How the Indulgence System Was Built, and Why It Is Still Running
Ask most Protestants about indulgences, and you will get a story with a tidy ending. A Dominican friar named Tetzel sold pardons across Germany. A monk named Luther objected. The Reformation followed, and somewhere in the centuries since, Rome quietly dropped the practice.
It is a satisfying story. It is wrong at the last step.
On January 10, 2026, the Apostolic Penitentiary issued a decree at the direction of Pope Leo XIV, proclaiming a special Year of Saint Francis to mark the eight hundredth anniversary of the death of Francis of Assisi. The year runs to January 10, 2027. Throughout it a plenary indulgence may be obtained on the usual conditions, which are sacramental confession, Holy Communion, and prayer for the intentions of the Pope. The decree adds that it may also be applied on behalf of the souls in purgatory.
That year is running as this is written.
Nor is it an oddity. Pope Leo XIV closed the Holy Door of St. Peter’s on January 6, the Epiphany, bringing the Ordinary Jubilee of 2025 to its end. The Year of Saint Francis began four days later, and the decree presents it as coinciding with that closing and as an ideal continuation of the Jubilee. The decree governing the Jubilee itself, issued in May 2024, listed pilgrimages, prayerful visits, works of mercy and acts of penance among the paths to the indulgence, and one of the penitential acts it named was abstaining, for at least one day a week, from futile distractions, social media included. And the Apostolic Penitentiary is not a committee convened for an anniversary. It is a permanent department of the Roman Curia, the government of the Roman Catholic Church, and the granting of indulgences is the work assigned to it under the law that now governs the Curia.
Rome has not buried the practice. Rome has kept it current.
The question worth asking, then, is not why Rome once sold indulgences. It is why Rome must still grant them. And the answer is not to be found in the sixteenth century at all. It is to be found in a paper trail that runs for nine hundred years, and enough of it survives to watch the thing being built.
What Trent actually fixed
Let me grant the objection before it is made, because it is a fair one and an informed Roman Catholic will make it within the first minute.
Rome does not sell indulgences. She has not sold them since the Council of Trent, the council that met in the northern Italian city of Trento from 1545 to 1563 to answer the Reformation. Anyone who says otherwise is attacking a practice Rome ended four centuries ago.
Now notice what that concession costs Rome. Nothing at all.
It happened in two stages, seventeen months apart, and the two together tell the story.
At the twenty-first session, on July 16, 1562, Trent abolished the questors of alms, the licensed collectors whose conduct had scandalized Europe, declaring their name and office henceforth utterly abolished. Indulgences were in future to be announced by the local bishops, with the alms received by two members of the chapter who were to take nothing for themselves, so that everyone might understand that these treasures of the church are administered not for gain but for godliness.
Then at the twenty-fifth session, on December 3 and 4, 1563, the council turned to the doctrine itself. It declared the use of indulgences most salutary, pronounced its anathema, its formal curse, on anyone who says they are useless or that the church has no power to grant them, and abolished the evil gains that had attached to them.
The council dismissed the sales force and kept the product.
That is the shape of the whole story, and it is worth fixing in mind before we go back to the beginning. What Trent reformed was the delivery system. The doctrine came through untouched, and the doctrine is what we have to look at.
The sentence that requires the system
More than fifteen years before it dealt with the collectors, Trent had already stated, as binding doctrine, the premise the mature system requires.
The sixth session, in January 1547, was given to justification. In it Trent set out what it holds justification to be. Chapter 7 says that the one and only formal cause, the thing by virtue of which a person is actually righteous in God’s sight, is a righteousness by which God makes him righteous, so that he is renewed in the spirit of his mind, and is not only reputed, but is truly called, and is, righteous.
Hold that. On Rome’s account the justified man has really been made righteous. Not merely reckoned so. Actually and inherently so.
