Fr. Sebastian Walshe explains the concept of indulgences in Catholic theology, clarifying their origins and purpose. He discusses whether or not we can know how many days each indulgence is worth.
Transcript:
I’ve seen some Catholic prayers with the heading “Pope Sonso gives an indulgence of X number of days for saying this prayer,” and I was just wondering where that comes from and what it means. It’s specifically about the number of days.
Yes, okay, very good. I’m glad you asked that question.
So, the question is, first of all, we have to ask the question, what on earth is an indulgence and where does that come from?
So, the idea is this, that we can do certain acts on behalf of those who have died. The clearest scripture passage for that is found in the second book of Maccabees, I believe it’s chapter 12, where it talks about a collection that was taken up for those who had died
and in order that they would be released from their sins, okay, after death. And so, this idea of people doing some sort of a sacrifice, making a financial sacrifice, an offering for the sake of someone who has already died that they be released from the punishment due to their sins, is something that you find even in Scripture. And there are a number of texts in other places in Scripture that imply it. A really interesting text is the parable found in Luke 16 about the unjust steward. The unjust steward, he uses his master’s money to pay the debts of his master. Isn’t that interesting?
And that fits exactly with what Catholics teach about indulgences. In other words, an indulgence is the remission of the temporal punishment due to sins that have already been forgiven in view of the excess merits of Christ and the saints.
So, it follows from the doctrine of the mystical body of Christ. We’re all one body in Christ. And just as in a human biological body, the healthy cells can help heal the cells that are damaged. So also, in the mystical body of Christ, the saints, Christ and Our Lady especially, but also the other saints who did much more penance than was due for their own sins, have so to speak an excess of merits that they can apply to heal those souls who still need reparation, satisfaction, so to speak, for their sins. Okay? And St. Thomas talks about that. He says it’s a little bit like this. If you have a friend who you love that pays the debt, because you love that friend and you see the sacrifice they’re making for you, you yourself suffer on behalf of your friend. You see your friend who you love making a sacrifice for you. And so now you also pay that debt by way of your compassion for your friend. So that’s kind of in a nutshell very quickly, the theology of indulgences and the mystical body, how that works. So who has the authority to distribute those excess merits of Christ and the saints? The answer is the one who has care of the common good of the church, and that would be the Pope.
And then the question, the last part was your part about, you know, days. Well, it’s a little bit difficult to speak about time and purgatory.
So purgatory is a place where there’s no bodies present, and at least there’s no human bodies there. There’s some, there might be, it might be a physical place. But so the experience of time and purgatory is quite different than what we might experience on Earth. So literally what it’s doing is it’s saying those are seven, for example, if it says is an indulgence of seven days, that would be seven of our days after seven of our days, you know, that person would be freed. But if you say this indulgence prayer, they’d be they’d be freed today rather than seven days later. OK, now, again,
the church tends not to speak that way anymore with regard to partial indulgences. Now the church just sort of talks about partial indulgences and doesn’t give any concrete number of days. That doesn’t mean that it’s wrong to talk about, you know, days off of purgatory, something like that. It’s just that it’s likely to be confusing. So now the church just says either an indulgence is planarial, meaning that all the punishment due to someone’s sins is forgiven, in which case they can go straight to heaven from purgatory. Or it means that is partial, in which case then some part of their sin is remitted and no number of days is established for it.
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