Offer closes December 8, 2008

[ciphergoth]

Pope Benedict XVI is offering relief from purgatory to Roman Catholics who travel to Lourdes over the next year, the Vatican said yesterday.

Pilgrims to the shrine in south-west France will receive "plenary indulgences" from the Pontiff, which the Church says reduce the time spent being "washed" of sin after death. The indulgences will be available from this weekend until Dec 8, 2008.

[...] In August the Vatican opened an airline service offering pilgrims direct flights from Rome to Lourdes.

-- Daily Telegraph, 7 Dec 2007

Comments

[webcowgirl.livejournal.com]

Is this in a package deal with the Lourdes board of Tourism?

[mskala.livejournal.com]

I wonder if the liberal and conservative cardinals have political arguments over how to divide the Church's prayer surplus between purgatory reductions for individual sinners, and paying off Original Sin.

[lizw.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure that in Catholic doctrine, original sin is paid off by the death of Christ, otherwise you wouldn't be able to have the doctrine that saints go straight to heaven and bypass purgatory. But I believe they do suffer from political wranglings between the advocates of different devotions, holy sites etc about the relative allocation of indulgences between them.

[mskala.livejournal.com]

I just read the Wikipedia article on indulgences and it says that you can also earn a plenary indulgence (which is the good one, the all-your-purgatory-erased kind) just by reading Scripture for a half hour, or saying the rosary in church. There are other conditions necessary too, but they're the same ones that apply to all plenary indulgences.

That seems to me to put this all in a new light. It suggests that plenary indulgences aren't really all that hard to come by at all, and the Pope's generosity in this case is much less of a big deal.

Have we travelled back to 1517 while I wasn't looking?

[lizw.livejournal.com]

I thought we were long past the days of "as soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs".

Re: Have we travelled back to 1517 while I wasn't looking?

[indifferenthues.livejournal.com]

Speaking as a sex-positive, bisexual activist, third-wave feminist, Catholic grandmother of Irish/Cuban decent, I think these old-fashioned customs and rituals are lovely [as long as not taken too seriously].

As a tween my family moved to North America (the NE region of the US) from Asia (HK formerly BCC now SAR) and I really, really dislike the drabness of modern western life.

Starting sometime around the dawn of the industrial revolution and finishing with a definitive BANG at WWI, life in Western Europe/North America seemed to be progressively drained of colour. From people lives, way of dress, houses, decorating styles and all, it's like everything went politely and genteelly grey!

Though it is not polite to mention it to the more hidebound theologian, how is all this with Lourdes with it's rituals of sacred water, a healing female deity and all that much different or more harmful than the custom of bathing in the Ganges?

At least in these old folk customs there is pageantry, colour, music, incense, art and all those other pretty things that are usually not included now in daily life. And how is that bad?

Re: Have we travelled back to 1517 while I wasn't looking?

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

It would be good if the Church would issue more explicit guidance on which parts to take seriously.

Re: Have we travelled back to 1517 while I wasn't looking?

[indifferenthues.livejournal.com]

It would be good if the Church would issue more explicit guidance on which parts to take seriously.

True, true . . . and of course they (the Curia) think they have . . . but honestly half the time what they write is so obscure, in such "lofty" language and has so little to do with the realities of daily parish & human life that I've even seen the priests politely rolling their eyes about many of the pronouncements.

As in "Yes, yes we understand, no girls can be 'Alter Boys . . . " so instead we have children who are "Alter Servers".

Heaven is high and the Emperor is far away.

Re: Have we travelled back to 1517 while I wasn't looking?

[lizw.livejournal.com]

Starting sometime around the dawn of the industrial revolution and finishing with a definitive BANG at WWI, life in Western Europe/North America seemed to be progressively drained of colour.

I think you might like Eamon Duffy's book Stripping the Altars, if you haven't read it already. He talks about the effects of the English Reformation on ordinary churchgoers in terms very similar to the ones you use here, and (at least for me, having grown up in a context much less High Anglican than I ended up in) sheds a lot of light on surviving Catholic traditions in the process.

[reddragdiva]

You're just posting this out of antireligious bigotry.

[damerell.livejournal.com]

You say that like it's a bad thing.

[battlekitty.livejournal.com]

Ooh! Ooh!

Do you think we'll get a real life version of Dogma??

Maybe they're doing it as a reality TV show...

[barakta]

*snorts*

[aster13.livejournal.com]

Ha!

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

It's been done before, said Nile, who ate overcooked and unidentifiable fish for his school inners on a Friday, all because some Pope said we should - when all that's virtuous about it was that it promoted his commercial interests in the fishing industry.

Maybe we should nail another 95 precepts to a door somewhere - though preferably one where nobody will notice, and get us all prosecuted for inciting religious hatred.


Assuming, of course, that the shareholders' register for this new venture in religious tourism has a public listing of its owners; the Vatican is one of the few areas within the EU that isn't subject to all those tedious banking laws.