And now hear what the same session says a few pages later. Canon 30 pronounces its anathema on anyone who says that when the grace of justification is received, the guilt is so remitted and the eternal punishment so blotted out that no debt of temporal punishment remains to be discharged, either in this world or in purgatory, before heaven can be opened.
Read those two together, because Rome asks us to hold them at once. Made righteous, and still in debt.
Everything that follows is built out of that second sentence by plain logic, and the logic is not hard.
If a debt remains after the guilt is forgiven, there must be somewhere to discharge it. Rome calls that place purgatory, a condition of purifying punishment after death for those who die in God’s grace with the debt outstanding. It is not hell. Everyone in purgatory is going to heaven. But nobody can say when.
If there is a debt to discharge, there must be a fund to discharge it from. Rome calls that the treasury of merit.
And if there is a fund, someone must hold the keys and make the withdrawals. That withdrawal is what an indulgence is. The Catechism defines it as a remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven. A partial indulgence remits part of that punishment; a plenary indulgence remits all of it. And it may be gained for yourself or applied to somebody who has already died.
Purgatory, treasury, keys, indulgence. Four links, and canon 30 states the premise that holds them together.
The paper trail
Here is what most people never hear, and it is the reason I am writing this. The major load-bearing pieces of that four-link chain enter the documentary record one at a time, across roughly four centuries, and enough of the paperwork survives for us to watch it happen.
Let me say at once what that does not prove. A doctrine is not false merely because the church later found more precise words for it. The doctrine of the Trinity has a history of formulation too, and so does the canon of Scripture, and no Christian concludes from that history that either was invented. The real question is different. Does a later definition articulate what was already given to the apostles, or has a new load-bearing piece been added to the structure?
That is the question the dates put to Rome, and they put it sharply.
1095: the first plenary indulgence
At the Council of Clermont in November 1095, Pope Urban II called for what became the First Crusade. The official canons of that council do not survive, but according to the list preserved by Lambert of Arras, who was there, the council decreed that whoever went to Jerusalem to liberate the Church of God out of devotion alone, and not to gain honour or money, could count that journey in place of all penance. Historians generally regard this as the first unambiguous plenary indulgence. Several later accounts of Urban’s preaching go further than the canon does, reporting that those who took up the pilgrimage and died on it might be assured of the forgiveness of their sins and of eternal reward. None of those accounts was written down at the time, and they differ among themselves, so I give the substance they share and not a sentence from his mouth.
Mark the chronology, because it matters more than it first appears. In 1095 purgatory was not yet a defined doctrine. It would not be formally defined until the Second Council of Lyons in 1274, and again at the Council of Florence in 1439.
The idea of a purifying suffering after death is older than 1095, and I am not pretending otherwise. But the plenary remission enters the record before the place it remits punishment in receives formal definition by a council. That does not by itself settle the theological question. It is an awkward chronology for anyone claiming the mature system was handed down intact.
1343: the treasury defined
This is the document nobody quotes, and it is the most important one in the chain.
On January 25, 1343, Pope Clement VI issued the bull Unigenitus Dei Filius. Its immediate business was the jubilee: it shortened the interval between holy years from a hundred to fifty. But along the way it gave the treasury of merit its first formal papal statement, and what it says is remarkable.
It teaches that Christ shed more blood than was needed. A single drop would have sufficed to redeem the whole race, and He poured out far more, and that surplus formed a treasure. To that treasure, the bull says, the merits of the Blessed Mother of God and of all the elect, from the first righteous man to the last, add their help. And there is no fear of the treasure being consumed or diminished, both because the merits of Christ are infinite and because the more are brought to justification by its application, the greater the increase of the merits themselves.
A fund that grows as it is spent. It is worth pausing over the fact that such a sentence was ever written.
Two hundred and fifty years after Clermont, the fund now exists on paper, and the pope holds the keys to it. And the Catechism of the Catholic Church still teaches the same treasury today, describing it as the infinite and inexhaustible value of the merits of Christ, and saying in the very next paragraph that it holds as well the prayers and good works of the Blessed Virgin Mary and of all the saints.
