INDULGENCES
A brief disclaimer: this is not an attack on the present-day Catholic Church. It will be talking about the medieval era, a time when the people of Europe believed that there were witches, that the planet was flat, and that their kings were directly chosen by God.
Most people in this world were illiterate, and the lucky ones died at 30. This is not a debate about the validity of organised religion or the existence of God. This is the story of how the Bible was deliberately mistranslated to make a few people extremely rich, renovate a couple of cathedrals, and fund a handful of holy wars.
This is the story of one of the greatest and most widespread cons of all time.
This is the story of Indulgences.
It should be common knowledge that Christianity is based on the idea that people who do good things (saving drowning puppies, helping old ladies to cross the street, killing non-believers) go to heaven, a place where good things (all you can eat pizza, backgammon tournaments, smiles from cute angels) happen to you eternally. People who do bad things on the other hand (drowning puppies, pushing old ladies into the street, doubting the awesomeness of God) go to hell, a place where — I’m sure you can see where this is going.
But around the 12th Century, an important question was raised: what happens if you aren’t really good or bad? Is it a tipping scale where St Peter agonisingly balances the puppies you drowned on one side and the puppies you saved on the other and whichever way it tipped points to the door for you?
No, the Catholic God is forgiving, and so there is always a chance for redemption. The papal decree was that no one goes to hell on a technicality. Those that have sinned (read: everyone) but have confessed their sins (read: Catholics) go to Purgatory when they die. Purgatory is a place that should be familiar to you if you stuck it out with the TV show “Lost,” up until its whimpering finale, or have ever been to the waiting area of a bus station, motor vehicles office or any doctor’s office. You could look at it as being friend-zoned by God. There is the promise of heaven in the future, but you have to wait until you are accepted, perhaps indefinitely.
Like the friend zone, the existence of Purgatory is the subject of much debate, but for Catholics, in the medieval period, it was a certainty. Everyone sinned, everyone confessed, and everyone worked up a little post-death waiting time before they could waltz on through the pearly gates.
Because of this, a sort of points-based system emerged in the Catholic community. All sins short of murder had an associated waiting time that would be tallied up as you confessed to them. People had a pretty accurate reckoning of how long they would have to spend waiting once they took their dirt nap before they could get to the backgammon, the cute angels, and the pizza buffet. They were also told of a whole slew of pious actions — frequently, vast numbers of Hail Marys or other forms of genuflection — that would reduce that time. If you felt you had too much free time, you could even pray on behalf of dead relatives. But all of this praying did take up a lot of time and could be considered quite tedious. Why waste time that could be spent having fun (and probably adding to your time in Purgatory)?
Just like the terrifying mobile games with their clashing clans and their castles developers today take a week of real-world time to build, the Church agreed that all of that waiting time was a terrible thing, and offered to make it all go away — for a reasonable fee.
This was the birth of Indulgences.
By making a charitable donation to the Church, your time in purgatory could be made to vanish. It was as simple as that. As one medieval rhyme put it, “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs”.
I’m sure it was catchier in the original German.
In a coincidence that should be shocking to no one in our modern world of applied scarcity capitalism, around the time that Indulgences became widespread, other forms of absolution became almost useless. It wasn’t long before the amount of time you needed to pray while living to avoid time in purgatory was longer than your life itself. It’s a wonder they didn’t start charging extra for access to a deluxe version of heaven with a cocktail bar at the buffet and where the cute angels would sit on your lap.
It’s unclear precisely who first came up with the idea of an Indulgence (possibly because they became wealthy enough to have that part of history rewritten), but it is hard to blame just one person when they were being signed by bishops and archbishops all across Europe for over three hundred years. Some even bear the signature of the Pope himself. But one of the most infamous dispensers of Indulgences was the bishop Johann Tetzel.
Tetzel was the Grand Commissioner of Indulgences in Germany. He took so much money under the guise of saving souls that in his most famous remaining portrait he is swearing an oath not on a bible but on a coin box. His sermons frequently dealt with the idea of Purgatory and were, in effect, one long sales pitch on buying Indulgences to avoid an afterlife of numbing neutrality. When he ran out of living believers who could pay their way out of purgatory, he started selling indulgences for their dead relatives! Even though you might think that would be a well that would never run dry, he took it a step further than that and started selling people Indulgences for future sins that they had yet to commit. No matter how devout you were, Tetzel could find a way to sell you an Indulgence.
His hard graft paid off, too: Tetzel is credited with funding huge refurbishments to St. Peter’s Basilica, one of the most, if not the most, impressive buildings ever constructed by the Catholic Church. And that wasn’t even half of what he took because a big chunk of the money went to pay off the vast debts that his boss, Albert of Brandenburg, amassed in rising to the rank of cardinal. Why he had to pay off his boss’s debts is unclear, but we can assume he probably didn’t have much choice in the matter. This was, after all, the age of the Inquisition.
