OK Mad Dawg, (did you graduate from UGA as I did), I don’t know the Popes name, got me there. I’m sure within 15 minutes I could find out who it was.
The fact is, it was a latter construct of the RCC and for a purely for profit scheme. Not that there’s anything wrong with profit, but it looks a little non-Christian when your population is dying of starvation.
I do not have the honor of having gone to UGA. I took the name Mad Dawg when one of my ewes got rabies and all three of us had to have the shots— which aren’t that bad any more.
The very idea of rabid sheep still makes me laugh. It’s like when I named one of my sweeter rams “Fang.”
I would go this far toward you: in the 16th century the idea of indulgences was perverted and drawn into the effort to raise money, I think to build St. Peter’s in Rome. I don’t have all my books at hand, darn it, or I could refer you to the page in Chadwick’s (non-Catholic) history of the Church which claims to present the first recorded indulgence which the Pope granted to nuns who especially impressed him with their piety. I don’t THINK he was counting on income from that grant.
I think a friend ‘borrowed’ that book anyway. It was in my pickup, and he borrowed my pickup, and then he told me it was a good book. Looks suspicious to me! :-)