The fifteenth century: a promise built on a forgery
If you want to see how such a system behaves once it is running, look at the Sabbatine Privilege.
In its classic form the privilege held that those who fulfil certain conditions will be released from purgatory by the Blessed Virgin on the Saturday after they die. The conditions are the wearing of the brown scapular with proper enrolment, chastity according to one’s state in life, and the daily recitation of the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin or an approved substitute.
Its authority rests on a bull attributed to Pope John XXII, Sacratissimo uti culmine, dated March 3, 1322, in which the pope is represented as reporting an apparition of Mary.
The bull is a forgery.
That is not a Protestant accusation. The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913 calls it apocryphal in its opening sentence. No original appears in the registers of John XXII’s pontificate. The Carmelite historian Benedict Zimmerman rejected it, and Carmelite scholars have traced it to a Sicilian forgery of the fifteenth century, produced roughly a hundred years after its supposed date.
And the privilege was preached anyway, for centuries.
In 1613 the Holy Office under Pope Paul V issued a decree setting out what the Carmelites might preach concerning the privilege. That decree makes no reference at all to the bull of John XXII, and none to the apparition, and it does not simply repeat the guaranteed release. What it permits is the pious belief that Mary will assist the souls of members after death by her intercession, her merits and her protection, and especially on Saturdays.
So the document was eventually set aside as a basis of proof. The devotion did not go with it. It was reformulated and allowed to continue.
Remember that sequence, because it is the system in miniature. A promise about a dying man’s eternity can long outlive the paperwork that once justified it, and people go on resting their souls upon it after the scholars have finished with the evidence.
1517: the money
By Luther’s day the practice had become an extraordinarily effective way of raising funds.
The indulgence preached in Germany in 1517 was authorized to pay for the rebuilding of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, and a share of the proceeds went to repay the debt Albert of Brandenburg had incurred with the Fugger bank in order to secure the archbishopric of Mainz while already holding other sees. St. Peter’s took some hundred and twenty years to build and drew on many streams of revenue, so it is too much to say the basilica was built on indulgences. It is not too much to say the indulgence was preached to pay for it.
A long and lurid speech is usually put into the mouth of John Tetzel, the Dominican who preached that indulgence, and I have quoted it myself in the past. I will not quote it here. It comes to us through a nineteenth century history whose set speeches are literary reconstructions rather than transcripts, and no contemporary manuscript of Tetzel preaching those words survives. The gospel has no need of embellished history, and quoting such a speech only hands a critic an easy way out of the argument.
What we do have is better, because it comes from Luther’s own hand at the time. In Thesis 27 he condemned those who preach that the moment “the money clinks into the money chest,” the soul flies out of purgatory. Whether Tetzel used those exact words or not, Luther heard the substance of it preached and named it the doctrine of men.
The ninety-five theses went to the heart of the matter. In Thesis 32 Luther warned that those who suppose themselves certain of salvation because they hold letters of indulgence will be damned along with their teachers. In Thesis 36 he insisted that any truly repentant Christian has full remission of penalty and guilt, and has it “even without indulgence letters.”
And in Thesis 62 he named what he thought the church actually possessed. The true treasure of the church, he said, is “the most holy gospel of the glory and grace of God.”
Set that sentence beside Clement VI and you have the Reformation in a single line. One treasury holds the surplus merits of Christ and Mary and the saints, administered by an office. The other is the gospel itself.
1520: Rome answers
Here is the part that settles whether the argument was ever really about corruption.
On June 15, 1520, Pope Leo X issued the bull Exsurge Domine, condemning Luther. Among the propositions it condemned were his theses denying that the treasures of the church from which the pope grants indulgences are the merits of Christ and the saints.
Rome did not merely defend the fundraising. Rome defended the treasury.
So when Trent later abolished the collectors, it was not conceding Luther’s point. It was removing the embarrassment while keeping the doctrine that Leo had already defended by name.
