The announcement in church bulletins and on Web sites has been greeted with
enthusiasm by some and wariness by others. But mainly, it has gone over the
heads of a vast generation of Roman Catholics who have no idea what it means:
“Bishop Announces Plenary Indulgences.”
In recent months, dioceses around the world have been offering Catholics a
spiritual benefit that fell out of favor decades ago — the indulgence, a sort of
amnesty from punishment in the afterlife — and reminding them of the church’s
clout in mitigating the wages of sin.
The fact that many Catholics under 50 have never sought one, and never heard of
indulgences except in high school European history (where Martin Luther
denounces the selling of them in 1517 and ignites the Protestant Reformation)
simply makes their reintroduction more urgent among church leaders bent on
restoring fading traditions of penance in what they see as a self-satisfied
world.
“Why are we bringing it back?” asked Bishop Nicholas A. DiMarzio of Brooklyn,
who has embraced the move. “Because there is sin in the world.”
Like the Latin Mass and meatless Fridays, the indulgence was one of the
traditions decoupled from mainstream Catholic practice in the 1960s by the
Second Vatican Council, the gathering of bishops that set a new tone of
simplicity and informality for the church. Its revival has been viewed as part
of a conservative resurgence that has brought some quiet changes and some highly
controversial ones, like Pope Benedict XVI’s recent decision to lift the
excommunications of four schismatic bishops who reject the council’s reforms.
The indulgence is among the less-noticed, less-disputed traditions to be
restored. But with a thousand-year history and volumes of church law devoted to
its intricacies, it is one of the most complicated to explain.
According to church teaching, even after sinners are absolved in the
confessional and say their Our Fathers or Hail Marys as penance, they still face
punishment after death, in Purgatory before they can enter heaven. In exchange
for certain prayers, devotions or pilgrimages in special years, a Catholic can
receive an indulgence, which reduces or erases that punishment instantly, with
no formal ceremony or sacrament.
There are partial indulgences, which reduce purgatorial time by a certain number
of days or years, and plenary indulgences, which eliminate all of it. You can
get one for yourself, or for someone else, living or dead. You cannot buy one —
the church outlawed the sale of indulgences in 1857 — but charitable
contributions, combined with other acts, can help you earn one. There is a limit
of one plenary indulgence per sinner per day.
It has no currency in the bad place.
“It’s what?” asked Marta de Alvarado, 34, a bank cashier in Manhattan, when told
that indulgences were available this year at several churches in New York City.
“I just don’t know anything about it,” she said, leaving St. Patrick’s Cathedral
at lunchtime. “I’m going to look into it, though.”
The return of indulgences began with Pope John Paul II, who authorized bishops
to offer them in 2000 as part of the celebration of the church’s third
millennium. But the offers have increased markedly under his successor, Pope
Benedict, who has made plenary indulgences part of church anniversary
celebrations nine times in the last three years. The current offer is tied to
the yearlong celebration of St. Paul, which continues through June.
Dioceses in the United States have responded with varying degrees of enthusiasm.
This year’s offer has been energetically promoted in places like Washington,
Pittsburgh, Portland, Ore., and Tulsa, Okla. It appeared prominently on the Web
site of the Diocese of Brooklyn, which announced that any Catholic could receive
an indulgence at any of six churches on any day, or at dozens more on specific
days, by fulfilling the basic requirements: going to confession, receiving holy
communion, saying a prayer for the pope and achieving “complete detachment from
any inclination to sin.”
But just a few miles west, in the Archdiocese of New York, indulgences are
available at only one church, and the archdiocesan Web site makes no mention of
them. (Cardinal Edward M. Egan “encourages all people to receive the blessings
of indulgences,” said his spokesman, Joseph Zwilling, who added that he was
unaware that the offer was missing from the Web site, but would soon have it
posted.)
The indulgences, experts said, tend to be advertised more openly in dioceses
where the bishop is more traditionalist, or in places with fewer tensions
between liberal and conservative Catholics.
“In our diocese, folks are just glad for any opportunity to do something
Catholic,” said Mary Woodward, director of evangelization for the Diocese of
Jackson, Miss., where only 3 percent of the population is Catholic. At church
recently, she said, parishioners flocked to her for information about
indulgences. “What all do I have to do again to get one of those?” she said they
asked.
