Indulgences: Authority, Rubrics?

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Help me understand. Under what authority does the Catholic Church issue indulgences? I’m thoroughly confused by this practice. Are there rubrics somewhere for issuing them? Are some indulgences objectively “worth” more or less? How does the Church decide?
 
Can someone help me understand the power to loose and bind? I’m still not seeing the link.
 
Clare’s link pretty much covers it, except maybe for the “worth” of indulgences.

The Church used to put a value of days on indulgences, like saying prayer A was worth “500 days indulgence” and saying prayer B was worth “200 days indulgence”. This created a lot of confusion because people thought it meant you got 200 days off your stay in purgatory. Purgatory is outside of earthly time, so the idea of removing 200 days from your stay there does not make sense. What it actually meant was that people used to be assigned really long earthly penances, like 3 years of pilgrimage time, and the indulgence would remove 200 days from the assigned 3 years of earthly penance.

In recent years the Church has stopped putting a time value on the indulgences and just makes them all “plenary”, which means the removal of all purgatory, or “partial” meaning the removing of some indeterminate portion of your purgatory but not the whole thing. We have no way of knowing if our “partial” is going to be 1 percent of our purgatory stay or 99 percent of our purgatory stay, though we know it won’t be 100 percent, as that would make it plenary.

As for “how the Church decides” you’d have to ask them; most likely they assign the plenary to the acts they most want Catholics to do, as a way of encouraging you to do them.
 
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mrsdizzyd said:
Can someone help me understand the power to loose and bind? I’m still not seeing the link.
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Matthew 16: 13-19
[13] And Jesus came into the quarters of Caesarea Philippi: and he asked his disciples, saying: Whom do men say that the Son of man is? [14] But they said: Some John the Baptist, and other some Elias, and others Jeremias, or one of the prophets. [15] Jesus saith to them: But whom do you say that I am?

[16] Simon Peter answered and said: Thou art Christ, the Son of the living God. [17] And Jesus answering, said to him: Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jona: because flesh and blood hath not revealed it to thee, but my Father who is in heaven. [18] And I say to thee: That thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. [19] And I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose upon earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven.
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Tis_Bearself said:
We have no way of knowing if our “partial” is going to be 1 percent of our purgatory stay or 99 percent of our purgatory stay, though we know it won’t be 100 percent, as that would make it plenary.
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This implies that the church has a way of knowing that plenary indulgences are, well, plenary. Is there any further information on that point.
 
Yes, but how does this relate to indulgences? Is the power to bind and loose reserved to only certain kinds or groups of people?
 
Once again, the church has the power to bind and loose. If the church decides to make something a plenary indulgence, it’s a permissible exercise of the church’s “loosing” power for the Church to say, for example, that walking through a specifically designated Holy Door during the Year of Mercy gives you a Plenary Indulgence under the usual conditions.

Now God could conceivably come in, look at what is in the actual person’s mind and heart and say “nope, you don’t get the benefit of the loosing power because you didn’t have the right mindset of being totally detached from your sin when you walked through that Holy Door” etc. so in that sense the Church cannot be certain that a particular person will get the benefit of the indulgence offered by the Church.

However, the Church is within its power and authority to set up such a practice, with God the ultimate judge of whether us humans have performed the practice well enough to qualify for the attached benefit.
 
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Thank you!

Lots of info here. I’ll have to sit with it a bit.
 
mrsdizzyd said:
Help me understand. Under what authority does the Catholic Church issue indulgences? I’m thoroughly confused by this practice. Are there rubrics somewhere for issuing them? Are some indulgences objectively “worth” more or less? How does the Church decide?
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It is the authority given by Christ to bind and loose sins. Indulgences are for the satisfaction of temporal punishment due sins, for sins already forgiven. The Catholic Roman Curia that issues the grants is called the Apostolic Penitentiary.

http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/tribunals/apost_penit/index.htm

Apostolic Constitution, Pope Paul VI, INDULGENTIARUM DOCTRINA

https://www.ewtn.com/library/PAPALDOC/P6INDULG.HTM
 
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