Save your soul! So indulgences are back. Honestly, I’m a bit ambivalent about this. Maybe it’s just because I did not grow up with them, but it’s easier for me to see why the sacraments and the Church matters–indulgences seem to me a bit too much like pushing a button for cheese. But then, maybe I’m wrong, and if it gets people to the sacraments and to Mass, then I’m all for it. The story in the NYTimes:

“It’s not that easy to explain to people who have never heard of it,” said the Rev. Gilbert Martinez, pastor of St. Paul the Apostle Church in Manhattan, the designated site in the New York archdiocese for obtaining indulgences. “But it was interesting: I had a number of people come in and say, ‘Father, I haven’t been to confession in 20 years, but this’ ” — the availability of an indulgence — “ ‘made me think maybe it wasn’t too late.’ ”

Getting Catholics back into the confession booth, in fact, was one of the underlying motivations for reintroducing the indulgence. In a 2001 speech, Pope John Paul II described the newly reborn tradition as “a happy incentive” for confession.