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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

Date: 2007-12-09 03:21 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] 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.

Date: 2007-12-09 03:34 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] 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.

Date: 2007-12-10 02:26 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] 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.

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Paul Crowley

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