Word Finder - indulgences

definition

The act of indulging

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Tolerance

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Catering to someone's every desire

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Something in which someone indulges

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An indulgent act; favour granted; gratification.

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A pardon or release from the expectation of punishment in purgatory, after the sinner has been granted absolution.

Twenty years after Savonarola's death Martin Luther made public his theses against indulgences.

In 1908, however, it was suppressed, as stated above, and its functions as to indulgences were transferred to the Holy Office, and those as to relics to the Congregation of Rites.

This salutary doctrine, however, has undoubtedly been obscured to some extent by the phrase a poena et a culpa, which, from the 13th century to the Reformation, was applied to Plenary Indulgences.

The most accepted modern theory is that it is merely a catchword surviving from a longer phrase which proclaimed how, during such Indulgences, ordinary confessors might absolve from sins usually " reserved " to the Bishop or the Pope.

These misconceptions were certainly widespread from the 13th to the 16th century, and were often fostered by the " pardoners," or professional collectors of contributions for Indulgences.

The greatest of all Plenary Indulgences is of course the Roman 1 Equally strong assertions were made by the provincial council of Mainz in 1261; and Lea (p. 287) quotes the complaints of 36 similar church councils before 1538.

The occasion for the schism was given by the conflict with regard to indulgences, in the course of which Luther was not content to attack actual grievances, but assailed the Catholic doctrine itself.

It had also the duty of considering applications for the concession of indulgences and of interpreting the rules with regard to them.

These are not so much jubilees in the ordinary sense as special grants of plenary indulgences for particular purposes (Indulgentiae plenariae in forma jubilaei).

This was the origin of Indulgences properly so-called.

But these dispensations, which at first lay chiefly in the gift of the bishops, then almost exclusively in that of the popes, soon increased in an incessant stream, till at the close of the middle ages there were thousands of churches in every western country, by visiting which it was possible to obtain an almost indefinite number of indulgences.

Most pilgrims, probably, contented themselves with the brief guidebooks which seem to have originated in the catalogues of indulgences.

And, since the strongest motive in the pilgrimage was the acquisition of indulgences, unnumbered thousands were moved to assume the Cross, when, in 1095, Urban II.

The possession of an extraordinary relic, a bloody Host, or the like, was everywhere considered a sufficient claim for the privileges of indulgences; and wherever this privilege existed, there the pilgrims were gathered together.

For the indulgences attached to the devotion consult Beringer, S.J., Die Abldsse, 11 th ed.

If on one or two points, as, for instance, the invocation of saints, some germs of subsequent Roman teaching may be discovered, there is a want of anything like the doctrine of indulgences or of compulsory private confession.

It appeared characteristically enough on the practical and not on the speculative side of theology in a sermon on Indulgences preached in July 1516.

Luther began his work as a Reformer by proposing to discuss the true meaning of Indulgences.

The occasion was an Indulgence proclaimed by Pope Leo X., farmed by the archbishop of Mainz, and preached by John Tetzel, a Dominican monk and a famed seller of Indulgences.

The practice of offering, selling and buying Indulgences (see Indulgence) was everywhere common in the beginning of the 16th century.

This old and simple conception of Indulgences had been greatly altered since the beginning of the 13th century.

The change made in the character of Sorrow made Indulgences all the more necessary for the indifferent penitent.

This doctrine of Attrition had not the undivided support of the theologians of the later medieval church; but it was taught by the Scotists and was naturally a favourite theme with the sellers of Indulgences.

Nor were all theologians at one upon the whole theory of Indulgences.

The majority of the best theologians held that Indulgences had nothing to do with the pardoning of guilt, but only with freeing from temporal penalties in this life or in purgatory.

The unexpected effect of the Theses was that the sale of Indulgences began to decline rapidly, and the archbishop of Mainz, disappointed in his hopes of revenue, sent a copy to Rome.

The book practically discarded all the ideas and practices concerning Indulgences which had come into the medieval church since the beginning of the 13th century, and all the ingenious explanations of the scholastic theologians from Bonaventura and Thomas Aquinas downwards.

The effect of the controversy was a great decrease in the sale of Indulgences in Germany, and the Papal Curia saw with alarm a prolific source of revenue decaying.

They saw in him a pious man, an esteemed professor, who had done nothing but propose a discussion on the notoriously intricate subject of Indulgences, peremptorily ordered to recant and to remain silent.

