Thank you for posting this article. I found it refreshing and enriching. There's always the danger of looking at it purely as a 'numbers game,' but if anything, I got the opposite impression from the post. Reflecting on the differences between God's mercy and God's wrath can be particularly fruitful - especially during trying times.
Thanks, good article.
Don't forget to pray for the Poor Souls in Purgatory to alleviate their suffering, especially those who are forgotten, have died in wars, and have no one to pray for them.
Oh, what a letdown! Like a handshake at the doorstep at the end of a date! The article ends with a cliffhanger!!!
Actually, I think I can see where the author is going with this. Indulgences are (if I'm reading the signs right) the flip-side of Penance. In other words, indulgences are the Church's offer of an opportunity to repent of sins monetarely. But I could be really, really wrong about this.
Please feel free to ping me if there's another installment. It was a well-written, well-reasoned article for as far as it took us.
There is strong Scriptural direction that prayers for the dead help blot out the sins they incurred during life, which leads us to reflect on indulgences.
I quote:
2 Maccabees 39 et seq.
On the following day, since the task had now become urgent, Judas and his men went to gather up the bodies of the slain and bury them with their kinsmen in their ancestral tombs. But under the tunic of each of the dead they found amulets sacred to the idols of Jamnia, which the law forbids the Jews to wear. So it was clear to all that this was why these men had been slain. They all therefore praised the ways of the Lord, the just judge who brings to light the things that are hidden.
Turning to supplication, they prayed that the sinful deed might be fully blotted out. The noble Judas warned the soldiers to keep themselves free from sin, for they had seen with their own eyes what had happened because of the sin of those who had fallen. He then took up a collection among all his soldiers, amounting to two thousand silver drachmas, which he sent to Jerusalem to provide for an expiatory sacrifice. In doing this he acted in a very excellent and noble way, inasmuch as he had the resurrection of the dead in view; for if he were not expecting the fallen to rise again, it would have been useless and foolish to pray for them in death.
But if he did this with a view to the splendid reward that awaits those who had gone to rest in godliness, it was a holy and pious thought. Thus he made atonement for the dead that they might be freed from this sin.
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Here, the Bible tells us that prayers and almsgiving for the dead helps to blot out the sins they incurred during life. How much more efficacious, then, prayers and alms and charitable acts undertaken while we are yet alive to help blot out our own sins!