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

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.