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INDULGENCES
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To appreciate the benefit of an indulgence, one must recognise that every sin, because it is
an injustice against God, merits punishment. Moreover, one must understand that the
forgiveness of sin is one thing but the removal of punishment is something else. After the
fall, for example, Adam was forgiven his sin (cf. Wisdom 10: 1-2) but he still had to suffer
the punishment of death. Even though King David's adultery was pardoned, he nonetheless
had to endure the death of his child as a penalty for his offence.
Mortal sin and the eternal punishment due to it are removed by a sacramental
confession. But just as Adam and David, having been forgiven their mortal sins,
underwent temporal punishment (i.e. punishment that lasted for a time), so also, the
Church's theologians affirm, according to the ordinary law the sorrow of the penitent does
not remove all the temporal punishment. This punishment must be endured either here in
this world or in purgatory.
An indulgence, however, is one way that the temporal punishment due to forgiven
sin is removed. The Council of Trent pronounced that Christ had given to His Church the
power of granting indulgences and that the Church had used this power since the earliest
times. Recognising that the use of indulgences is especially salutary for the Christian
people as well as approved by the authority of the holy councils, Trent condemned those
who either claimed that indulgences are useless or who denied the Church's power to grant
them.
Besides maintaining the Church's authority to grant indulgences, Pope Clement VI
explained the existence of the Church's treasury. He said that through the death of Christ
there was established an infinite treasure by which those who use it become partakers of
God's friendship. Christ entrusted this treasure, the pontiff continued, to be dispensed to
the faithful through Peter and his successors either for the total or the partial remission of
temporal punishment due to forgiven sins (cf. Denzinger 551). Not only do the merits of
Christ belong to this treasury, but also those of Our Lady and the saints. There can be no
fear of any diminution of this treasury, not only because Christ's merits are infinite but also
because when merits are applied they bring many to justice and this increases the treasury
(cf. Denzinger 552).
Transferring the merits from one member to satisfy for the punishments of another
strikingly illustrates the doctrine of the communion of saints. As St Paul says, 'And if one
part is suffering, all the rest suffer with it; if one part is treated with honour, all the rest find
pleasure in it. And you are Christ's body, organs of it depending upon each other' (1 Cor.
12:26-27). 'Because all the faithful, under Christ their head, form one mystical body', Fr A M
Herve SJ wrote, 'the merits of Christ and the satisfactions of Christ and the saints are, in a
certain sense, the property of the individual members and these members can grant them
for the benefit of one another' (cf. 'De Indulgentiis' Herve, Vol IV, p.69). By granting
indulgences, the Church through the Vicar of Our Lord on earth applies the merits of Christ
and the saints to the souls in purgatory and to the faithful on earth to satisfy for the
punishment their forgiven sins deserve. Those in purgatory are members of the mystical
body whose bond is love. Because they cannot help themselves, they depend upon the
charity of the faithful on earth to gain indulgences for them. Unlike some remission of
temporal punishment from the prayers, fasts and almsgiving of an individual member of the
faithful, the value of the indulgence is much greater because it is derived from the
intervention of the Church Herself.
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