Baylor Lariat, Catholic professor spar over indulgences revival

WACO, Texas (ABP) — A Baylor Lariat editorial critical of the Catholic Church's newly revived practice of indulgences brought a strong rebuke from a prominent Catholic professor at the world's largest Baptist university.

The Feb. 27 editorial in Baylor's student newspaper criticized several Roman Catholic parishes in the United States for beginning to issue indulgences as part of a larger campaign to make Catholics more concerned with their spirituality.

The student newspaper called indulgences — acts of contrition that Catholics believe help mitigate the punishment for sins — "a dated solution to a problem that needs a modern-day, innovative strategy to truly raise awareness of sin and reconnect people with their religion and their God."

The editorial earned mention on the Catholic Culture website and prompted a letter to the editor from Francis Beckwith, a professor of philosophy and church-state studies at Baylor University. Beckwith made headlines in 2007, when he resigned as president of the Evangelical Theological Society and announced that he had converted back to his original Catholicism.

Beckwith, who describes his faith journey from Catholicism to evangelical Protestantism and back in a new book, criticized the editorial for "poor timing" — appearing during the first week in the season of Lent — and "poor taste" for an accompanying cartoon mocking Pope Benedict XVI. He also lamented what he called bad history and faulty theology.

"If the Catholic Church believes it has good grounds to hold this belief and its critics disagree on the adequacy of those grounds, then it would seem beside the point for the editors of a student newspaper at a Baptist university in Central Texas to suggest that the Catholic Church should abandon its belief because it is unfashionable," Beckwith wrote.

The 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church defines indulgences as "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."

The Catholic Church claims the doctrinal prerogative to dispense indulgences as part of the authority of "binding and loosing" granted by Christ to Peter in Matthew 16:19. Catholics believe Peter was the first bishop of Rome, and that the spiritual authority of pontiffs since has flowed from Christ's charge to his disciple.

Indulgences can be partial — removing some of the temporal consequences of past sins — or plenary, removing them all. Catholics may obtain indulgences either for themselves or for souls in purgatory, but not for another person living on Earth.

Though not a sacrament — a visible ceremony that Catholics believe imparts grace — the tradition of indulgences dates back to the early church, when Christians who had fallen away from the faith during periods of persecution desired to be restored to full communion. Over the centuries, severe forms of penance prescribed in those cases transitioned to less-demanding works such as prayer, fasts or payment of sums of money to the church.

The earliest conspicuous use of plenary indulgences was in 1095 by Pope Urban II, who decreed them for all who engaged in the First Crusade.

Abuses arose during the Middle Ages, with unrestricted sale of indulgences to raise funds for capital projects. Aggressive marketing of indulgences to raise money to build St. Peter's Basilica in Rome provoked Martin Luther in 1517 to write his "Ninety-Five Theses," the primary catalyst for the Protestant Reformation.

The Council of Trent (1545-1563) affirmed the efficacy of indulgences, but decreed almsgiving should never be a necessary condition for receiving them.

Indulgences fell into disuse after the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65, but Pope John Paul II reinstated them in 2000 to celebrate the church's third millennium.

Benedict, a conservative sometimes criticized for turning back the reforms of Vatican II, has issued indulgences on several occasions — most recently to mark the 2000th anniversary of the birth of the apostle Paul. The original decree was for pilgrims traveling to St. Paul's Basilica in Rome but later expanded to include other specified pilgrimage sites for Catholics who cannot afford to travel abroad.

The Lariat editorial opined that because of their negative connotation, indulgences will hurt Catholicism instead of help it.

"Catholics should on their own choose to go to confession because they recognize their sins and desire to truly atone," the newspaper said. "They shouldn't be motivated simply because the award of an indulgence makes it more appealing."

Beckwith, who first posted his reaction to the editorial on a blog promoting his new book, Return to Rome: Confessions of an Evangelical Catholic, said as an official university publication, the Lariat's articles and opinions cannot be read apart from the university community's common good.

"[T]he next time the Lariat's editors choose to offer a theological critique, they should at least consult those within their midst who embrace the tradition they have targeted," he advised. "Anything less than that is uncharitable and unchristian."

–Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.