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Here is something on the "treasure of merits" that we wanted to discuss.

BTTT. One of my sons was just asking me about this the other day, and I know my explanation wasn't as clear as it could have been (on a better day ...).

I'll have him read this article.

well-written article - thank you for posting it.

And in contrast, we have...

1 John 1:9

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.

Spices were burnt on behalf of the deceased Kings of Judah (Jeremiah 34:5).

I wonder why. Probably just nonsense.

Good article about a frequently misunderstood topic.

One thing that I think comes through particularly clearly in this is the Catholic concept of the saints (and not only the "officially" canonized) and the souls in Purgatory as being still part of the community of believers, in their new and different way after death.

"Indulgences."

The single most inexplicable and corruptive tenet of Catholicism through the ages.

Alex, this posted article is, to put it kindly, a bit simplistic, even dumbed down. This is 4th grade stuff and I'm surprised that a Professor would pen such a piece. I am therefore thankful for the link to the Vatican site for "INDULGENTIARUM DOCTRINA". Its somewhat easier to work with than stories of little kids and their pennies!

It seems to me that this article speaks of three things, namely, purgatory, indulgences and the treasury of merit. Within the system of the Latin Church, I can see how each of these concepts developed. To be fair, the concept of "indulgences" predates the schism by many centuries and is found in popular beliefs within The Church in North Africa where some of the faithful were in the habit of acquiring letters of remission of punishment for sins issued by certain monks on account of the "merits" gained by martyrs. This practice was never widespread in the areas which eventually became the Orthodox world but I think its hard to distinguish these, fundamentally from the Latin concept of indulgences and perhaps, without too much stretching, to the idea of a treasury of merit administered in some fashion by holy men, The Church or in the Latin system by the Pope. Again, though, this isn't anything which gained currency in the Eastern Church. Purgatory, another concept which never gained a foothold in the East, does have its roots in the theology of the early Church and the writings of The Fathers. The Church has always taught that there was a place where most souls go after death for an intermediate period between the Partial and Final Judgments. The early Church also believed that in this place God's love, spoken of as a fire, either purifies and fills the soul with joy or torments depending on the destination of the soul at the time of the Final Judgment. I suspect the concept of purgatory developed from this early theology, a theology which Orthodoxy maintains to this day. But purgatory seems to carry with it the concept of atonement, of making up for sins committed, for offenses given to God. As I understand it, the Latin Church teaches that while a soul cannot repent of its sins, or do much of anything for that matter after death, we can, through our prayers, activate the "merits" of Christ, Panagia and the saints for the benefit of those souls and thus do away with, in some non-temporal sense, the suffering "due" to God in recompense for the sins of the deceased and thus that soul enjoys the "beatific vision" "before" it might otherwise (I'm leaving out for now any benefit for us here on earth).

Having read Paul VI's writing, I am struck, as I often am, with the great difference between the Latin/Western concepts of sin and salvation and that of Orthodoxy and Oriental Orthodoxy. I have noted before that this stands in stark relief when one compares the Western focus on atonement, a sort of payback for sin through the Cross and the East's focus on the descent to Hades and the Resurrection. In the West, sin is an offense which God takes very personally and demands retribution for. This just isn't the way the East looks at things at all. Payback has nothing to do with salvation. The West, at least in popular belief, sees the Cross as an expiation for the sins of man, then past, then present and then future. The East sees the Cross as the means whereby Christ died in order to destroy the power which death formerly had over us on account of the Sin of Adam; "Death took a corpse and found God". In other words, Christ didn't die on the Cross to "make up" for your sins or mine, but rather to release us from the inevitable consequences of the Sin of Adam, spiritual death (which is the only real death). As the people pray in the Latin Rite Mass, "Dying you destroyed our death; Rising you restored our life!"

I noticed in the pope's writing that he speaks of how our sins affect not just ourselves but indeed everyone (and I assume everything). This is what The Church has always taught. Our sin distorts God's perfect creation and every sin we commit adds to the burden under which "all creation groans". What the West sees as a "punishment from God" for sin, whether it be personal, or societal or global, isn't a "punishment" at all, at least not most of the time; it is as a result of the distortion of creation caused by sin. God allows it to happen, but he doesn't cause it, we do. This is not to say that there are not what some theologians have called pedagogical punishments, punishments to truly "teach a lesson", but these are quite different from retributions or "paybacks" or atonements.

Orthodox theologians often note that at the Final Judgment we are not judged as if our good and bad deeds are placed on some sort of scale (though that is certainly a very, very ancient, pre Christian idea), but rather by how much like Christ we have become. We sin and thus separate ourselves from God because sin makes us less like Christ than we might otherwise be. We repent of those sins, not because that pays God back but rather because repentance is a denial of the self, which opens us to grace which in turn makes us more like Christ. All of this happens during this life. If we die without being fully in the image and likeness of Christ, it is only by God's mercy that our souls, in some fashion resembling Christ, will become through God's love, burnished and shining as by fire. Our prayers for the dead, therefore, are for our loving God, a God we call "Philanthrope", Lover of Mankind, to show mercy.

Do the prayers of intercession from the saints and Panagia help here? Orthodoxy believes so. Do the prayers of the living faithful help? Orthodoxy hopes so and in any event, those prayers are efficacious for those who make them.

As I said, in a system where God demands satisfaction, where good and bad deeds are weighed out in a judgment process, purgatory as a place of suffering, becomes necessary lest people loose hope. The concept of a treasury of merit administered by the Pope fits in with such concepts of sin, punishment, and the meaning of Christ's granting of the Keys to +Peter and indeed the Western concepts, at least the popular concepts, of the purpose of the Cross. In the Eastern Church, however, with very different beliefs in these areas, they have neither meaning nor place.