The history of indulgences in the Roman Catholic Church is largely an evolution of a system and ideas which had been adapted by the Church since the time of Emperor Constantine. Emperor Constantine was credited for making Christianity an emperior religion, an idea which became the precursor to other adaptations which later on were to be copied by the Roman Catholic Church. At this time, the belief in supernatural and miracles was a very common and widely practiced phenomenon within a vast majority of the Europeans of this era. Life was very hard because there was very limited knowledge on what caused such things like diseases and other forms of natural, happenings and catastrophes which were highly attributed to all kinds of forces. Such things like witchcrafts and other an explainable acts of nature had gained currency everywhere. The mode of economic production was based on feudalism; an economic system in which wealth was defined by land ownership. Majority of the population were peasants or vassals who were placed under the protection of the land owners called land lords, who incidentally happened to be the Roman Catholic Church.
During the late medieval period the Church was preoccupied with strict enforcement of legal standards to ensure that everybody was saved. The issue of immortality was also a big concern to the people who lived in the European continent. This was demonstrated with the incorporation of the “pagan” religious ceremonies into the Christian system; for instance chrismas and Easter. This was driven by the Church’s desire to find a short cut of life after death. Superstition was widely spread and accepted norm in both the secular and the spiritual minds in the dark ages. This is widely detected in various writings of the Church fathers especially in Ambrose’s ( the great bishop of Milan) who brought to his task as the bishop the skills of a great administrator, evolving by trial and error a pastoral theology and canon law which supplied the answers to all the questions the Christian life raised. Perhaps no man played a greater part, in practice, in constructing the apparatus of practical belief which surrounded the European during the millennium when Christianity was the environment of the society. In an attempt to defeat the popular challenge of Arianism, Ambrose was the first to systematically develop the cult of relics. He was so much occupied with the details of martyrology and relic-mongering. During the close of the fourth century there was a wave of discoveries, forgeries, thefts and sales of saintly treasures. The writer Faustus accused the Christians of simply substituting martyrs for pagan idols and reviving the idea of prodigies under another name. It is said that “Ambrose was a superstitious and credulous man, with a weird cosmology. He distinguished between paradise and the superior kingdom of heaven, already inhabited by Constantine and (after his death) Theodosius. He thought, in fact, there were seven heavens. Then there were Hades where people waited for the last judgment, and purgatory, a place of second baptism or furnace of fire, where the precious metal in the soul was tested to rid it of the base alloy.
The Church under the leadership of Pope Gregory 1 (ca. 540-604), further supported the doctrine of purgatory; “a doctrine in the Roman Catholic which states that all baptized souls who have died without repentance for venial sins or who have not paid their punishment for sins the guilt of which has been removed, go to a place called purgatory, where they undergo a period of probation.”
[1] The Church controlled very aspect of the people. So, people in the villages valued the Church for her efforts to avert natural disasters and remedy the situation in general. Parish priests exorcized and cursed storms, and they tried to drive away swarms of locusts by excommunications and processions. For instance, “in a monastic formulary, we find a service for banishing caterpillars and ‘palmer worms’ from the diocese of Troyes, on conditions that the peasants paid their tithes”. This was mainly driven by the peasants’ desire for good life and salvation. This was in fact the main reason why Christianity replaced “Paganism” because it had a clear-cut theory of what happened after death, and of how eternal happiness could be gained. The appeal was to all classes: it was the one thing which enabled the Church to hold society together.
Then, came penances, an idea which tried to deal with the issue of sin and repentance. The Roman Catholic Church is known to have been notorious in forgery and copying of ideas from the local religions of that time. For instance, “Pseudo-Isidorian forgeries played a major role in the evolution of the related ‘power of the keys’ theory.” The salient forgery was in the Capitularies of Benedict the Levite, a supposed document of Clement 1, reciting his ordination as bishop of Rome, in which Peter formally transmitted to him the power of the keys; Peter was made to say that bishops were the keys of the Church since they have the power to open and close the gates of heaven.
During the middle ages the discipline of the Church towards sinners was very severe. Heavy penalties, known as canonical penances were exacted for grave sins, but if the penitent manifested extraordinary signs of contrition, these penalties were shortened and lessened, and this was done especially when persecutions were going on.
“First, the penitentiaries and confessors, after they have explained to those making confessions the greatness of this kind of plenary remission and of these privileges, shall ask them for how large a contribution, in money or in other temporal goods, they would wish, in good conscience, to be spared this method of full remission and privileges; and this is to be done that they may be more easily induced to contribute. And because the conditions of men, and their occupations, are so various and manifold, and we cannot consider and asses them individually, we have therefore decided that the rates can be determined thus according to recognized classification…”
[2]The Church was very intolerant toward any ideas which deviated from the laid down dogma. Power and control were the two main driving forces of the Church’s intolerance and insensitivity. By the time of the great schism, the Church had been transformed into a money-raising organization without regard to the methods employed. In France alone, there were twenty- three papal collectors, and their staffs, distributed through the thirteen archbishoprics. In some parts of Germany, the church was wealthier and owned one-third to half of all real estates. The papacy creamed off about ten per cent of the Church’s income, in the form of innate; and it received huge sums direct from the public.
Corruption in the Church became rampant and the order of the day and by the time the sale of indulgence surfaced anything worked in the Roman Church. The idea of indulgence had evolved from the practice of penance, which had a lot of appeal to the Mediterranean world and, later to the northern barbarians. Penances were based on the principle of compensation – not to the victim, however, but to God.
