The Shameful Indulgences of the Roman Catholic Church

Another great Protestant Reformer was John Calvin, and his Institutes of Christian Religion is known as one of the greatest written works in Christian history.  One key major disagreement that Calvin and the other Reformers had against the Roman Catholic church was indulgences, and lest you think the Roman Catholic church has changed its tune in regards to indulgences, take a look at their Catechism straight off the Vatican's web-page:

"1471 What is an indulgence? 'An indulgence is 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 the saints.'"  Catechism of the Catholic Church, Part II, Section II, Article IV, X.

Calvin displayed the great error of this doctrine, free from the shackles of our modern politically correct tone, in his Institutes of Christian Religion:

"From the dogma of satisfaction that of indulgences takes its rise.  For the pretence is, that what is wanting to our own ability is hereby supplied; and they go to the insane length of defining them to be a dispensation of the merrits of Christ, and the martyrs which the Pope makes by his bulls...They give the name of treasury of the Church to the merits of Christ, the holy Apostles and Martyrs.  They pretend, as I have said, that the radical custody of the granary has been delivered to the Roman bishop, to whom the dispensation of these great blessings belongs in such a sense, that he can both exercise it by himself, and delegate the power of exercising it to others...These, to describe them truly, are a profanation of the blood of Christ, and a delusion of Satan, by which the Christian people are led away from the grace of God and the life which is in Christ, and turned aside from the true way of salvation.  For how could the blood of Christ be more shamefully profaned than by denying its sufficiency for the remission of sins, for reconciliation and satisfaction, unless its defects, as if it were dried up and exhausted, are supplemented from some other quarter?...What is this but merley to leave the name of Christ, and at the same time make him a vulgar saintling, who can scarcely be distinguished in the crows?  He alone ought to be preached, alone held forth, alone named, alone looked to, whenever the subject considered is the obtaining of the forgiveness of sins, expiation, and sanctification." Book III, chapter 5, 572-574