If you do what the pope says on Twitter, you can get out of Purgatory quicker!
Vatican Council II on Indulgences
“… it [the Roman Catholic Church] condemns with anathema those who say that indulgences are useless or that the Church does not have the power to grant them.” (Vatican Council II printed by Costello Publishing Co., Northport, New York. Austin Flannery, O. P., is the general editor and each volume contains the Nihil Obstat and the Imprimatur. The editions are: 1984, Vol. 1, p. 71)
“An indulgence is 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 defined conditions through the Church’s help when, as minister of Redemption, she dispenses and applies with authority the treasury of the satisfaction won by Christ and the saints.” (Ibid., p. 75)
“An indulgence is partial or plenary according as it removes either part or all of the temporal punishment due to sin.” (Ibid., p. 75)
The Catholic idea of indulgences is based on the non-existent place called Purgatory, a false belief embraced by Calvinism’s real founder, Augustine of Hippo. In Catholicism, some who die are too good to go to heaven and not bad enough to go to hell. In their theology Purgatory exists. The chief verse used in support of praying for the dead is found in the Apocrypha. Here is how it reads from the 1611 King James Version, which did contain the Apocrypha:
(For if he had not hoped that they that were slaine should haue risen againe, it had bin superfluous and vaine, to pray for the dead.) And also in that he perceiued that there was great fauour layed vp for those that died godly. (It was an holy, and good thought) wherupon he made a reconciliation for the dead, that they might be deliuered from sinne. (2 Maccabees 12:44,45)
