Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The Catholic Church teaches that indulgences relieve only the temporal punishment resulting from the effect of sin (the effect of rejecting God the source of good), and that a person is still required to have their grave sins absolved, ordinarily through the sacrament of Confession, to receive salvation.
Woodcut of an indulgence-seller in a church from a 1521 pamphlet Johann Tetzel's coffer, now on display at St. Nicholaus church in Jüterbog, Germany. Martin Luther, professor of moral theology at the University of Wittenberg and town preacher, [3] wrote the Ninety-five Theses against the contemporary practice of the church with respect to indulgences.
The Catholic Church had technically banned the practice of selling indulgences as long ago as 1567. As the Times points out, a monetary donation wouldn't go amiss toward earning an indulgence.
Tetzel was known for granting indulgences on behalf of the Catholic Church in exchange for tithes to the Church. Indulgences grant a degree of expiation of the punishments of purgatory due to sin. However, the misuse of indulgences within the Church largely contributed to Martin Luther writing his Ninety-five Theses. The main usage of the ...
The worldly excesses of the secular Renaissance church, epitomized by the era of Alexander VI (1492–1503), exploded in the Reformation under Pope Leo X (1513–1521), whose campaign to raise funds in the German states to rebuild St. Peter's Basilica by supporting sale of indulgences was a key impetus for Martin Luther's 95 Theses.
The Reformation, also known as the Protestant Reformation and the European Reformation, [1] was a major theological movement or period or series of events in Western Christianity in 16th-century Northwestern Europe that posed a religious and political challenge to the papacy and the authority of the Catholic Church.
Other Catholic practices that had drawn the ire of reformers within the Church, such as indulgences, pilgrimages, the veneration of saints and relics, and the veneration of the Virgin Mary were strongly reaffirmed, though abuses of them were forbidden.
The Catholic sale of indulgences shown in A Question to a Mintmaker, a woodcut by Jörg Breu the Elder of Augsburg, c. 1530. In 1516, Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar, was sent to Germany by the Roman Catholic Church to sell indulgences to raise money in order to rebuild St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. [46]