There was never a widespread abuse of Indulgence's that some forms of protestantism would like for you to believe. The abuse before Luther was handled by the Church resulting in excommunication of a handful of people who were involved.
Like anything else,we have sinners in the Church who do not follow the teachings
Many people have no idea what indulgences are and are not
From New Advent
WHAT AN INDULGENCE IS NOT
To facilitate explanation, it may be well to state what an indulgence is not. It is not a permission to commit sin, nor a pardon of future sin; neither could be granted by any power. It is not the forgiveness of the guilt of sin; it supposes that the sin has already been forgiven. It is not an exemption from any law or duty, and much less from the obligation consequent on certain kinds of sin, e.g., restitution; on the contrary, it means a more complete payment of the debt which the sinner owes to God. It does not confer immunity from temptation or remove the possibility of subsequent lapses into sin.””
Here is an example of an indulgence
The satisfaction, usually called the “penance”, imposed by the confessor when he gives absolution is an integral part of the Sacrament of Penance; an indulgence is extra-sacramental; it presupposes the effects obtained by confession, contrition, and sacramental satisfaction. It differs also from the penitential works undertaken of his own accord by the repentant sinner — prayer, fasting, alms-giving — in that these are personal and get their value from the merit of him who performs them, whereas an indulgence places at the penitent’s disposal the merits of Christ and of the saints, which form the “Treasury” of the Church.
roamer-””No! It is the French Liberalism, growing fitfully from the rotten root of Roman Empire that has foisted this nonsense upon the world. It has grown and festered far longer in the Catholic nations than it ever has among the Protestants. It is the basis of the stench of Nazism, and of communism, and is the very self same liberalism that we fight now. To suggest that such is the fault of Protestantism, or of the Protestant Nations is to deny history.””
Many people have been brainwashed to believe what you said here.It's not even close to being true
Here are the historical facts ...
I'll make this brief(in a hurray)
The reformation in breaking unity from the Catholic Church is the true start of Liberalism that gradually weakened the Catholic countries.
It was the french (mostly calvinists) who pillaged and stole the catholic Churches land and forced democratic elections to choose Bishops etc..- where protestant communities were actually able to select a Catholic Bishop in France,the Bishop was then forced to take civil oaths.
The United States was founded by liberal french and european calvinistic puritan slave owners and lawyers who were freemasons.
Are you going to call them Conservatives and moral?Hardly!
Thus it not surprise anyone that abortion,pornography etc.. is legal and protected in the name of freedom and democracy. It was only a matter of time before we caught up with most of western europe. It's not getting better either,Dear Brother.
ALL of this is and has always been AGAINST the teaching of the Catholic Church.
The world renown Professor of History Dr John Rao sums this up well
excerpt;
The Founding Fathers and their successors built their “make believe” objective order first and foremost upon America's British heritage. This was quite a schizophrenic legacy by the late eighteenth century. It certainly included Christianity, chiefly in the form of Anglicanism and Puritan Protestantism. But it also involved the Enlightenment, primarily in the manner that former Anglicans and Puritans who had lost their Faith presented it. These converts to the naturalist camp often used the Christian-inspired language with which they were familiar to promote their new, anti-Christian goals. Whether they intended this or not, such speech soothed those who remained believers and blinded them as to where, exactly, their familiar-sounding doctrines might actually lead in the future.
Even the Founders were aware that there was a troublesome reality that their novus ordo saeclorum was obliged immediately to confront. This was the presence in the United States of a kaleidoscope of different ethnic groups and religious convictions. That presence grew still more complex and troublesome with the mass migrations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The fullness of the make believe order of the American Pluralist system emerged out of attempts to harmonize the reality of a multicultural society with the basic conservatism of the Anglican via media, the radicalism of Puritanism, and the naturalism of an Enlightenment of both Anglican and Puritan flavor. Its theory and “mystique” were firmly in place by the late 1890’s. What they claimed was that America had discovered the formula for providing a peaceful, ordered community out of a society guaranteeing freedom to all of God (or Nature's) divided children. America thus offered mankind throughout the globe its “last and best hope” for a liberty, tranquility, and happiness greater than any ever known in human history.
Unfortunately, “diving into” the Americanist Pluralist mystique helps merely to bring to fruition another version of vulgar, materialist, and uniform disorder, whipped into some semblance of make believe unity through the will of the strongest. It aids in the perfection of that type of bland, organized willfulness predicted by nineteenth century Catholic thinkers, but in a more successful and seductive way than they could ever have imagined. Those who are interested in a deeper, more detailed discussion of Americanist Pluralism and its (temporarily) successful employment of Original Sin as the central building block of individual and social life should consult my Americanism and the Collapse of the Church in the United States, Why Catholics Cannot Defend Themselves, Founding Fathers and Church Fathers, To Promote Dialogue, Fight American Pluralism, and many other articles, all to be found on the For the Whole Christ website (jcrao.freeshell.org). All I propose to do in the present brief talk is to outline the main lines of the perversion and the confusion that this system perpetrates.
Let it suffice to say for now that the “freedom” and the “order” that one obtains through it are a purely naturalist freedom and order based upon the peculiar and often contradictory Christian and Enlightenment factors forming American culture. Its naturalism is bewildering to the believer because, as noted above, so many Americans used-—and still use-—Christian language to describe, praise and promote a set of anti-Christian purposes. It is baffling also because it has to cater to both radical and conservative naturalist tastes at one and the same time.
Hence, the American is told that he has the radical freedom that a secularized Puritans might wish him to have, a freedom that “sounds Christian” because it can easily be related to its fundamental Protestant roots. But in order to practice this freedom in a way that does not disturb the order preferred by Enlightenment conservatives, he learns that liberty actually has to be utilized in a way that avoids “divisiveness”; in a fashion that “integrates” its practitioner into an order composed of endless varieties of “non-divisive, integrating individualists”.
Americans learn that the “freedom” of communities, such as the Catholic Church, is subject to the influence of Puritan and secularized Puritan ideas regarding liberty. Freedom, under these circumstances, means only the freedom given for individual members of a religious society to rip their communal authority to shreds. All attempts to hold onto communal authority could be nothing other than assaults on freedom detested by the anti-institutional God of Protestantism and the anti-institutional Nature of the liberty-loving Enlightenment. Freedom for religious communities-—for all communities, as far as more radical thinkers are concerned-—amounts to nothing other than the freedom to be impotent and to self-destruct. James Madison, the chief author of the American Constitution, quite openly rejoices in this truth, arguing for the need to “multiply factions” within existing, strong communities so as to paralyze their ability to mobilize their followers and actually shape the American political and social order.