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Satan distributing indulgences, an illumination from a Czech manuscript, 1490s; Jan Hus (the main leader of the Bohemian Reformation) condemned the selling of indulgences already in 1412 IMAGE/Wikipedia
Today’s selection — from God’s Bankers by Gerald Posner. One of the scandalous practices of the Catholic church was the sale of “indulgences” to raise money. Indulgences allowed Catholics to buy forgiveness for their sins with cold, hard cash. Most remember that indulgences were one of the primary reasons Martin Luther made the cataclysmic decision to leave the Catholic church and start the “Protestant” movement. However, few realize that indulgences were used by the Catholic church as a primary source of revenue for over a thousand years, and that the practice did not end as a result of Luther’s protests:
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“Indulgences helped Urban II in the eleventh century offset the church’s enormous costs in subsidizing the first Crusades. He offered full absolution to anyone who volunteered to fight in ‘God’s army’ and partial forgiveness for simply helping the Crusaders. Successive Popes became ever more creative in liberalizing the scope of indulgences and the ease with which devout Catholics could pay for them. By the early 1400s, Boniface IX — whose decadent spending kept the church under relentless financial pressure — extended indulgences to encompass sacraments, ordinations, and consecrations. A few decades later, Pope Paul II waived the need for sinners to make a pilgrimage to Rome. He authorized local bishops to collect the money and dispense the indulgences and also cleared them for sale at pilgrimage sites that had relics of saints. Sextus IV had an inspired idea: apply them to souls stuck in Purgatory. Any Catholic could pay so that souls trapped in Purgatory could get on a fast track to Heaven. The assurance that money alone could cut the afterlife in Purgatory was such a powerful inducement that many families sent their life savings to Rome. So much money flooded to Sextus that he was able to build the Sistine Chapel. Alexander VI — the Spanish Borgia whose Papacy was marked by nepotism and brutal infighting for power — created an indulgence for simply reciting the Rosary in public. The new sales pitch promised the faithful that a generous contribution multiplied the Rosary’s prayer power.
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