Catholics giving indulgences still

Proving they remain the heretics they were 490 years ago when brother Martin grabbed a hammer and eventually restored the gospel to the Church...

Brother Martin has some comments on Strange Herring:

Plenary Indulgence Proclaimed, Lutherans Raid Hardware Stores for Hammers

Posted by Martin Luther (Doktor) on February 10, 2009

I should never have dropped dead, then I wouldn’t be alive now to see this.

For the last time: sin in unquantifiable. The idea of some Treasury of Merits from which the Church can extract a handful of grace-filled pixie dust and sprinkle it on the sufficiently contrite is a ludicrous perversion of the meaning of grace itself. It is God’s merciful and UNMERITED disposition toward us in Christ.

It is not to be manipulated, bargained with — or, Heaven help us, earned.

Dispensing penances based on the severity of sins is like experimenting with vitamin regimens on Julius Caesar.

If it makes you happy …

But I despair of salutary results …

The Cross and the Cross alone covers over all sin. If the Lord wishes to chastise an individual as a corrective, to remind a transgressor that he is a vessel of the Holy Spirit, He will do so without the aid of a priest or bishop, as He did in the case of King David.

As for the fable that is purgatory, from which indulgences are intended to spare the quivering soul, pfft.

I am afraid Rome makes the same mistake that reincarnationists make on this point. Just as there are not enough lifetimes that could conceivably be lived to burn one’s “karma” and thereby conquer death, so too there is no human work — either in this life through penances and pilgrimages or in the next through suffering the pains of purgative fires — that can undo even the temporal consequences of one errant thought. That is the severity of sin, such that the Second Person of the Holy Trinity had to assume human flesh and hang on a tree to rescue us.

And need I remind you that the birth of the plenary indulgence is to be found in Pope Urban II’s goading of the very first crusaders. “Die in a Crusade against the heathen, win a ticket to Heaven.”

Sound familiar?

My friends, turn from sin and cling to the Cross. Forsake these vain attempts at self-justification, these man-made trifles, these “transactions” between you and a holy God. The only transaction that matters is the one wherein you are granted Christ’s righteousness and Christ takes upon Himself your sin.

Listen to me! Or I shall come to your home and sit on you.

Now … breakfast, and DVR’d repeats of Just Shoot Me! What kind of mess will Nina get up to today?