page_title: Indulgence
section_title: Eastern Orthodox Church
hierarchical_section_title: Indulgence / Eastern Orthodox Church
context_page_description: In the teaching of the Catholic Church, an indulgence is "a way to reduce the amount of punishment one has to undergo for sins". The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes an indulgence as "a remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven, which the faithful Christian who is duly disposed gains under certain prescribed conditions through the action of the Church which, as the minister of redemption, dispenses and applies with authority the treasury of the satisfactions of Christ and all of the saints".
  The recipient of an indulgence must perform an action to receive it. This is most often the saying of a specified prayer, but may also include the visiting of a particular place, or the performance of specific good works.
  Indulgences were introduced to allow for the remission of the severe penances of the early Church and granted at the intercession of Christians awaiting martyrdom or at least imprisoned for the faith. The church teaches that indulgences draw on the treasury of merit accumulated by Christ's superabundantly meritorious sacrifice on the cross and the virtues and penances of the saints.
context_section_description: The Eastern Orthodox Churches believe one can be absolved from sins by the Sacred Mystery of Confession. Because of differences in the theology of salvation, indulgences for the remission of temporal punishment of sin do not exist in Eastern Orthodoxy, but until the twentieth century there existed in some places a practice of absolution certificates (συγχωροχάρτια – synchorochartia).
  Some of these certificates were connected with any patriarch's decrees lifting some serious ecclesiastical penalty, including excommunication, for the living or the dead. But because of the expense of maintaining the Holy Places and paying the many taxes levied on them, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, with the approval of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, had the sole privilege of distributing such documents in large numbers to pilgrims or sending them elsewhere, sometimes with a blank space for the name of the beneficiary, living or dead, an individual or a whole family, for whom the prayers would be read.
  Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem Dositheos Notaras (1641–1707) wrote: "It is an established custom and ancient tradition, known to all, that the Most Holy Patriarchs give the absolution certificate (συγχωροχάρτιον – synchorochartion) to the faithful people … they have granted them from the beginning and still do."
  Indeed, starting from the 16th century, Orthodox Christians of the Greek Church rather extensively, although not officially in penitential practice, used “permissive letters” (Greek: συγχωροχάρτια), in many ways similar to indulgences. The status of an official ecclesiastical document is obtained at the Council of Constantinople in 1727, the resolution of which reads: «The power of the abandonment of sins, which, if filed in writing, which the Eastern Church of Christ calls “permissive letters”, and the Latin people “indulgences”... is given by Christ in the holy Church. These “permissive letters” are issued throughout the catholic (universal) Church by the four holiest patriarchs: Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem». The practice of using "permissive letters" existed in Greece until the middle of the twentieth century. From XIII to XVII century, it was used in Russia. Indulgences as a means of enrichment were condemned at the Council of Constantinople in 1838. Even conciliar decisions were difficult to eradicate the practice of indulgences, rooted in the people. "Permissive letters" (or indulgences) survived in Greece until the mid-twentieth century
caption: An 18th-century absolution certificate granted by the Patriarch of Jerusalem and sold by Greek monks in Wallachia (History Museum, Bucharest)
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