Have you ever considered trying to gain a plenary indulgence during the routine of a normal week? If not, I invite you to read the following questions below, to see if this may be right for you:
1) Do you regularly go to Mass on the weekend?
2) Are you okay with going to confession approximately once a month?
3) Do you half-enjoy praying the rosary or sitting down to read your Catholic bible?
If so, you may be eligible to gain a plenary indulgence once every week!
The First Step: Going to Mass on the Weekend and receiving Communion.
If you’re like me, the more naturally something comes to me (whether by talent or by habit) the more likely I am to participate in it. In this case I go to Mass every single weekend. This is something that is asked of every able-bodied Catholic, so my guess is that you are probably attending Mass every weekend to.
So, what does this mean? It means that, every time we go to Mass like we should we are automatically part of the way to gaining an indulgence!
The Second Step: Picking a Work
If you go to Mass regularly, so far so good! Now, if we intend to gain a Plenary indulgence, we need to decide which Grant/Work we want to do. The Manuel of Indulgences lists 4 works that can be done on any day.
— adoration of the Blessed Sacrament for at least one half hour (grant 7)
— the pious exercise of the Way of the Cross (grant 13)
— recitation of the Marian rosary or of the hymn Akathistos, in church or an oratory; or in a
family, a religious community, or a sodality of the faithful or, in general, when several of
the faithful are gathered for any good purpose (grant 17)
— the devout reading or listening to the Sacred Scriptures for at least a half an hour (grant 30)
Sometimes other occasions that offer indulgences pop up (like Divine Mercy Sunday, or the Christ the King of the Universe-Sunday), but in general you are going to want to choose your favorites out of these 4 options so that a work is always available when you are. I find that I personally lean toward praying a rosary-in-church over the other options, but you may find that one of the other ways comes more naturally to you.
The Third Step: Pray for the Pope/’s Intentions
If you’re feeling good at this point, you’ll be happy to know that the next step is pretty easy. All you have to do is pray for the Pope/’s intentions. You may choose to do this at a totally separate time during the day, but I find it comes pretty naturally to take on this step at the end of my indulgence work, as some closing prayers.
One Our Father and one Hail Mary are all that’s needed for this intention. Or the Church allows you to pray other prayers ‘according to your own piety and devotion’. So, essentially, if you have a habit of saying certain prayers during the day, you do not have to add an Our Father and Hail Mary, or change the prayers you say. You just have to tack on this special intention.
The Fourth Step: Going to Confession approximately once-a-month
This next step may not come quite as naturally as a weekend Mass, but it has bonus that make it a little easier to to handle. Especially if you aren’t in the habit of going to confession regularly. The biggest bonus is that you don’t need to do this condition nearly as often as the rest of them. All the other conditions must be done every time you gain an indulgence. For confession though, you just need to go within 20 days of an indulgence...
Or, to put it more accurately, you must go within 20 days before or after your indulgence, which actually equals out to a span of 40 days total! And these 40 days, they are not just for one indulgence at a time. The other bonus is that, because only one confession is needed to cover a whole time span of indulgences, any indulgences you do within these 40 days are all covered by that single confession. So if we are making it our goal to gain a plenary indulgence every weekend, this would mean that a single confession would be good for 4-6 weekends at a time.
The Fifth & Final Step: Surrendering and Rejecting Sin
This last step is… the hardest to define, but it’s also the most necessary. We must be detached from all sin, even venial sin. If I’m being honest, the only way I can wrap my head around this is with the understanding that I have no way of detaching myself from sin on my own, but only through asking God to do it for me.
Now, this doesn't mean we don’t have some responsibilities in detaching ourselves. We must examining our sins as best we can, big and small, so we know what we should be detached from. We must be willing to detest our sins. And we must surrender our sins to Christ no matter what sins they are. No holding on to any sin (aka. withholding it from Christ), and no making excuses for them, or arguing that they might not be that bad.
So how do we do this? Well, there’s no straight answer to how you must surrender, entrust, or over all create your relationship with Christ. But, if it could help, let me tell you what I’ve been doing; I like to add a short act of contrition onto my indulgence process. I also recommend paying close attention to the prayers, processes, and reasons behind all the other requirements that we need to do to gain an indulgence. Like, I recommend paying attention to the prayers during the Mass, especially the “I confess” prayer. Or listening to the words of absolution at the end of confession. For me, these are like little reminders along the way, letting me know that I must trust God to make me into what I need to be. As long as I’ve done everything I’ve been asked to (the requirements), He makes me detached from my sin, and capable of gaining plenary indulgences.
Now you know what the steps are. They don't sound to terrable do they? But maybe you're still unsure as to why you'd want to do this. Briefly, let me give you a few reasons:
Plenary indulgences can remove temporal punishment from our souls, which is the thing that keeps us in purgatory. Doing an indulgence a week would keep our souls clean and ready for heaven. Because we never know when the Good Lord will call us home.
Plenary indulgences can also be offered for souls in purgatory to help them be released from purgatory. Doing an indulgence weekly, and offering some of those indulgences for the poor souls has long been seen as a great charity, from one member of the faith to another.
Every part of the indulgence process is edifying on its own (even before we receive an indulgence from it). I like to think of it as, like, a 'banana split for the soul'. If you took a banana split and broke it down by parts (the banana, the ice cream, the syrup, the toppings) each one of these parts are tasty all by themselves. In the same way; the mass, confession, praying for the pope/'s intentions, etc. are all tasty treats to our souls all by themselves. If you throw them all together, you get a super desert! A Plenary indulgence. But even if you never put them all together, you still get to taste some delicious things, one part at a time.
So now I challenge you! If you are going to Mass on the weekends, or even if you go more sparingly; every time you go to Mass try to gain a Plenary indulgence. You're almost half way there already, just by going to Mass. And if this can prepare you for heaven, or help another soul reach heaven, I think that at the end of the day you will find that it really is worth it to try.
** Let us know, in the comments or on our Facebook Group, how this weekly challenge is going for you.
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