Dear Father,
I buy Masses for my deceased parents at my local church. I was thinking it would be good if the Church would sell indulgences to help people get out of purgatory. Could my parish sell indulgences like they sell Masses?
-Ted
Dear Ted,
Having Masses offered for your deceased parents, and other departed souls, is very important. But we don’t sell Masses. Or indulgences. Someone tried that once and it didn’t end well.
You can make monetary offerings to the parish when you ask for Masses to be celebrated for your parents. We do not and cannot buy holy things, especially Masses. I know that people see all kinds of holy items for sale, especially on the internet. Some of these are fake. Some have been illegally obtained. The selling of holy things is a sin. It’s called simony, named after Simon Magus (Acts 8:9-24). Simon was a Samaritan magician who wanted to buy the power the Apostles had received from the Holy Spirit. (You really must read the story for yourself!)
Trying to buy divine power is a far cry from offering gifts to people who do divine things for us. By way of analogy, we can’t buy friendship from someone we want to be our friend. But we often give them gifts as a sign of our appreciation for who they are. If someone has done us a service, such a neighbor shoveling the snow from our driveway who refuses payment, we can give the neighbor a gift to show our gratitude.
Likewise, when a Catholic priest offers the Holy Mass for a specific intention, we can give him a gift by way of showing our thankfulness. It could be his favorite kind of cookie. That can become rather impractical when the cookies start piling up in the rectory. Also, the people who fix the rectory’s broken pipe usually won’t take food as a payment; they want money. So, folks have typically offered gifts of money to the priest to show their gratitude.
The gift to the priest also associates us much more closely with the work we are asking the priest to do, in this case, to offer Mass. Our gift unites us to the work of the Mass or other prayers of the priest.
As for indulgences, there was a 16th century German priest (a Dominican, I’m sad to say), Father Tetzel, O.P., who was accused of selling indulgences. Father Tetzel short-changed the Church’s teaching about indulgences by failing to require the confession of sins and contrition for them. He emphasized only the doing of a work in order to gain an indulgence for a soul in purgatory, and that work was the offering of money.
Thus, the famous jingle arose: “As soon as the gold in the coffer rings, the rescued soul to heaven springs.”
Martin Luther, a former priest, railed against this abuse; but as oft happens with some reformers, he took the matter too far and committed his own abuses.
An indulgence is related to the Sacrament of Penance. The Latin origin of the word means to give free reign to, or to treat with excessive kindness. So, we sometimes indulge ourselves with regard to our appetites. We give free reign to them. Or we can indulge our children, giving them free reign with social media. A positive use of the word is when we indulge someone who needs to vent; we give them our time.
God, too, indulges us, especially when we have sinned and ask His forgiveness and try to make amends for our wrongdoing.
All of our sins have effects that last for longer or shorter periods of time, depending on their seriousness and how they touch the lives of others. Some sins (mortal sins), by which we break communion with God, merit eternal punishment (hell).
Every sin, including mortal sins which we’ve taken to the Sacrament of Confession or Penance, have “leftover” consequences, as it were. This is called temporal punishment. We must be purified of these attachments before we can enter the pure brilliance of God’s presence. This is purgatory.
We can ask God to pardon the temporal punishment of the sins of souls in purgatory because we live in a bond of charity with them and the saints in heaven, in Christ. We could say that God indulges our request. This is true because Christ gave St. Peter and the Apostles and their successors the power to bind and loose in the Church.
The Church gives us multiple opportunities to do things on behalf of poor souls (including ourselves in this life). We offer these as petitions to God. We call these indulgences. We ask God in His mercy to indulge us and grant the healing of the disordered attachments that cling as a result of sins committed.
You can’t buy that! It requires a change of heart, not an exchange of money.