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Indulgences Reintroduced [nytimes.com]

(1) Does the article depict RCC teaching accurately?
(2) What position do Eastern Catholics take on this matter?

Here is an excerpt:

Why are we bringing it back?” asked Bishop Nicholas A. DiMarzio of Brooklyn, who has embraced the move. “Because there is sin in the world.”

Like the Latin Mass and meatless Fridays, the indulgence was one of the traditions decoupled from mainstream Catholic practice in the 1960s by the Second Vatican Council, the gathering of bishops that set a new tone of simplicity and informality for the church. Its revival has been viewed as part of a conservative resurgence that has brought some quiet changes and some highly controversial ones, like Pope Benedict XVI’s recent decision to lift the excommunications of four schismatic bishops who reject the council’s reforms.

The indulgence is among the less noticed and less disputed traditions to be restored. But with a thousand-year history and volumes of church law devoted to its intricacies, it is one of the most complicated to explain.

According to church teaching, even after sinners are absolved in the confessional and say their Our Fathers or Hail Marys as penance, they still face punishment after death, in Purgatory, before they can enter heaven. In exchange for certain prayers, devotions or pilgrimages in special years, a Catholic can receive an indulgence, which reduces or erases that punishment instantly, with no formal ceremony or sacrament.

There are partial indulgences, which reduce purgatorial time by a certain number of days or years, and plenary indulgences, which eliminate all of it, until another sin is committed. You can get one for yourself, or for someone who is dead. You cannot buy one — the church outlawed the sale of indulgences in 1567 — but charitable contributions, combined with other acts, can help you earn one. There is a limit of one plenary indulgence per sinner per day.

It has no currency in the bad place.

“It’s what?” asked Marta de Alvarado, 34, when told that indulgences were available this year at several churches in New York City. “I just don’t know anything about it,” she said, leaving St. Patrick’s Cathedral at lunchtime. “I’m going to look into it, though.”

The return of indulgences began with Pope John Paul II, who authorized bishops to offer them in 2000 as part of the celebration of the church’s third millennium. But the offers have increased markedly under his successor, Pope Benedict, who has made plenary indulgences part of church anniversary celebrations nine times in the last three years. The current offer is tied to the yearlong celebration of St. Paul, which continues through June.

It's not entirely accurate. One example is that Indulgences never gave "time off of Purgatory", which is not actually measured by time, but rather time off of assigned penances, or a completion of their "after death" equivalent of purification. For example, if you were assigned to fast for a year, or pray a certain prayer every week for a year, then a "year indulgence" would equal that penance. That's the most serious issue I found with the article, though the implication that indulgences somehow went away for a time is certainly inaccurate; they've always been around, and certainly didn't vanish after Vatican II.

As for Eastern Catholics, some go for indulgences, others don't. Theologically speaking they aren't really much different from the various penances and devotions already found in the East, particularily those done for the dead (such as donating to charities, or giving out food). Such practices mirror the Latin tradition of indulgences (which itself is merely a more "codified" approach to the same principle), and together they represent different manifestations of the same Apostolic tradition of living practices offered on behalf of the dead, and penances done for the purification of our souls.

Realistically speaking, I find indulgences and Purgatory to be the least of the differences between the Latins and the various Eastern traditions. The Byzantine East, at least, has maintained a very strong tradition of offerings for the benefit of the dead, arguably much more so than the Latin tradition has preserved despite its codification of such things. The only real difference I see is that the Latin West codified it, but didn't always popularize and institutionalize it, while the Byzantine East made it part of the daily package of the Faith, but didn't strictly codify how this or that benefits the departed or our own souls, leaving the definition hazy but the practice very firm and well established.

Peace and God bless!

As Ghosty correctly notes, the newspaper report is not accurate.

Neither Vatican II nor anybody else "abolished" indulgences. The connection of indulgences with money has been forbidden since the Council of Trent. What did happen after Vatican II was that the connection of indulgences with specific lengths of time fell into desuetude, because of the confusion that it caused.

The newspaper article also claims that the Church had abolished the celebration of Mass in Latin (the Church did no such thing - all these years there has been a Latin High Mass in Dublin Pro-Cathedral, Westminster Cathedral, and lots of other places every Sunday) and meatless Fridays (the Church did not abolish that either, but did permit local bishops' conferences to permit the substitution of another penitential practice).

We do well to refrain from taking secular newspaper articles as a reliable source of Church teaching and practice.

Fr. Serge

Temporal punishment.

Is this useful? It seems a succinct explanation of an indulgence.

In his apostolic constitution on indulgences, Pope Paul VI said: "An indulgence is 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 defined conditions through the Church's
help when, as a minister of redemption, she dispenses and applies with authority the treasury of the satisfactions won by Christ and the saints" ("Indulgentiarum Doctrina")

http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Paul06/p6indulg.htm

I think the prayers in the Handbook of Indulgences are helpful for anyone. Surely, any form of prayer is beneficial in the spiritual life. I used to take a hard-line approach to latinizations, but I don't see indulgences as a latinization, but something we can share as members of the Universal Church. Latins and Eastern Christians need to pray together so we can increase the bonds of friendship and unity. I don't think we need to worry to much about how prayers "work", but rather if they are helping us change our lives--let God worry about His work of removing sin and the punishment, temporal or otherwise, that goes with sin.