However, I am pretty sure that the following article in the New York Times is going to prove irresistable to my dear wife:
Getting Catholics back into confession, in fact, was one of the motivations for reintroducing the indulgence. In a 2001 speech, Pope John Paul described the newly reborn tradition as “a happy incentive” for confession.
[snip]
“Confessions have been down for years and the church is very worried about it,” said the Rev. Tom Reese, a Jesuit and former editor of the Catholic magazine America. In a secularized culture of pop psychology and self-help, he said, “the church wants the idea of personal sin back in the equation. Indulgences are a way of reminding people of the importance of penance.”
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3 comments:
You got me: I had to click through. My assessment? At least Catholicism announces so explicitly that it's a wacky, ludicrous cult. The rest of Christianity masquerades as something vaguely more reasonable, which is even scarier.
You got me, too. Just because I wanted to be like Alice.
Btw, did you guys find a cellphone case upstairs?
I too clicked through on a trip down memory lane. As a 5th-grader my friend Lorrie Dudzik and I went on an indulgence binge. We kept a notebook and recorded the indulgences we racked up for the souls in purgatory. We weren't keeping them for ourselves! Boy were we feeling holy.
In light of the space-time continuum posed in the general theory of relativity, I wonder how time is going to be computed in purgatory. Actually I thought the Catholic Church had abandoned the idea of purgatory, but I guess it's just Limbo that has been discontinued. I'm grateful the Episcopal church keeps its disputes in this world.
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