In 1095, Urban II, propagating the first Crusade, laid it down that a crusade to the Holy land was a substitute for any other penance, and entailed complete remission of sin. Throughout the twelfth century, crusading was the only source of indulgence, except in rare individual cases. The word indulgence is derived from the Latin word indulgentia which comes from the Latin word indulgeo, which means to be kind or tender. Indulgence in the post-classic Latin had the original meaning of kindness or favor; meaning the remission of a tax or debt, granting of amnesty or remission of punishment. In the Roman law and in the Vulgate of the old Testament ( Is.,Ixi,1 ) it was used to express released from captivity or punishment. In the ecclesiastical Latin, an indulgence meant the remission of the temporal (not the eternal) punishment of sin (not of sin itself), on condition of penitence and the payment of money to the church or to some charitable object. It was granted by a bishop or archbishop within his diocese, while the pope had the power to grant all Catholics. This practice finds its origin from the customs of the people of Northern and Western barbarian. Like in many other practices found in the Roman Catholic Church, this practice was adapted and incorporated by the Church to avoid the sending of blood. The first instance of such pecuniary compensations took place in England under Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury (d 690). The practice rapidly spread on the European Continent, and was used by the pope during and after the crusades as a means of increasing their power. It was justified and reduced to a theory by the schoolmen, especially by Thomas Aquinas, in close connection with the doctrine of the sacrament of penance
[3] and priestly absolution.
[4] These sacraments had threefold purpose, contrition of the heart, confession by the mouth (to a priest), and satisfaction by good works, such as prayer, fasting, almsgiving, pilgrimages all of which were supposed to have an atoning efficacy.
The argument behind indulgence was that Christ and the Saints performed works of supererogation with corresponding extra-merit and extra-rewards; and these constituted a rich treasury from which the pope, as the treasurer, can dispense indulgences for money. This papal power of dispensation extends even to the departed souls in purgatory
[5], whose suffering could be abridged. Indulgences meant at first that the time spent in purgatory would be eliminated if one prayed for the souls of the dead or gave donations to the Church. “The application of indulgences to the departed souls which were in a state of penitential suffering is of rather ancient date. We find a mention of it in the ninth century, when Popes Pascal I and John VIII bestowed such indulgences on the souls of those who had died in defense of the Church or Christian civilization; and in succeeding ages it became customary to proclaim nearly all indulgences as applicable not only to the living person who performed the prescribed work, but also to such departed ones as he wished to aid.
[6]The granting of indulgences degenerated, after the time of the crusades, into a regular traffic, and became a source of ecclesiastical and monastic wealth. A good portion of the profits went into the papal treasury. The whole game was perfected by Boniface VIII, who issued the first bull of the jubilee indulgence to all visitors of St. Peter in Rome (1300).Although it was to be confined to Rome and to be repeated only once in a hundred year, it was later on extended and multiplied as to place and time. The selling and buying was later on extended to people who were ignorant and superstitious, which led to the protest of the pre-reformers like John Wycliffe in England, John Huss, John Wessel in Holland and Thomas Wyttenbach in Switzerland, but without much effect. The Lateran Council of 1517 allowed the pope to collect one-tenth of all the ecclesiastical property of Christendom, in order to sponsor a war against the Turks (Moslems).
The rebuilding of St. Peters Basilica in Rome provided the opportunity for the periodical exercise of the papal power, in which, Julius II and Leo X, two of the most worldly, avaricious, and extravagant Popes, had no scruple to raise funds for that object, and incidentally for their own aggrandizement, from the traffic in indulgences. They both issued several bulls but Spain, England and France ignored or resisted these bulls for financial reasons, refusing to be taxed for the benefit of Rome. However, Germany under the weak rule of Emperor Maximilian yielded to the papal domination. Pope Leo X divided Germany into three districts, and committed in 1515 the sale for one district to Albrecht, Archbishop of Mainz and Magdeburg, and brother to the Elector of Brandenburg. Pope Leo X set the example for the secularization and luxury of the prelate in Germany.
Albrecht was very much indebted to the rich banking-house of Fugger in Augsburg, from whom he had borrowed thirty thousand florins in gold to pay for the papal pallium. By an agreement from the Pope, he had permission to keep half of the proceeds arising from the sale of indulgences. Johann Tetzel, a Dominican
[7] friar, was commissioned with the responsibility of selling these indulges. Though a well educated priest, according to Carl von Miltitz, (a papal nuncio), Tetzel was an avaricious, dishonest and a person of sexual immorality. Tetzel traveled with great pomp through out Germany proclaiming and recommending with unscrupulous effrontery and declamatory eloquence the indulgences of the Pope to large crowds who gathered allowed him. Luther by this time was deeply involved with the reformation and when the sales of indulgences surfaced, he was more than incensed and he attack the practice with all the force of ideas he could master. This became the last straw that broke the camel back and the last nail on the coffin, toward reformation led by Martin Luther
[1] Van A. Harvey, “A handbook of Theological Terms” Macmillan Publishing Company (1964), pg 200.
[2] Henry Betteson, “Documents of the Christian Church” Oxford University Press (1963), pg 184-185.
[3] The punishment to which an individual, voluntarily submits or subjects himself or herself as an expression of penitence.
[4] The act of releasing someone from their sin by God, through the means of a priest.
[5] A holding place for the departed souls.
[6] Rev. John F. Sullivan, “The external of the Catholic Church” P.J. Kennedy $Sons (1918) pp 297-299.
[7] Another order of the Roman Catholic monastery.
