So, you can win an indulgence if you follow the pope on Twitter, eh? OMG, OMG, let’s all sign up.

I have already written a short chapter on papal indulgences. Basically, all that you need to know about the subject is this:

1. The theory is derived from the story in Matthew 16 in which Jesus tells Peter: “Whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”
2. Indulgences do not apply to serious sins. If you murder someone, and you are not forgiven, the indulgence is worthless. You are looking at an eternity in the Inferno.
3. Indulgences apply only to venial sins that have already been confessed to a priest. This is the part that is seldom mentioned.
4. No one, including the pope, has any idea how long the sentences in Purgatory will be; there are absolutely no established standards. An indulgence of a year might be just what a sinner needed, or it might be meaningless if the sins have earned one tens of billions of years of suffering.

Of course, the faithful go to confession with the express intent of getting their sins large and small forgiven. If they have already been to confession, what need do they have of indulgences? Well, there is the little matter of penance, which is the punishment imposed by the priest. The sins are not technically forgiven until the sinner completes the penance. So the indulgence would be helpful if, and this is a big “if”, one happens to die in the period between the priest’s granting of (conditional) absolution and the sinner’s completion of the prescribed penance, which ordinarily consists of reciting a few prayers. It might help to think of the indulgence as an insurance policy against the possibility of the roof of the church collapsing at the exact moment that one leaves the confessional.

It could happen! The demise of Pope John XXI, the only Portuguese pope, occurred when the roof of his medical laboratory collapsed and crushed him. Whether he had enough time to grant himself a plenary indulgence was not recorded.

This whole scheme would be pretty funny if not for the fact that so many people historically had not fallen for it. Hundreds of thousands of people gave their lives in the crusades, and the motivation for many of them was to earn the way into heaven for themselves or someone else. Countless thousands have made pilgrimages to Rome or other locations in order to rack up indulgences. During the Renaissance a fair number of unscrupulous marketers of indulgences bilked people out of quite a bit of money, which, in many cases the marks desperately needed. This provoked so much resistance that people began to protest. You might have heard of them. They were called Protestants.