Plenary Indulgences were hard to obtain. There was sacrifice, and prayer, and work involved in getting one... BXVI and JPII just made it easier to get one at certain strawman times. Now, the mainstream press is trying to say that people can "pay money" and get one, which we all know is absurd. (They even mention the "lollifting of the excommunications of the SSPX bishops in this article)

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/nyregion/10indulgence.html?_r=1&ref=us

For Catholics, a Door to Absolution Is Reopened

By PAUL VITELLO
Published: February 9, 2009

The announcement in church bulletins and on Web sites has been greeted with enthusiasm by some and wariness by others. But mainly, it has gone over the heads of a vast generation of Roman Catholics who have no idea what it means: “Bishop Announces Plenary Indulgences.”

In recent months, dioceses around the world have been offering Catholics a spiritual benefit that fell out of favor decades ago — the indulgence, a sort of amnesty from punishment in the afterlife — and reminding them of the church’s clout in mitigating the wages of sin.

The fact that many Catholics under 50 have never sought one, and never heard of indulgences except in high school European history (Martin Luther denounced the selling of them in 1517 while igniting the Protestant Reformation), simply makes their reintroduction more urgent among church leaders bent on restoring fading traditions of penance in what they see as a self-satisfied world.

“Why are we bringing it back?” asked Bishop Nicholas A. DiMarzio of Brooklyn, who has embraced the move. “Because there is sin in the world.”

Like the Latin Mass and meatless Fridays, the indulgence was one of the traditions decoupled from mainstream Catholic practice in the 1960s by the Second Vatican Council, the gathering of bishops that set a new tone of simplicity and informality for the church. Its revival has been viewed as part of a conservative resurgence that has brought some quiet changes and some highly controversial ones, like Pope Benedict XVI’s recent decision to lift the excommunications of four schismatic bishops who reject the council’s reforms.

The indulgence is among the less noticed and less disputed traditions to be restored. But with a thousand-year history and volumes of church law devoted to its intricacies, it is one of the most complicated to explain.

According to church teaching, even after sinners are absolved in the confessional and say their Our Fathers or Hail Marys as penance, they still face punishment after death, in Purgatory, before they can enter heaven. In exchange for certain prayers, devotions or pilgrimages in special years, a Catholic can receive an indulgence, which reduces or erases that punishment instantly, with no formal ceremony or sacrament.

There are partial indulgences, which reduce purgatorial time by a certain number of days or years, and plenary indulgences, which eliminate all of it, until another sin is committed. You can get one for yourself, or for someone who is dead. You cannot buy one — the church outlawed the sale of indulgences in 1567 — but charitable contributions, combined with other acts, can help you earn one. There is a limit of one plenary indulgence per sinner per day.

It has no currency in the bad place.

“It’s what?” asked Marta de Alvarado, 34, when told that indulgences were available this year at several churches in New York City. “I just don’t know anything about it,” she said, leaving St. Patrick’s Cathedral at lunchtime. “I’m going to look into it, though.”

The return of indulgences began with Pope John Paul II, who authorized bishops to offer them in 2000 as part of the celebration of the church’s third millennium. But the offers have increased markedly under his successor, Pope Benedict, who has made plenary indulgences part of church anniversary celebrations nine times in the last three years. The current offer is tied to the yearlong celebration of St. Paul, which continues through June.

Dioceses in the United States have responded with varying degrees of enthusiasm. This year’s offer has been energetically promoted in places like Washington, Pittsburgh, Portland, Ore., and Tulsa, Okla. It appeared prominently on the Web site of the Diocese of Brooklyn, which announced that any Catholic could receive an indulgence at any of six churches on any day, or at dozens more on specific days, by fulfilling the basic requirements: going to confession, receiving holy communion, saying a prayer for the pope and achieving “complete detachment from any inclination to sin.” (Wonder how many novus ordo people would have this, considering there's no such thing except being a traditional Catholic these days   I guess that would make all of them eligible.)

But in the adjacent Archdiocese of New York, indulgences are available at only one church, and the archdiocesan Web site makes no mention of them. (Cardinal Edward M. Egan “encourages all people to receive the blessings of indulgences,” said his spokesman, Joseph Zwilling, who said he was unaware that the offer was not on the Web site, but would soon have it posted.)

The indulgences, experts said, tend to be advertised more openly in dioceses where the bishop is more traditionalist, or in places with fewer tensions between liberal and conservative Catholics.

“In our diocese, folks are just glad for any opportunity to do something Catholic,” said Mary Woodward, director of evangelization for the Diocese of Jackson, Miss., where only 3 percent of the population is Catholic.

Even some priests admit that the rules are hard to grasp.

“It’s not that easy to explain to people who have never heard of it,” said the Rev. Gilbert Martinez, pastor of St. Paul the Apostle Church in Manhattan, the designated site in the New York Archdiocese for obtaining indulgences. “But it was interesting: I had a number of people come in and say, ‘Father, I haven’t been to confession in 20 years, but this’ ” — the availability of an indulgence — “ ‘made me think maybe it wasn’t too late.’ ”

Getting Catholics back into confession, in fact, was one of the motivations for reintroducing the indulgence. In a 2001 speech, Pope John Paul described the newly reborn tradition as “a happy incentive” for confession.

The rest of the story...

Indulgences have never left, one can attain certain partial indulgences at any time as long as they are in a state of grace. One probably gains some of these without even knowing it by doing things like praying the rosary. Plenary indulgences on the other hand are harder to attain, and one can not presume or be certain that they have gained one.

I've come across NOers who think that they can attain a plenary indulgence with ease because they have "moments when they don't sin."  

I'm just wondering what sedevacantists think of plenary indulgences in the current time, since the traditional conditions stipulated included prayers for the intentions of the Holy Father. Wonder how that would work in an interregnum?

Anyway, the article is chock full with errors in fact and dogma. What to expect from a secularist publication?

Indulgences presuppose that the guilt of sin has already been forgiven, and are remissions, either partial or entire, of the temporal punishment that remains due them. The granting of indulgences are attached to the performance of a good work, which can take the form of a pilgrimage, a charitable contribution, a prayer or some such thing.

This has nothing to do with the sin of simony or the sale of ecclesiastical offices, as the heretics imagined. It is not accurate to say indulgences were "sold" because of this. If a judge, on seeing signs of repentance from a criminal commutes a sentence of imprisonment to community service, it would not be accurate to say the judge has "sold" him a pardon, even if the community service indirectly benefits the government.