I was reading the Church’s position on indulgences. It gave me a bad feeling. It makes doing a devotion or another good deed feel mercenary. " I’m just doing it to get a remission of sins." What do you think? Am I overreacting?
Mercenary (Collins) 1. influenced by greed or desire for gain.
The desire to make reparations for sin as well as making those reparations is good, both for oneself and for the faithfully departed.
Catechism of the Catholic Church:
1472 To understand this doctrine and practice of the Church, it is necessary to understand that sin has a double consequence. Grave sin deprives us of communion with God and therefore makes us incapable of eternal life, the privation of which is called the “eternal punishment” of sin. On the other hand every sin, even venial, entails an unhealthy attachment to creatures, which must be purified either here on earth, or after death in the state called Purgatory. This purification frees one from what is called the “temporal punishment” of sin. These two punishments must not be conceived of as a kind of vengeance inflicted by God from without, but as following from the very nature of sin. A conversion which proceeds from a fervent charity can attain the complete purification of the sinner in such a way that no punishment would remain.84 **
1473** The forgiveness of sin and restoration of communion with God entail the remission of the eternal punishment of sin, but temporal punishment of sin remains. While patiently bearing sufferings and trials of all kinds and, when the day comes, serenely facing death, the Christian must strive to accept this temporal punishment of sin as a grace. He should strive by works of mercy and charity, as well as by prayer and the various practices of penance, to put off completely the “old man” and to put on the "new man."85
From Pope Paul VI - Indulgentiarum Doctrina - Doctrine on Indulgences - 1 January 1967:
8. The remission of the temporal punishment due for sins already forgiven insofar as their guilt is concerned has been called specifically “indulgence.”[37]
It has something in common with other ways or means of eliminating the vestiges of sin but at the same time it is clearly distinct from them.
In an indulgence in fact, the Church, making use of its power as minister of the Redemption of Christ, not only prays but by an authoritative intervention dispenses to the faithful suitably disposed the treasury of satisfaction which Christ and the saints won for the remission of temporal punishment.[38]
The aim pursued by ecclesiastical authority in granting indulgences is not only that of helping the faithful to expiate the punishment due sin but also that of urging them to perform works of piety, penitence and charity–particularly those which lead to growth in faith and which favor the common good.[39]
And if the faithful offer indulgences in suffrage for the dead, they cultivate charity in an excellent way and while raising their minds to heaven, they bring a wiser order into the things of this world.
The Magisterium of the Church has defended and illustrated this doctrine in various documents.[40] Unfortunately, the practice of indulgences has at times been improperly used either through “untimely and superfluous indulgences” by which the power of the keys was humiliated and penitential satisfaction weakened,[41] or through the collection of “illicit profits” by which indulgences were blasphemously defamed[42] But the Church, in deploring and correcting these improper uses “teaches and establishes that the use of indulgences must be preserved because it is supremely salutary for the Christian people and authoritatively approved by the sacred councils; and it condemns with anathema those who maintain the uselessness of indulgences or deny the power of the Church to grant them.”[43]
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