition, as he nailed to the church door at Wittenberg his thesis of defiance against a power that professed to forgive sins without repentance of the sinner or amendment of his life, and damned men’s souls while it promised to save them .



But even among Catholics, who know better than to be led astray by such distorted phantoms of the imagination, there is a tendency to put in the background, at least of thought, if not of devotional life, the whole subject of indulgences as an abstruse and almost esoteric part of the Christian belief, with little practical bearing on the everyday life of the soul. We have before now come across converts who told us that their instructors had assured them that, provided they gave their assent to the teaching of the Church of God on that particular point, they need not trouble their heads further about it. To all intents and purposes, it was relegated to an academic atmosphere, remote from the living circle of the great dogmas that mould the Catholic life from the cradle to the grave. This lack of true perspective can only arise from a want of consideration of what the Church actually teaches as regards indulgences. The difficulties that at first sight seem to enshroud the dogma with an impenetrable gloom, disappear almost imperceptibly when its real meaning and spiritual importance become apparent. For, in truth, no doctrine perhaps is more luminous in its bearing upon Catholic belief and conduct than that which links the Church of the twentieth century with the Church of the third and fourth centuries by an identical formula.



If it is the proud boast of the Catholic and Roman Church that she is semper eadem — teaching today what she taught at the beginning — an identity of type characterizing her doctrine (all development being from within, like the increase in stature of a growing child); this note of sameness is nowhere more prominent than in the doctrine, so much misunderstood and withal so fiercely attacked, of indulgences. The name itself should be sufficient to prove this; it brings us back to the early days of the Church’s history, when persecution tried the faith of her children, and discipline in reconciling the lapsed was correspondingly severe. Here is a confessor in prison, awaiting death for the love he bore to Christ — a love stronger than the ties of life; here is a poor sinner, perchance one who had been regarded as a light for his holiness, perchance a priest of the altar, who through cowardice had burnt a few grains of incense before a statue of the Emperor, and thereby perjured his soul. Remorse seizes him; he can have no peace until he has been reconciled to God and restored to the communion of the Church, which he had forfeited by his sin. What, then, does he do? He knows that he will have to undergo a lengthy penance before the Church will receive him, and he dreads the probation and the disgrace. So he goes to the holy confessor bound with chains in his dreary dungeon, and prays him to intercede in his stead, giving him a letter to present to the bishop in which to ask him, for the sake of his imprisonment and approaching death — in other words, through the application of his merits — to remove in whole or in part the canonical penalty which was the Church’s equivalent for the temporal punishment due to his sin of apostasy. And the bishop recognized the confessor’s plea, and, as the representative of the whole Christian Society, readmitted the penitent to the privileges of communion, without making him undergo the long months or years of penitential humiliation.

There we have in a nutshell the full doctrine of indulgences. The Communion of Saints; the belief that what one member of the body does is shared by all the other members, or, as St. Paul expresses it, “If one member glory, all the members rejoice with it;” the application, by virtue of that vital fellowship, of the merits, whether of the Head, Christ Jesus, or of His saints (for the confessor in his dungeon, or the martyr burning in the cruel flame, could have no merit apart from the Lord, to whom they were united by the joints and bands of divine grace), to the penitent sinner for the remission of the temporal punishment due to his sin, represented by the canonical penance, whose only raison d’etre was the Church’s conviction that by it the temporal penalty could be expiated; these three elements of an indulgence were as much present in the days of Tertullian and St. Cyprian in the third century, as in those of Leo XIII in the twentieth. For by an indulgence the Church teaches to-day the identical doctrine that she taught then. She claims now, as in the days of persecution, the power of remitting, in whole or in part, the debt of temporal punishment for sin (or its substitute in the canonical penalty imposed by the Church in satisfaction to God), that survives after its guilt and eternal punishment have been forgiven; — and this by the application of the merits of Christ and His saints. Even at the present day, after some 1600 years, the Catholic Church uses the same language in her indulgences. When we read of 100 days’, 200 days’, 300 days’ indulgence, our memory is perforce recalled to the time when canonical penance, lasting for various lengths of time, was wont to be exacted from the excommunicated seeking reconciliation. The indulgence corresponds to the canonical penance, being substituted for it even in the amount of the temporal chastisement which is remitted by it.



But the doctrine of indulgences is not only a support to faith, in that it is a striking witness to the purity of the Catholic faith, which remains unchanged, in spite of all the fluctuations of time; it has also a distinct place of importance in the spiritual life of conflict against temptation and sin. As defined by theologians, an indulgence is declared to be “the remission of temporal punishment still due from the sinner after the guilt of his sin has been washed away, — which remission is binding at the tribunal of God in heaven, since its force lies in the application of the treasure of the Church made by a lawful superior.” To understand fully the spiritual benefits conferred by an indulgence it is necessary to consider the precise meaning of that “temporal,” or non-eternal, “punishment” which is cancelled by the application of the merits stored in the treasure-house of the Catholic Church.