HistoricalChristian.Faith

Did Rome's own reforms concede the Reformers' critique of indulgences?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: contested — the thesis equivocates on which critique. The Reformation lodged two: an abuse critique (the sale, the false security a pardon-letter bred, the mechanical claim over the souls in purgatory) and a doctrinal critique (that indulgences as such — the treasury of merit, a temporal debt surviving forgiveness, its remission by the Church and its application to the dead — have no warrant). Rome's reforms conceded the first and explicitly retained the second. Trent abolished the pardon-sellers (1562) and the “evil gains” (1563) while anathematizing those who deny indulgences are salutary; Paul VI's Indulgentiarum Doctrina (1967) dropped the countable “quantities” of days and years while restating the treasury, the temporal debt, and application to the dead word for word. So the blanket claim “Rome conceded the Reformers' critique” is true of the abuse limb and false of the doctrinal limb; what is genuinely disputed is the middle — whether abandoning the quantified schedules tacitly concedes that the underlying penny-accounting was never well founded, or was mere discipline. No clear winner: contested.

Related arguments: see also the crusade-indulgence origin thesis (how the abuses arose) and the power of the keys (the doctrinal warrant Rome retained).

The claim

Rome's own house-cleaning proves the Reformers were right: it abolished the pardon-sellers Luther attacked, and in 1967 quietly deleted the days and years that had priced its pardons for centuries. A doctrine whose numbers can simply be erased was never sound; the reform is a confession.

The argument is a staple of Protestant and secular-historical polemic: that the Catholic Church, by reforming indulgences from within — first at the Council of Trent, then under Paul VI — has in effect ratified the grievance that Luther raised in 1517. It is worth weighing precisely because there is real substance to it and a real overreach in it, and the two are easily run together.

The evidence for

The abuses really were disowned — by Rome, not merely by its critics. The concession on the abuse limb is not in doubt; it is documented in Rome's own conciliar acts. Trent's twenty-first session (1562) ordered that the quaestores of alms — the commissioned pardon-preachers of whom Tetzel was the notorious type — have their “name and use… henceforth utterly abolished,” with alms thereafter gathered by the local Ordinaries “without their receiving any remuneration whatsoever.” Its twenty-fifth session (1563) commanded that “all evil gains for the obtaining thereof… be wholly abolished.”¹ This is exactly the target of Luther's sharpest 1517 theses — that “those preachers of indulgences are in error, who say that by the pope's indulgences a man is freed from every penalty” (Thesis 21), and that a soul does not fly from purgatory “so soon as the penny jingles into the money-box” (Thesis 27).² On that limb the reform and the protest converge.

The 1967 reform deleted the numbers. For centuries a partial indulgence was quantified — “seven years and seven quarantines,” and the like — a schedule inherited from the days and years of ancient canonical penance. Indulgentiarum Doctrina abolished the whole apparatus of quantities: a partial indulgence would “henceforth… [be] designated only with the words ‘partial indulgence’ without any determination of days or years” (Norm 4), leaving only the plenary/partial distinction (Norm 2).³ The strong form of the thesis presses on this: the numbers were the visible face of a debt-accounting the Reformers said was a fiction, and Rome erased them.

Adversarial assessment

Where the concession is real. On the abuse limb the thesis is simply correct, and Catholic and Protestant historians agree on the facts: the sale of indulgences, the licensed pardon-sellers, the false assurance a letter bred, and the crude claim over the dead were condemned by the Roman Church itself. Notably, this limb of Luther's 1517 protest was never distinctively Protestant — the Ninety-Five Theses are an intra-Catholic disputation that still affirms true papal indulgences (Thesis 71), and reforming humanists and later Catholic reformers shared the grievance. That Rome eventually acted on it vindicates the abuse critique, which is real ground gained for the thesis.

Where it is overstated. The doctrinal limb was not conceded but reaffirmed, twice and pointedly. Trent did not merely tidy the practice; in the same breath it declared “that the power of conferring Indulgences was granted by Christ to the Church” and anathematized those “who… assert that [indulgences] are useless.”¹ And Indulgentiarum Doctrina, precisely while stripping the numbers, restated the disputed theology intact — the indulgence remains “the remission before God of the temporal punishment due sins already forgiven,” granted as the Church “dispenses and applies the treasury of the satisfaction won by Christ and the saints” (Norm 1), and it “can always be applied to the dead by way of suffrage” (Norm 3).³ Every element the Reformers rejected in principle — the treasury of merit, a temporal debt outliving forgiveness, the Church's power to remit it, its reach to the dead — stands in the 1967 text unchanged. On the category the Reformers most cared about, the reform is the opposite of a concession.

The genuinely disputed middle. The interesting question is whether the disciplinary reform carries a doctrinal admission it does not state. Two readings are each defensible. On the Catholic reading the analogy is to any corrupt minister: abolishing a fraud no more concedes the doctrine than punishing a simoniac concedes that ordination is false, and the day/year numbers were never a claim about calendar time in purgatory but a canonical measure of the penance an indulgence would once have remitted — dropping an archaic and misunderstood unit is housekeeping, not retraction. On the Protestant reading the quantities were the doctrine made operational: a “treasury” drawn on in dated increments implies an audited ledger, and quietly deleting the audit while keeping the bank concedes that the accounting was always notional — which was much of Luther's point (Thesis 21; and Thesis 82, why not empty purgatory for love rather than money). Neither reading can be dismissed: the first rightly distinguishes a discipline from a dogma; the second rightly notes that the reform removed exactly the feature that made the dogma checkable. This is a real dispute with no decisive resolution — strong by the lights of Catholic dogmatic theology, strong by the lights of Reformation polemic, and unsettled between them.

Assessment

Contested. Split cleanly, the thesis resolves: the abuse critique was conceded — a plain historical fact, admitted by Rome's own decrees — while the doctrinal critique was explicitly rejected, Trent by anathema and Indulgentiarum Doctrina by verbatim restatement. The blanket claim “Rome conceded the Reformers' critique” is therefore half true and, taken whole, overstated. What keeps the page from a clean split is its live middle — whether abandoning the quantified schedules is a tacit doctrinal concession or mere discipline — on which the Catholic and Protestant readings are each coherent and neither prevails. Real ground on the abuses, no ground on the doctrine, and a genuine standoff in between: contested.

Sources