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Selling
indulgences was an ingenious money-making scam
set up by the early
Roman
Catholic Church.
An
indulgence defined: "The purchase of a pardon which secured the buyer's
salvation or released the soul of another from
purgatory."**1
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Here's
how it worked: A person gave The Roman Catholic Pope money and
then the Pope instructed God forgave the sinner of his sins. It was a
money-back-guaranteed, ticket to heaven.
Indulgences
had their hay day with the sixteenth-century, gay Pope, Pope Leo X.**2 He became Pope in 1513 and is famous
for his zeal at selling indulgences. In those days the
governments
were ruled by what was called
the "established
church." It ruled
every aspect of European life. People had to obey the laws of
the church and pay taxes that went to the church. Whether or not
they followers of the faith was irrelevant.
The
church leaders peddled the story that without
the church's blessing, God would not let a person into heaven.
People were programmed to believe that unless they
obeyed all church orders, that they would be condemned to
hell forever. Most of
the
people, being uneducated and having no other source of information,
believed the story. Thousands of people purchased
indulgences. Leo was such a good salesman that he even gave the
purchaser a piece of paper acknowledging God's forgiveness.
Pope
Leo X is also famous for sparking the wrath of Martin Luther ' who, posted
his famous "95 Theses" on the church door on October 31,
1517. Luther's theses attacked Pope Leo's
practice of selling
indulgences and triggered the European revolution know as the Reformation.
**1
Accordance with
Catholic teaching, purgatory (Lat., "purgare", to make clean, to
purify) is a place or condition of temporal punishment for those who,
departing this life in God's grace, are, not entirely free from venial faults,
or have not fully paid the satisfaction due to their transgressions.
**2
We can't say with
absolute, provable certainty that Pope Leo X was a homosexual; however, when we
read descriptions of naked little boys coming out of cakes at his parties, one
could reasonable apply the same criteria to Pope Leo X the has been applied to
former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover: "If he wasn't gay, he certainly
gave a good impression of someone who was."
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