Still running
That is the construction history. Now the current state, because the most common assumption about indulgences is that they belong to it.
In 1967 Pope Paul VI issued the apostolic constitution Indulgentiarum Doctrina, which reorganized the practice and abolished the old classification of indulgences by days and years. Those figures, incidentally, never measured time in purgatory, whatever the popular imagination made of them. They referred to periods of canonical penance on earth. Since 1967 an indulgence is simply partial or plenary, with no number attached.
That was a genuine reform of the practice, and there were others in the same document. It was not a reversal of the underlying doctrine, which the same constitution restates. The arithmetic was retired. The doctrine was not.
In 1999 the Apostolic Penitentiary published the fourth edition of the Enchiridion Indulgentiarum, the official handbook listing the prayers and works to which indulgences are attached. It is not a historical curiosity. The 2024 Jubilee decree cites it directly, by norm number.
In 2013 the Apostolic Penitentiary granted an indulgence to those who, being legitimately prevented from travelling to World Youth Day in Rio, followed the rites by television, radio, or what the decree called the new means of social communication, the papal Twitter account included. The press treated it as a novelty and rather enjoyed itself. Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli was quite right to tell reporters that merely checking a Twitter feed would obtain nobody an indulgence, since the usual conditions still applied. What the decree does show is a system being fitted, carefully and deliberately, to the way people in 2013 actually lived.
In May 2024 came the decree for the Jubilee of 2025, and it contains one sentence that answers this article’s whole question. During that Jubilee, it states, all other previously granted indulgences remain in force.
Not reformed. Not quietly retired. In force.
And on January 10, 2026, the decree with which this article began.
More than nine hundred and thirty years from Clermont to the Year of Saint Francis, and the chain is unbroken.
Why any of this matters
Someone will ask why a Reformed Baptist pastor in Arizona should spend his time on the internal paperwork of another communion. It is a fair question and it has a short answer.
Because a system with this much machinery exists to solve a problem, and the problem is a debt that Rome says is still outstanding after God has forgiven the guilt. Trent did not invent that machinery in 1547; most of what I have described was centuries old by then. What Trent did was state dogmatically the premise on which the whole of it depends, and bind that premise on the conscience with an anathema. Every link hangs on it. Forgiveness of guilt does not exhaust the debt.
And if that sentence is false, then the entire apparatus is answering a question that God has already closed.
And Scripture says the debt is closed. I want to be careful about how it says so, because Rome has a fair answer to a careless version of this argument.
Hebrews is not discussing indulgences. It is contrasting the one sacrifice of Christ with the repeated sacrifices of the old covenant, and Rome would rightly insist that an indulgence is not another offering for sin. Grant that as well.
The letter settles the question before that distinction can be reached. “For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified” (Hebrews 10:14). Perfected, and still being sanctified, in the same sentence. The transformation is unfinished. The standing is not.
So the burden does not lie on me to prove that an indulgence is a second sacrifice. It lies on Rome to show, from Scripture, what debt is left before God for an office to discharge.
I have argued that case from the text at length elsewhere, and I will not repeat it here. What this article has tried to show is narrower and, in its own way, harder to answer. Not that the system is unbiblical, though it is. That it was built.
Two treasuries
There are two treasuries on offer, and every reader of this article will draw on one of them.
One is administered by a department in Rome and released by decree, with conditions attached, dates of expiry, and terms subject to revision. Its currency is what Rome calls the superabundant merits of Christ and the saints, dispensed through the church. It was defined in 1343 and it comes with a calendar. The current one closes on January 10, 2027.
The other was opened at Calvary and has never once been closed. Its currency is the obedience and the blood of the Son of God, reckoned to the account of everyone who trusts Him. It has no expiry date, because it was never a fund of surplus in the first place. It is a Person.
