No, Catholics Don’t Believe You Can Buy Heaven—Here’s What Indulgences Actually Mean

The older I get, the more complicated life becomes. I used to think things would become simpler with time—more stable, more manageable. But that hasn’t been my experience. The consequences of the sins I’ve committed over the years seem to accumulate, not disappear. Sometimes, I feel like a sailor trying to steer a damaged boat across open water. Just when I plug one leak, another one bursts open. It’s a constant scramble to keep things afloat.

I’ve been civilly divorced—not once, but twice. I’ve made choices that I deeply regret. There are days when I wonder if I’ll ever feel whole again. And for a long time, I wrestled with the Christian concept of grace. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in grace—it was more about understanding how far it extended and how it worked in the aftermath of sin.

In my Protestant background, grace was often described as a sweeping, all-encompassing act. Jesus paid it all. Past, present, and future sins were covered. And in a theological sense, that’s true—we are justified by the work of Christ alone. But over time, I found myself yearning for a more robust understanding of what came after forgiveness. What happens after you’ve been forgiven but still feel the weight of what you’ve done?

Now, as a Catholic, I still hold fast to the belief that it is Christ who takes away the sins of the world. We proclaim it at every Mass: “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.” But Catholicism adds something that, to me, better reflects the human experience: even after forgiveness, sin leaves a wound. And wounds don’t heal just because we’ve been declared clean—they require time, attention, and effort to mend.

This isn’t about working for salvation. The Catechism teaches clearly: “The grace of Christ is the gratuitous gift that God makes to us of his own life, infused by the Holy Spirit into our soul to heal it of sin and to sanctify it” (CCC 1999). Salvation is unearned. But grace doesn’t only save—it sanctifies, it heals, it restores.

Even after sin is forgiven, there are temporal consequences that remain. As the Catechism explains:

“Sin has a double consequence. Grave sin deprives us of communion with God… Every sin, even venial, entails an unhealthy attachment to creatures, which must be purified either here on earth, or after death…” (CCC 1472).

This is why Catholics speak of penance, reparation, and healing—not as earning God’s love, but as cooperating with His grace.

Think of the story of the ten lepers in Luke 17. All were healed of their disease, but only one returned to Jesus—and Scripture says that man was not just healed, but made whole. Healing involves relationship. It involves return.

This is also where the theology of indulgences comes into view—a word that carries centuries of misunderstanding. Contrary to popular belief, indulgences do not forgive sins. “An indulgence is a remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven…” (CCC 1471). It is about healing the effects of sin, not removing its guilt—that’s already done through confession and God’s mercy.

And this is not a foreign idea to Scripture. After meeting Jesus, Zacchaeus doesn’t just enjoy forgiveness—he acts on it. He gives half of his wealth to the poor and repays those he’s wronged fourfold (Luke 19:8). Forgiveness leads to restitution. Grace becomes visible through action.

People often focus on the historical abuses of indulgences, especially the selling of them. And they’re right to call that out. The Church herself condemned those abuses at the Council of Trent and reformed the practice. But the core idea remains beautiful: that God invites us to participate in our healing. Not to earn His love, but to grow in it.

It’s also worth noting that indulgences were never required to be financial. As the Catechism states:

“The ‘treasury of the Church’… is the infinite value… of Christ’s merits, as well as those of the Blessed Virgin Mary and all the saints. In this treasury, too, are the prayers and good works of the Church, which are offered for the benefit of the faithful…” (CCC 1476–1477).

The poor were often encouraged to pray or perform works of mercy—not to give money—because indulgences were about interior conversion, not external transactions.

This isn’t an attempt to win anyone over to a particular doctrine. It’s just a glimpse into the healing process I’ve discovered. A way of understanding that grace doesn’t bypass suffering—it enters into it. God’s grace finds us in our broken boats, leaking and tired, and says, “Let’s start plugging these holes—together.”

Maybe if we had listened more to one another centuries ago—if we truly sought to understand the heart behind theology—maybe the Reformation wouldn’t have fractured the Church the way it did. Maybe today, we can take a different approach.

Maybe the person across from you isn’t the villain of your story. Maybe they’re a fellow sailor, patching up their hull just like you.