Pope grants indulgences for novena prayers for the Church in China

According to the Catholic News Agency, an article was printed on their website about the pope granting Catholics indulgences for novena prayers for the Church in China. While the recent earthquake in China is a tragedy, and our prayers are with the people of China, for the pope to entice Catholics with indulgences for their prayers is very disturbing to me.

In order to understand what is being offered here, we need to define some terms. A novena is defined in the Catholic Encyclopedia as nine days of private or public devotion in the Catholic Church to obtain special graces. In this case the prayers are to be directed to Mary, which is problematic in itself because we should not offer prayers to anyone but God. Setting that aside, what are indulgences and what purpose do they serve for the Catholic Church? In the article the following quote is made about indulgences, “The Catechism defines an indulgence as a remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven.”

The key to this phrase is “temporal punishment”, but from what? Purgatory is where the remission has its effectiveness for the Catholic. For those who don’t know…Purgatory is a Catholic belief where souls need to go for purification before they enter heaven. The time spent in this place can very, but the majority of Catholics must go there prior to entering heaven. This belief brings up a huge problem of the sufficiency of Christ’s atoning sacrifice for us on the cross, and how we need something extra done to us before our heavenly reward. For the Protestant, once we accept Christ as our Lord and Savior, His blood covers us and is sufficient to wash away or purify us of all our sins (Hebrews 1:3 comes to mind).

The thing that I find most confusing about indulgences and the Roman Catholic Church is that if the pope has an unlimited deposit of indulgences available to him to remit temporal punishment in purgatory, why doesn’t he just give all Catholics a plenary indulgence (the remission of the entire temporal punishment due to sin so that no further expiation is required in Purgatory –source: Catholic Encyclopedia)? Instead, these indulgences are dangled in front of Catholics like a carrot in order to keep them under the submission of the pope. It’s very sad indeed to see this type of thing happen especially when Jesus Christ paid the price and purified us (who believe) of ALL our sins.