Even some priests admit that the rules are hard to grasp.
“It’s not that easy to explain to people who have never heard of it,” said the
Rev. Gilbert Martinez, pastor of St. Paul the Apostle Church in Manhattan, the
designated site in the New York archdiocese for obtaining indulgences. “But it
was interesting: I had a number of people come in and say, ‘Father, I haven’t
been to confession in 20 years, but this’ ” — the availability of an indulgence
— “ ‘made me think maybe it wasn’t too late.’ ”
Getting Catholics back into the confession booth, in fact, was one of the
underlying motivations for reintroducing the indulgence. In a 2001 speech, Pope
John Paul II described the newly reborn tradition as “a happy incentive” for
confession.
“Confessions have been down for years and the church is very worried about it,”
said the Rev. Tom Reese, a Jesuit and former editor of the weekly Catholic
magazine America. In a secularized culture of pop psychology and self-help, he
said, “the church wants the idea of ‘personal sin’ back in the equation.
Indulgences are a way of reminding people of the importance of penance.
“The good news is we’re not selling them anymore,” he added.
To remain in good standing, Catholics are required to confess their sins at
least once a year. But in a survey last year by a research group at Georgetown
University, three-quarters of Catholics said they went to confession less often
or not at all.
Under the rules in the “Manual of Indulgences,” published by the Vatican,
confession is a prerequisite for getting an indulgence.
Among liberal Catholic theologians, the return of the indulgence seems to be
more of a curiosity than a cause for alarm. “Personally, I think we’re beyond
the time when indulgences mean very much,” said the Rev. Richard P. McBrien, a
professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame who supports the
ordination of women and the right of priests to marry. “It’s like trying to put
the toothpaste back in the tube of original thought. Most Catholics in this
country, if you tell them they can get a plenary indulgence, will shrug their
shoulders.”
One recent afternoon outside Our Lady Queen of Martyrs Church in Forest Hills,
Queens, two church volunteers disagreed on the relevance of indulgences for
modern Catholics.
Octavia Andrade, 64, a retired secretary, laughed as she recalled a time when
children would race through the rosary repeatedly to get as many indulgences as
they could — usually in increments of 5 or 10 years — “as if we needed them,
then.”
Still, she supports their reintroduction. “Anything old coming back, I’m in
favor of it,” she said. “More fervor is a good thing.”
Karen Nassauer, 61, a retired hospital social worker who meets Mrs. Andrade
almost daily for Mass, said she was baffled by the return to a practice she
never quite understood to begin with.
“I mean, I’m not saying it is necessarily wrong,” she said. “But I had always
figured they were going to let this fade into the background, to be honest. What
does it mean to get ‘time off’ in Purgatory? What is ‘five years’ in terms of
eternity?”
The latest indulgence offers de-emphasize the years-in-Purgatory formulations of
old in favor of a less specific accounting, with more focus on ways in which
people can help themselves — and one another — come to terms with sin.
“It’s more about praying for the benefit of others, doing good deeds, acts of
charity,” said the Rev. Kieran Harrington, spokesman for the Brooklyn diocese.
After Catholics, the people most expert on the topic are probably Lutherans,
whose church was born from the schism over indulgences and whose leaders have
met regularly with Vatican officials since the 1960s in an effort to mend their
differences.
“It has been something of a mystery to us as to why now,” said the Rev. Dr.
Michael Root, dean of the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary in Columbia,
S.C., who has participated in those meetings. The renewal of indulgences, he
said, has “not advanced” the dialogue.
“Our main problem has always been the question of quantifying God’s blessing,”
Dr. Root said. Lutherans believe that divine forgiveness is a given, but not
something people can influence.
But for Catholic leaders, most prominently the pope, the focus in recent years
has been less on what Catholics have in common with other religious groups than
on what sets them apart — including the half-forgotten mystery of the
indulgence.
“It faded away with a lot of things in the church,” said Bishop DiMarzio of
Brooklyn. “But it was never given up. It was always there. We just want to
people to return to the ideas they used to know.”
