Indulgences And The 700 Club Etc.

[prose]

I have always understood indulgences this way:

They are a way of making your soul more pure on earth. The act that grants one an indulgence in some way spiritually purifies a person, and therefor there is less time spent in purgatory (less purification needed). For instance, if you go to the Vatican for confession and then pray certain prayers, you are granted I believe a partial indulgence. It is not just that you have done the acts that "Took some time off" as you will, but the graces have purified you in that much more of a powerful way.

That is why full, plenary indulgences are difficult (if not impossible) to get. Because you would have to be soooo open to the graces of the act that you allow God to purify you in that moment. That is why people say "you must have no earthly attachments to achieve a full indulgence".

Now, I am not an expert on this, so someone can correct me if I am way off base, but this is how I understood the process.

Edited February 28, 2008 by prose

[LouisvilleFan]

[quote name='prose' post='1470630' date='Feb 28 2008, 01:32 PM']They are a way of making your soul more pure on earth. The act that grants one an indulgence in some way spiritually purifies a person, and therefor there is less time spent in purgatory (less purification needed).[/quote]

We shouldn't think of it so much in terms of time, simply being purified. The idea of time is easier for us to imagine because it's what we know in this life... you do something wrong and you get time out, time in detention, time in jail, etc. But purgatory is a purification of the heart. It's really nothing more than Christ eliminating all our detachments to this world and sin so that we are pure in Heaven. I think we talk about it more than we should... I think all of four paragraphs in the Catechism discuss purgatory.

[thessalonian]

Prose,

I think what you have said is good. One thing to remember in all of this is that it is said that in purgatory we can do nothing for ourselves, wheras here we can. Therefore when we do these things in this life it affects our time in purgatory more than the time it takes to purify in purgatory. Does that make sense. i.e. 20 minutes of praying (relatively speaking because as LF indicated purgatory isn't time but it is a crude way of thinking about it) might elimanate 40 minutes of purgatory. Again, only using time as a crude representation. Actually I think purgatory is more like levels. One in some fashion ascends toward God. Again, there probably isn't ascending and descending but another way of looking at it perhaps.