Indulgence, remission given by Popes for the punishment owing for sins, under certain prescribed conditions.

Abbé Fleuri, who will be my prime guide on this subject, commences by remarking that all Catholics agree that the Church may grant indulgences , and that it should do so in certain cases, but he adds that it is up to its ministers to wisely dispense its favors, and not turn them into a useless or even pernicious profusion.

The multitude of indulgences , and the facility of winning them became a great obstacle to the zeal of enlightened confessors. It was difficult for them to persuade penitence to a sinner who could pay for his sins with minor almsgiving or by a single visit to a church. For the bishops of the 11th and 12th century liberally granted indulgences for all sorts of pious works, as for the building of a church, a chapel, the upkeep of a hospital, a pilgrimage to Rome, and even works useful to the public: a bridge, a road, paving a thoroughfare. Several indulgences joined together could procure complete forgiveness.

Although the Fourth Lateran Council held in the 13th century called these sorts of indulgences indiscreet and superfluous , rendering the keys of the church contemptible and enervating penitence, nevertheless Guillaume Bishop of Paris, celebrated in the same century, maintained that there was more honor to God and utility to souls in the construction of a church than in all the torments of penal works. He claimed too that indulgences were given much more reasonably for the foundation of hospitals, the repair of bridges and roads, because these works served pilgrims and other persons who traveled for pious causes.

If these reasons had been solid, continues M. Fleury, they ought to have been able to convince all the holy bishops, since the first centuries, who had established canonical penitence, but supporters of indulgences carried their views even farther. The Council understood that God is infinitely more honored by purity of behavior than by the construction and ornamenting of material churches, by song, ceremonies, and all external worship, which is only the outward layer of religion, whose soul is virtue. As most Christians are not fortunate enough to always follow their duty, these wise pastors could find no better remedies to bring sinners back than to engage them, not in charity, visits to churches, and outward ceremonies, where the heart has no share at all, but to punish themselves voluntarily in their own persons, by the retrenchment of all pleasures. Moreover, Christians were never more corrupted than when canonical penitence lost its vigor, and when indulgences took its place.

In vain did the Church leave it up to episcopal discretion to bring back a portion of the canonical penitence, according to circumstances and the fervor of the penitent, since the more commodious indulgences had sapped any penitence. But it was surprising that under the pontificate of Urban II, thanks to a single good work, the sinner was discharged of all the temporal punishments that he owed to divine justice. It took no less than a large council, presided over by this Pope in person, to authorize this novelty. This council thus granted indulgence , full remission for all sins, to those who would take up arms to recover the Holy Land.

They had already employed the invention of buying back, in a few days by some pious work, many years of penitence; for example, in the commutation of penitence, pilgrimages to Rome, to Compostela and other places, counted for a lot. But since the crusade to the East was a voyage painful to undertake, which was accompanied by all the perils of war, in a distant land, and against infidels, it was believed that nothing was too much to do for its sake. Moreover indulgence took the place of pay for the Crusades, and although it did not give bodily nourishment, it was accepted by everybody as payment. People flattered themselves with subsisting at the expense of the public, the rich, Greeks and Muslims.

The nobles who most of them felt charged with crimes, among others the pillaging of churches and the poor, thought themselves fortunate to have full remission for all their sins and total penitence in their ordinary exercise, which was to make war, with the hope, if they were killed, of obtaining the crown of martyrdom.

The nobility brought along the ordinary people, of whom the greater part were serfs attached to the lands and entirely dependent on their lords. In a word, each person was persuaded he had only to walk toward the Holy Land to assure his salvation. One knows about the conduct of the Crusades, and the success of their enterprises.

Nevertheless Urban II’s idea was adopted, tested and perfected by his successors; some even extended the privilege of indulgences to persons who either could not or would not arm themselves for the Crusades and so supplied a soldier at their expense.

Soon these spiritual favors were distributed to all persons who went into the campaign against those whom the Popes declared heretics in Europe. The long schism arising under Urban VI even involved the dual pontiffs in delivering indulgences in competition with each other. Walsingham, a Benedictine monk of the Abbey of Saint Albans, says “that they gave the world this lesson, that a stratagem, as sacred as it may be, should never be twice employed in the same century.”

Nevertheless Alexander VI successfully used it to pay the army that he destined for the conquest of Romagna. Cardinal Bembo claims that he sold indulgences in Italy for nearly 1600 gold marks; and this is the least reproach that can be made to this pontiff.

After the detested but happy pontificate of Alexander VI (says the author of the general history, whose tableau will end this article), after the war-like and even happier reign of Julius II, Jean de Médicis was crowned with the tiara at the age of thirty-six and took the name Leo X. There was nothing austere about religion under his pontificate, and whatever offended it the most was not perceived in a court preoccupied with intrigues and pleasures.

The predecessor of Leo X, Pope Julius II, under whom Painting and Architecture commenced to assume such noble growth, had desired that Rome have a temple that surpassed Saint Sophia of Constantinople, and would be the most beautiful ever seen on earth. He had the courage to undertake that which he could never see finished.

Leo X followed this project ardently. It took a lot of money and his magnificence had exhausted his treasury. There was no Christian who did not have to contribute to erecting this marvel of the metropolis of Europe; but the money destined for public works was never taken except by force or by skill. Leo X had recourse, if one may use this expression, to one of St. Peter’s keys, by which the coffers of Christians were several times opened to fill those of the Pope.

He had the pretext of a war against the Turks, and had sold in all the states of Christendom full indulgences , containing deliverance from the punishments of purgatory, either for oneself, or for one’s relatives and friends. Everywhere there were offices of indulgences ; they were treated like customs duty. Several of these stalls were located in the cabaret bars of Rome, and in them people played publicly as at dice, says Guichardin, for the power to draw souls from purgatory. The preacher, the [tax] farmer, and the distributor, all drew good profits from this; the Pope especially earned prodigiously. One can judge for oneself if one deigns to recall that one of his legates whom he sent in 1518 to the kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, the poorest of Europe, there sold indulgences for nearly two million florins. Leo X, always magnificent, dissipated in profusion all this wealth as soon as it arrived to him.

But ill-fortune would have it that the Dominicans were given the farming of indulgences in Germany; the Augustinians who had long possessed it were jealous, and this small interest of monks in a corner of Saxony opened people’s eyes to the scandalous traffic in indulgences , and produced three hundred years of discord, violence, and misery among thirty nations.