Notice how much of this article has been dates. Clermont in 1095. Unigenitus in 1343. A forged bull and the decree that outlived it. Exsurge Domine in 1520. Trent in 1562 and again in 1563. Paul VI in 1967. The handbook in 1999. Decrees in 2013, in 2024, and in January of this year. And a year of grace that expires on a Sunday in a few months, on January 10, 2027.
Only one thing in the whole story has no expiry date, and it is the one thing that answers the question the machinery exists to answer.
Rome will say that what I have described is development and not invention, that the church defined in time what she had always held, and that a forged bull does not empty a later decree resting on intercession. Let her make that case; she is entitled to. It still has to be made against a single sentence, and the sentence has been in the letter to the Hebrews the whole time. Development has to show its seed. And this development has to show what debt was left over for it to service.
So if you are a Roman Catholic reading this, I am not asking you to be angry at your church. I am asking you to notice what the paperwork is for. Every decree in this article exists to service a debt. Scripture says the debt is closed.
And if you are a Protestant who has read all this with a certain satisfaction, be careful. You may not believe in a treasury of merit, and you may still be keeping a private ledger of your own, quietly totting up attendance and giving and the years since your worst sin, and consulting it whenever your conscience presses. The bookkeeping is the problem, not the denomination. Close the book.
By a single offering He has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified. To Him be the glory, forever. Amen.
Sources
Council of Clermont, November 1095, canon 2, as preserved in the list of Lambert of Arras. The official canons of the council do not survive.
Second Council of Lyons (1274) and the Council of Florence (1439), on the definition of purgatory.
Clement VI, bull Unigenitus Dei Filius, January 1343, on the treasury of merit. Sources differ between January 25 and January 27 for the date; the substance is not in dispute. See Denzinger for the text.
Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), article “Sabbatine Privilege,” on the apocryphal character of the bull Sacratissimo uti culmine attributed to John XXII, and on the decree of the Holy Office of 1613.
Martin Luther, Ninety-Five Theses (1517), Theses 27, 32, 36 and 62.
Leo X, bull Exsurge Domine, June 15, 1520, condemning among other propositions Luther’s denial that the treasures of the church are the merits of Christ and the saints.
Council of Trent, Session VI (January 13, 1547), Decree on Justification, chapter 7 (the sole formal cause; “not only reputed, but are truly called, and are, just”) and canon 30 (remaining temporal punishment).
Council of Trent, Session XXI (July 16, 1562), Decree on Reform, chapter 9, abolishing the name and office of the questors of alms and providing that indulgences be announced by the local bishops, the alms received without fee, so that these treasures might be seen to be administered not for gain but for godliness.
Council of Trent, Session XXV (December 3 to 4, 1563), Decree Concerning Indulgences: the use of indulgences declared most salutary, an anathema on those who say they are useless or that the church lacks the power to grant them, and the abolition of evil gains.
Paul VI, apostolic constitution Indulgentiarum Doctrina, January 1, 1967, which abolished the classification of indulgences by days and years.
Enchiridion Indulgentiarum, fourth edition, 1999, cited by norm number in the Jubilee decree of 2024.
Decree of the Apostolic Penitentiary for World Youth Day, Rio de Janeiro, July 2013, and the remarks of Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli reported in the press at the time.
Decree on the Granting of the Indulgence during the Ordinary Jubilee Year 2025, Apostolic Penitentiary, May 13, 2024, signed by Cardinal Angelo De Donatis, which states that all other previously granted indulgences remain in force.
Decree of the Apostolic Penitentiary on the occasion of the Eighth Centenary of the death of Saint Francis of Assisi, dated January 10, 2026, and made public by the Holy See Press Office on January 16, 2026. The Ordinary Jubilee of 2025 concluded on January 6, 2026 with the closing of the Holy Door of St. Peter’s.
Praedicate Evangelium, n. 193, on the competence of the Apostolic Penitentiary over the granting of indulgences.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 1030 to 1032 (purgatory), 1471 (definition of an indulgence), 1476 to 1478 (the treasury of the Church).
Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version, 2025 text edition.