The Inquisition was the Catholic secret police force, busting down people’s doors at night — similar to the KGB, except they came around to check whether you believed that a man in a big hat spoke the word of God verbatim. The Inquisition had so much influence that it was above the local law, rounding people up and torturing them until they confessed to whatever it was that the Inquisition wanted them to confess to. This, of course, was done to save the souls of their victims. They burned thousands of women at the stake under suspicions of witchcraft (read: campaigning for equal rights), and stamped out many smaller Christian sects, branding them as heretics. To add an extra level of terror to Tetzel’s character, he had previously worked as the Grand Inquisitor in Poland.
There is a famous story about Tetzel, spread by Martin Luther (more on him later): One night travelling through Leipzig, Tetzel was paid an enormous sum by a noble seeking an Indulgence to pardon a future sin. Presumably rubbing his hands together with glee, Tetzel agreed. However, on the road out of Leipzig, Tetzel was set upon by a masked bandit. After savagely beating Tetzel and relieving him of his money, the bandit removed his mask, revealing himself to be none other than that same nobleman!
He thanked Tetzel for his advance pardon and went on his way, guilt-free.
It’s a charming story of just desserts, but when you consider that Tetzel was the former commander of the Catholic torture-police, it seems a lot less likely.
Tetzel was far from the only one selling Indulgences. They were such big business that it was hard to keep it within the upper echelons of the Church or even within the Church at all. People made a living as professional “Pardoners”, going around calculating how much you would owe for your various sins and writing you up a personalised Indulgence then and there. In another not-so-shocking twist, it turned out that many of these Pardoners weren’t priests at all and that they were effectively selling ludicrously expensive signatures.
I’ll avoid making the obvious joke here about that not being too different from what the church was selling for fear of pulling at a thread that will leave all of humanity as nothing more than monkeys in silly hats. But yes, Indulgences were big business. They had to be. It was a period of rapid expansion for the Catholic Church. They were sanctioning holy wars all over the place. They reclaimed Spain and Portugal from Islamic rule over a period of 500 hundred years and for good measure continued their expansion into northern Africa and the Middle East until they had reclaimed the majority of the early Christian world. They called these wars the Crusades.
Because they were holy wars, it was the obligation of all good Christians to fight for their God. If you didn’t have a good excuse not to fight (there weren’t many) you would have to answer to the Inquisition. But if you did happen to be too old, infirm, or wealthy to fight, you could always support the troops with an Indulgence instead. Once they had significantly redesigned the maps of their age, the Catholic Church then set their sights on a new destination: Latin America, a continent that is still predominantly Catholic today.
It’s unclear exactly when the practice of selling Indulgences was stopped, but it probably had something to do with the Reformation. The Reformation was the most significant schism the Christian faith has ever seen, and like all great moments in Christianity, it all started with something being nailed to a piece of wood.
The something was Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses, a scathing document about making Christianity more accessible to the common people, calling out Tetzel by name for charging people for salvation, and arguably claiming that the poor couldn’t afford to get into heaven. This was the protest that started Protestantism.
Luther translated the Bible into common vernacular, getting away from the Latin that the average person couldn’t understand. As an example of how little the average church-goer understood of what they heard: the magical phrase “hocus pocus” is actually a mishearing of the phrase “hoc es mea corpus”, meaning “this is my body” from the communion rites.
It’s probable that once believers could actually understand their holy book, they came to realise that there wasn’t anything that directly mentioned Purgatory, let alone Indulgences. We can also assume that priests were a bit more careful about scamming their congregation with the hip new competition down the street.
But, you may be asking, why wasn’t Protestantism stamped out by the Inquisition? That’s how the Church dealt with all its previous opponents. The thing was, all those former “heretics” didn’t have the backing of a monarch. Protestantism, however, happened to come along just when Henry VIII of England was having an argument with the pope over whether or not he was married to Catherine of Aragon.
They couldn’t agree, and so the Reformation found itself with a mighty powerful ally. It wasn’t long after that the Catholic Church issued an official decree condemning the abuse of Indulgences. They do still exist in a profoundly altered form today, one much closer to a charitable donation to the Church.
There is also still a belief in purgatory but the penance required to negate your time there is a lot more manageable, capable of being done in an afternoon rather than a lifetime. Now, we can be thankful that there is no one religion in our society with so much power that they think they can get away with a scam such as Indulgences, but there are plenty of individuals like Tetzel seeking to exploit people’s faith for their own personal gain.
Perhaps the lesson to be gained from this is: don’t spend money on something that you can’t see, but thinking like that might be the end of the modern finance industry.
An excerpt from “History’s Greatest Deceptions and Confidence Scams” — By Steven Lazaroff and Mark Rodger.