Some additional questions that flow from this one: If they were simply not received, why were the people who chose not to receive them treated differently than people who chose not to receive the decrees of, say, the Council of Chalcedon or other Councils the Orthodox Church still holds up as authoritative? Likewise, as the above Councils seemed to have lost their authority over time, can the other Councils also lose theirs over time?
I don’t know the history of every local council over time, so I cannot answer some of your basic query. The practice was not universal in Orthodoxy, and it did not spread beyond the Greeks of certain regions.
The connection to western practices is pretty clear. The Latin church practices were emulated by some in that period. The Turks being dominant in the Middle East, some priests were going abroad to Rome and elsewhere in the West for higher studies (that never really ceased, Patriarch Bartholomew and Metropolitan Zizoulis have studied in Roman Catholic universities). One result of the practice of sending seminarians abroad in those generations was a movement in the Melkite (Antiochian) Orthodox church for reconciliation with Rome. Of course there was a reaction and it split that church wide open.
It must be emphasized that these are not indulgences of the type given in Latin church, and probably indulgence is a poor term for it. In fact, I don’t believe the Latin church ever did this. The reason is the Orthodox do not make the customery Latin distinction between absolution of sins and a residual temporal punishment. Latin indulgences remit the temporal punishment, which is not a major concern of Orthodox.
When absolution is received from an Orthodox priest in confession, that’s it, one is forgiven without conditions. So what these people were actually doing was taking financial contributions for the forgiveness of sins. In my opinion it is as bad or worse than the sale of indulgences in the west, in other words a serious abuse.
What these ‘sales of absolution’ amounted to was a replacement for confession.
Part of the reason the practice arose when it did was the discrimination and oppression Christians experienced in those times. It was an era when being caught by a gang on the street after leaving a church could result in beatings and death. There was tyranny on the streets, and a police state which looked the other way when Christians were the victims but came down hard when Christians were the suspects.
I know that the Greek churches no longer do this, but I don’t know when the practices finally ceased, or if there were synodal decrees or the bishops on their own discontinued the practice. It is quite possible the practice was abandoned without a new formal council acting on it. Any bishop who thinks about it the way I do would never allow it, and would order the practice to stop in his diocese.
This isn’t something to be swept under a rug, it’s part of our history. Orthodox have reflected on it, and dealt with this matter, our theologians are opposed to it as are our bishops. We do not wish to see anything like that return to us through the side windows or the back door.
Michael
