Indulge: “to be kind; yield, concede …”

May the souls…. etc.

At this time of year — Hallows Eve through the octave of All Souls Day — we are always getting mailings from Catholic religious, such as the Jesuits at BC and or the Benedictine monks at Glastonbury Abbey, requesting names of the Faithful Departed that we want prayed for. {Also these mailings include a convenient card for submitting $contributions as well.} Glastonbury Abbey even sells “Spiritual Bouquets”  or “Spiritual Enrollments” for the souls of dearly departed friends and family.

What’s up with all these? and why a separate day for all saints vs. all souls? Is it like Varsity vs. JV?

I researched this so you don’t have to:

“The theological basis for the feast is the doctrine that the souls which, on departing from the body, are not perfectly cleansed from venial sins, or have not fully atoned for past transgressions, are debarred from the Beatific Vision, and that the faithful on earth can help them by prayers, alms deeds and especially by the sacrifice of the Mass”   – Catholic Encyclopaedia

And, From the Brittanica:

“…in the sacrament of penance it did not suffice to have the guilt (culpa) of sin forgiven through absolution alone; one also needed to undergo temporal punishment (poena, from p[o]enitentia, “penance”) because one had offended Almighty God. Second, indulgences rested on belief in purgatory, a place in the next life where one could continue to cancel the accumulated debt of one’s sins,…”

Specifically from Cardinal Law’s Magnum Opus, the Catechism of the Catholic Church …. still….. to this day….. the church teaches:

“…a remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven, which the faithful Christian who is duly disposed gains under certain prescribed conditions through the action of the Church which, as the minister of redemption, dispenses and applies with authority the treasury of the satisfactions of Christ and all of the saints“

          (emphasis mine)

So if you go to confession God will forgive your guilt BUT , He still holds out for the PUNISHMENT for those sins; the debt, as it were, of punishment, must STILL get paid off. — Miserly, mean  and exacting being that ‘God must be! –

Yup. To this day the Magisterium have resisted Luther and Protestants and before them the Eastern Orthodox… and hold to this teaching. (ask Ron!)

You may remember numbers of days of indulgence that different acts earned….. e.g. ‘2 hail Mary’s gets 30 days indulgence’, etc.

Here’s a view of a prayer and its effect on someone in Purgatory from the “God Leads Me” Grade 5 Catechism © 1960 W. H. Sadlier used at St. Theresa’s School, West Roxbury, MA

The church used to maintain a compendium of indulgences with explicit numbers of days / years etc. They called it the Raccolta (“Collection” in Italian).

Without rescinding it Paul VI revised the Raccolta in 1967 to expunge specific counts of days in Purgatory. But here, from the original:

“An indulgence of nine years for each step
His Holiness, Pope Pius IX., by a brief, Dec. 19, 1856, granted to all the faithful, every time that, being truly penitent, after confession and communion, they shall, any time between the feast of All-Saints and the octave of All- Souls, and from the feast of the Nativity of our Lord to the octave of the Epiphany, and during Lent, ascend on their knees the steps placed, on either side, near the Scala Sancta praying meanwhile and meditating on the passion of our Lord, each and all the indulgences that could be gained by ascending the Scala Sancta,..”

It’s like legacy code. Nothing goes away…no mistaken world views admitted….. its just that the gaze is averted.

Happy All Souls Day,