Papal indulgences.
Papal indulgences.
§ 132. Papal indulgences and the jubilees take their beginning from satisfaction. These will be discussed in brief since there are detailed commentaries from our people who are opposed to Bellarmine and other lovers of the Roman Whore.
** Godsc. Holem. [Hollen] (Sermon 2 for the Second Sunday after Easter) and Keisersbergius (De micis, fol. 43): “He who gives or has done nothing does not receive indulgences. Fitness for undertaking indulgences requires three C’s: contrition, confession, and contribution.” **
The scheme of indulgences is as follows. They claim that Christ indeed made satisfaction for our sins and for their eternal punishment. Nevertheless we ourselves must make satisfaction for temporal punishment by works undertaken voluntarily or enjoined by the priest in this life, or by punishment to be paid in purgatory after this life. But lest these remaining punishments become unbearable either because of the harshness of the torments or because of their length of time, they thought up indulgences, by which they claim that these punishments can be relaxed and redeemed, so long as letters of indulgence are purchased with a certain amount of money from officials of the Roman pontiff. Indulgences were given out not only to ease punishments but also for future sins and deeds, for an illegal grade of marriage, for eating butter and cheese during Lent. Very broad indulgences were given especially during jubilee years. As a result, things finally went so far that Johann Tetzel, a roaming circus act for the pope and a shameless hawker of indulgences, was sent into Germany by the pope in 1517. Tetzel argued that “no sin is so great that it cannot be pardoned, not even if he had violated the mother of God, through some impossibility. Souls immediately fly out of purgatory when the contribution is thrown into the collection box.” He said that he did not want to enter the argument with Peter about a higher place in the kingdom of heaven, even though he redeemed more souls from destruction with his indulgences than did Peter by preaching the Gospel! (See Dr. Luther, Opera, vol. 1;10 Sleidanus, Historia, bk. 1; and many others.)
They establish the Roman pope as the collector and dispenser of this treasury of indulgences and say it contains: (1) The superabundant merit of Christ. (2) The works of the saints, which are meritorious of eternal life by the power of Christ’s merit and are satisfactory for the remission of sins. (3) The sufferings of the saints, which were far greater in number and far more serious than the guilt of temporal punishment would demand as a result of their own faults. They argue that the keys of this treasury were handed to the Roman pontiff alone, and he applies and dispenses this treasure either immediately through himself, as happens especially in a jubilee, or mediately through metropolitan bishops, apostolic legates, supreme penitentiaries, etc. He applies it either to the living or to the souls of the dead burning in purgatory, and this he does through the intercessions of the living [suffragia vivorum], that is, through Masses, vigils, fasts, prayers, and other meritorious and satisfactory works of the monastic orders. Clement VI in his jubilee bull said: “The pope has as much power in purgatory and in the lower realms as there are souls which are being tormented in those places. To the extent that he wills, he can free them and immediately place them in heaven and on the seat of the blessed through his own indulgences.”
** Comp. theol. verit. (bk. 7, ch. 5): “It is clear that papal indulgences benefit the dead in purgatory since a cross is given at times for two or four or ten souls. For in the church there is the treasury of the merits both of Christ and of the dead. From this treasury, the pope, who alone has the keys to it, can receive and dispense in proportion to the needs of the church. Some, like the bishops, do not have a general power over these but a limited one, and only through the dispensation of the supreme pontiff. Therefore it should be said that the pope properly does not absolve the dead from their punishment but, as it were, pays for them from the common treasury of the church. This is in one way like a creditor freeing a debtor when he absolves him of his debt, and in another way like the friend of a debtor when he pays the debt for him.” **