Indulgences and Purgatory

[Michie]

An indulgence, as per the Catholic Catechism, is a remission of the temporal punishment, which comes from the commission of sin. Since we are all sinners, all of us will acquire the need for the forgiveness of sin by either receiving absolution from a priest during the Sacrament of Penance or by praying the Perfect Act of Contrition in the absence of a priest, which I detailed in my article on Pandemic Practices. This will forgive your sins, but it will not relieve the temporal punishment connected with the sin.

This is why most of us after our death and particular judgment where we must give an accounting of our lives, wind up in a place called Purgatory. So what caused all the sin? Why it was an act of “Un-Love” where we failed to love God or love our neighbor. By not loving our neighbor, we also fail to love God.



There are two commandments that the entire law is based. You must love God with your whole heart, mind, soul, and strength and your neighbor as you love yourself. All acts of “Un-Love” must be atoned. So where do indulgences enter the picture? We, the Church Militant, by praying for the Church Suffering commit an act of love in two ways.


Continued below.
Indulgences and Purgatory

 

[zippy2006]

I was recently looking at an old essay on the East-West Schism by David Bentley Hart, and he condenses a central question about purgatory and indulgences. I have wondered this myself, and I assume it must come up often:

On the second matter, Purgatory, it may seem somewhat counterintuitive to place this issue alongside something of such enormous consequence as the filioque clause; but here I think is one area where Roman doctrinal pronouncements have not been as marked as one might wish by that formulary minimalism I praised above. The Eastern church believes in sanctification after death, and perhaps the doctrine of Purgatory really asserts nothing more than that; but Rome has also traditionally spoken of it as ‘temporal punishment’, which the pope may in whole or part remit. The problem here is it is difficult, from the Orthodox perspective, to see how it could be both. That is, if it is sanctification, then it is nothing other than salvation: that is, the transformation of our souls, by which the Holy Spirit conforms us to God, through all eternity, and frees us from the last residue of our perversity and selfishness. The Orthodox and Catholic Churches are as one, after all, in denying that salvation is either a magical transformation of the human being into something else or merely a forensic imputation of sinlessness to a sinful creature: it is a real glorification and organic transfiguration of the creature in Christ, one which never violates the integrity of our creatureliness, but which—by causing us to progress from sin to righteousness—really makes us partakers of the divine nature. Very well then: what then could it mean to remit purgation? Why, if it is sanctification, would one want such remission, and would it not then involve instead the very magical transformation of the creature into something beyond itself that the Orthodox and Catholic Churches both deny? These are not, granted, unanswerable questions, but they are questions as yet unanswered, and there is genuine need for a serious engagement on what the doctrinal formulation regarding sanctification after death should be, and whether Roman and Orthodox traditions can be reconciled in a more than superficial way on this one issue.

-The Myth of Schism​