Dear Father,
My friend’s father was in the hospital on the East Coast. When she went to be with him while he was dying, a priest gave him some special blessing called a pardon. The priest said it was guaranteed to get him to heaven. The priest also gave that blessing to my friend and her husband. Can you explain more about this and how we can get it here in our church?
-Kate
Dear Kate,
It seems that what you are describing as the blessing that a priest gave to your friend’s father is the Apostolic Pardon. It is, indeed, a special blessing, but it is reserved for those who are very near death.
There are two forms of the Apostolic Pardon blessing. One is: “Through the holy mysteries of our redemption may almighty God release you from all punishments in this life and in the life to come. May he open to you the gates of paradise and welcome you to everlasting joy.”
The other formula is “By the authority which the Apostolic See has given me, I grant you a full pardon and the remission of all your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
Each of these prayers, in its own way, asks God for the remission of all the punishments due to sins. This refers to what we might call the remains of our sins, or the temporal punishment due to sin.
First, however, we must repent of our sins. In so doing, we ask God’s forgiveness. If the sins are serious, known as mortal sins, then we must use the means that Christ gave us for divine forgiveness. It’s not merely a matter of an interior act such as wishing for forgiveness. God wants us to confess our sins through a priest, who sits in the person of Christ. God wants us to receive absolution from our mortal sins through the priest.
Second, we are to show signs of our repentance. The first sign is confession. The second sign of our contrition is the desire to make up for our sins or try to repair the effects of our sins. While we may be able to repair having hurt a loved one, we can never repair the harm we have caused God’s infinite majesty. Jesus does this for us through the sacrament of penance.
Our serious sins can so disrupt our relationships or so destroy people and our world that we and others suffer the effects of those sins for a long time. We especially suffer those ripple effects in our own lives. By way of analogy, mortal sins cause our spiritual death, like a heart attack might. Confession is the restoration of our spiritual life, like a medical electric shock jump starts the heart. And as a new regimen of diet and exercise will be required after the heart attack, so with the soul.
From the human side of things, we can do things to heal and deepen our friendship with God, such as prayer, making reparation, and other holy deeds. The Apostolic Pardon is one of those ways to help heal the effects of our sins. The Pardon is a special prayer by which a priest asks God to pardon all remaining effects of a person’s sins while the “work” of the dying person is to join his/her sufferings to Christ’s sufferings. Thus, suffering, and even death, is transformed into something holy, just like the exhaustion and pain of the runner in a race is “transformed” into a gold medal.
Every Catholic priest is able to give the Apostolic Pardon, but only to someone at death’s door and is rightly disposed, namely, to be in friendship with God. The Apostolic Pardon is not a magical formula for an unrepentant sinner to slip into heaven through the back door.
Or is it a substitute for the sacraments of penance (confession) and anointing of the sick. Given a choice between receiving the sacraments and receiving the Apostolic Pardon, always go for the sacraments.
That said, having received the sacraments, including Holy Communion for the last time (viaticum), and being properly disposed, the Apostolic Pardon is important because of its power to take away any remaining experience of purgatory.
I’m concerned about something you said: that the priest gave the Apostolic Pardon to the daughter and son-in-law of the dying man. The Apostolic Pardon is not granted to non-dying persons. To give it in that situation is a false hope and could lead the so-called recipients to think that their own purgatory was eliminated. The Church offers a multitude of indulgences in addition to the sacraments to help us take care of the temporal punishment due to our sins.
As for getting this here in Columbus … well, we already have it. We have the sacraments administered by our wonderful priests, morning, noon and night. Sacramental grace, received with a heart desirous of union with God, is the guarantee of heaven, because God wants our union with Him more than we ever can desire it. Our priests give the Apostolic Pardon to Catholics on their deathbeds. We are blessed!
