The pope is in the hospital. It’s the Jubilee Year of Hope. Given how he started his papacy with a Jubilee year of Mercy, I pray he has many more Jubilees here to celebrate. So I pray for his health, his restoring to fullness. I know what it’s like to struggle with breathing. I’ve followed Pope Francis since he became Pope, covering his visit to the United States and the Basilica back in 2015 during the Jubilee Year of Mercy. He is dear to my heart. My memories of him are these sort of moments:
And of him embracing the leper, face to face, and of him washing the feet of women prisoners on Holy Thursday. This is a man who smiles, who breathes out the faith, and exudes joy.
More than anything, the Pope desires that we be guests at the banquet. He also longs for us to see that all of this life, is our time to make sure everyone knows they too are invited. We’re also called to serve everyone here in the meantime, as part of the Body of Christ.
To do this, we must begin with our own souls –preparing for the present and future. Our church offers us the grace and blessing of indulgences this year, walking through Holy Doors.
I’ve been working on making it to some of these and fulfilling the other components of the obligations. It’s both easier and still, not easy. I thought I’d do a post giving you dear readers, some of your options for the coming year that might help.
First, the basics. I got this straight from the catechism so it’s 100% guaranteed accurate:
Obtaining indulgence from God through the Church
1478 An indulgence is obtained through the Church who, by virtue of the power of binding and loosing granted her by Christ Jesus, intervenes in favor of individual Christians and opens for them the treasury of the merits of Christ and the saints to obtain from the Father of mercies the remission of the temporal punishments due for their sins. Thus the Church does not want simply to come to the aid of these Christians, but also to spur them to works of devotion, penance, and charity.89
How do we do this?
Well, it’s both easy and complicated. When you google, you can find four requirements for an indulgence, and five requirements for an indulgence…and there are all kinds of means to an indulgence and if you fulfill some but not all of the requirements, not to worry, you can get a partial.
The four or five requirements are:
1) Be in a state of grace –seeking holiness, desiring to and working at not sinning.
2) Confess sins –this seems a natural extention of #1. You want to have nothing impeding God’s grace in your life.
3) Receive the Eucharist –this is part of both further deepening your relationship with Christ, and again, purging you of all but God’s grace.
4) Complete detatchment from sin –which for most of us, is the trickiest because even venial sins have eternal consequences.
5) Pray for the Pope’s Intentions. There are different ones monthly. February’s are for the terminally ill. March is for families in crisis. Here’s the link to the list so you can stay current.
So let’s go over what we can do to mitigate both the sins of our own, and of all those who long for full union with Christ but are in Purgatory. The world needs more saints –because we seem to be struggling monumentally with sin.
The National Catholic Register published a fine piece called “12 Ways to Obtain an Indulgence” but I started wondering, how many other ways are there to obtain this sort of magnificent merciful all encompassing forgiveness?
A brief search lead to a lovely site, The Visitation Project, where 70, that’s right, 70 ways were listed.
Pilgrimages to Holy Doors is one way. The bisop of each Diocese has the capacity to designate holy doors for the faithful, so the number is unknown, but here’s a link to all the diocese, and all the Bishops so you can find the Holy Door Pilgrimages near you.
Part of making this a year of hope, when there’s so much chaos, is being deliberate.
Deliberately kind.
Deliberately merciful.
Deliberately hopeful.
Deliberately Holy.
The world needs us to be intentional and holy.
Let us begin.
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