Essentially all sacramentals seem to be out of use today but that doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t take advantage of any graces they may provide. Growing up I’d never heard of them and I bet the priests there haven’t either. I once asked a diocesan priest a question about plenary indulgences and at first he didn’t know what I was talking about!
Perhaps though this one is actually retired since as you say indulgences are no longer attached to items? How could an indulgence be attached to an item? Why not the wearer of the item? Or is it just that it had only a partial indulgence attached, which until the time of Paul VI gave a temporal measurement released from purgatory? The Church has since decided that such a temporal measurement would be inappropriate given that purgatory exists outside of space and, possibly, time (at least as we know it)?
I would hardly say that “all sacramentals seem to be out of use today”.
I would say that the usage has changed.
For example, there was a time in my ministry when we, more or less automatically, enrolled First Communicants in the Scapular of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. That stopped as few of the children were cognizant of the sacramental and did not actually make use of it after the ceremony of investiture.
In years after, when people would ask to be invested, if they were of the right age, I would ask them if they had not in fact been invested at the time of their First Communion. Almost invariably, the response “I have no idea.” Which affirmed the new practice that one needs to come forward, knowingly and intentionally, to assume this devotion volitionally.
Indulgences used to be attached to the item by the priest or the bishop with the requisite faculty, with different indulgences originating with different grants applying to a variety of sacramentals. It was in the same vein as the old practice of having altars that were privileged.
There was, for instance, the old Station Crucifix that I have had occasion to talk about before, which were for people who could not do the Stations of the Cross where they were lawfully erected.
These sorts of things, however, over-emphasised the possession of the religious object to the detriment of the devotion and the person. Today, there is a grant in the Enchiridion by which a person can complete the devotion and gain the indulgence without the need of a physical object which, in times past, they had need to go and have blessed and indulgences attached to it.
I remember some of the practices being particularly regrettable. We are far better off, and more balanced, today than in the days of my youth.
