October 31st this year marks half a millennium since an Augustinian Monk called Martin Luther nailed 95 Theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral. This action wasn’t actually, as it is frequently presented, a ‘protest’ of any kind, but a challenge to other theologians to debate him on the ideas he was asserting, ideas which criticised the concept of ‘Purgatory’ and most directly, the practice of ‘Indulgences’. An ‘Indulgence’, as the Catechism tells us, 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 prescribed conditions through the action of the Church which, as the minister of redemption, dispenses and applies with authority the treasury of the satisfactions of Christ and the saints.