There he disowned the sermons of the pardonsellers, let it be seen that he did not approve of the action of the Legate, and so prevailed with Luther that the latter promised to write a submissive letter to the pope, to exhort people to reverence the Roman See, to say that Indulgences were useful to remit canonical penances, and to promise to write no more on the matter unless he happened to be attacked.

He re-examined his convictions about justifying faith and whether they did lead to his declarations about Indulgences.

The Disputation made him see that his protest against the abuses of Indulgences was no criticism of an excrescence on the medieval ecclesiastical system, but an attack on its centre of existence.

These indulgences were extended by Benedict XIII.

In 1857 the Roman Catholic bishops in England received faculties, renewed quinquenially, permitting them to erect the stations with the accompanying indulgences, and they often delegate this faculty to priests.

Contrary to the wishes of the archbishop of Prague a meeting of the members of the university took place, at which both Hus and Jerome spoke strongly against the sale of indulgences.

It must be inferred from the whole practice of indulgences as at present authorized that the pains of purgatory are measurable by years and days; but here also everything is indefinite.

Thus he may grant indulgences, issue censures, give dispensations, canonize saints, institute bishops, create cardinals - in short, perform all the acts of his jurisdiction, even though he be no more than a layman; but by custom certain of his more solemn acts are postponed till after the ceremony of his coronation, from which his pontificate is officially dated.

Hitherto the way had been blocked by a horde of protonotaries, dataries and other officials - purveyors of indulgences, dispensations and such-like spiritual favours - to whom reform spelt ruin.

The indignation excited by Leo X.'s sale of indulgences, the moral rage stirred in Northern hearts by papal abominations in Rome, were external causes which precipitated the schism between Teutonic and Latin Christianity.

Indulgences were tried, and were successful in bringing back about loo ministers to their parishes and introducing a new cause of division among the clergy.

Indulgences are not recognized; an intermediate and purificatory state of the dead is held but not systematized into a doctrine of purgatory.

Crowned in St Peter's on the 31st of August at the age of sixty-three, he entered upon the lonely path of the reformer_ His programme was to attack notorious abuses one by one; but in his attempt to improve the system of granting indulgences he was hampered by his cardinals; and reducing the number of matrimonial dispensations was impossible, for the income had.

It was out of this practice that later on Indulgences grew up.

When he proceeded to deny the doctrine of transubstantiation, to assert the all-sufficiency of the Scriptures as a rule of life, to denounce saint-worship, pilgrimages, and indulgences, and to declare, the pope to be Antichrist, he frightened his old supporter John of Gaunt and the politicians of the anti-clerical clique.

If so, parliament was told that temporal possessions ruin the church and drive out the Christian graces of faith, hope and charity; that the priesthood of the church in communion with Rome was not the priesthood Christ gave to his apostles; that the monk's vow of celibacy had for its consequence unnatural lust, and should not be imposed; that transubstantiation was a feigned miracle, and led people to idolatry; that prayers made over wine, bread, water, oil, salt, wax, incense, altars of stone, church walls, vestments, mitres, crosses, staves, were magical and should not be allowed; that kings should possess the jus episcopale, and bring good government into the church; that no special prayers should be made for the dead; that auricular confession made to the clergy, and declared to be necessary for salvation, was the root of clerical arrogance and the cause of indulgences and other abuses in pardoning sin; that all wars were against the principles of the New Testament, and were but murdering and plundering the poor to win glory for kings; that the vows of chastity laid upon nuns led to child murder; that many of the trades practised in the commonwealth, such as those of goldsmiths and armourers, were unnecessary and led to luxury and waste.

Twelve years had elapsed since Luther had published his theses against indulgences - twelve years of intense excitement and anxious discussion, not in Germany only, but in almost all the adjacent countries.

King Leopold was personally a man of considerable attainments and much strength of character, but he was a notoriously dissolute monarch, who even to the last offended decent opinion by his indulgences at Paris and on the Riviera.

Martin Luther was nailed to the church door for selling papal indulgences.

Papal diplomacy in the interests of peace failed, however; Cardinal Wolsey made England, not the pope, the arbiter between France and the Empire; and much of the money collected for the crusade from tithes and indulgences was spent in other ways.

An arrangement was effected, however, whereby that citation was cancelled, and Luther betook himself in October 1518 to Augsburg to meet the papal legate, Cardinal Cajetan, who was attending the imperial diet convened by the emperor Maximilian to impose the tithes for the Turkish war and to elect a king of the Romans; but neither the arguments of the learned cardinal, nor the dogmatic papal bull of the 9th of November to the effect that all Christians must believe in the pope's power to grant indulgences, moved Luther to retract.