In the
history of the Catholic Church
The history of the Catholic Church is the formation, events, and historical development of the Catholic Church through time.
The tradition of the Catholic Church claims the Catholic Church began with Jesus Christ and his teachings; the Catholi ...
, a crusade indulgence was any
indulgence
In the teaching of the Catholic Church, an indulgence (, from , 'permit') 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 ...
—remission from the penalties imposed by
penance—granted to a person who participated in an ecclesiastically sanctioned
crusade. It had its origins in the
Council of Clermont
The Council of Clermont was a mixed synod of ecclesiastics and laymen of the Catholic Church, called by Pope Urban II and held from 17 to 27 November 1095 at Clermont, Auvergne, at the time part of the Duchy of Aquitaine.
Pope Urban's speech ...
that closed on 27 November 1095. According to
Lambert of Arras, who was present, the council decreed that, "Whoever for devotion alone, not to gain honour or money, goes to Jerusalem to liberate the Church of God can substitute this journey for all penance." This marked the start of the
First Crusade
The First Crusade (1096–1099) was the first of a series of religious wars, or Crusades, initiated, supported and at times directed by the Latin Church in the medieval period. The objective was the recovery of the Holy Land from Islamic r ...
. Later popes and councils often invoked "the same remission as instituted by
Pope Urban at the council at Clermont." The connection to the liberation of Jerusalem was later weakened and the same or similar indulgence offered to participants in the
Northern Crusades
The Northern Crusades or Baltic Crusades were Christian colonization and Christianization campaigns undertaken by Catholic Christian military orders and kingdoms, primarily against the pagan Baltic, Finnic and West Slavic peoples around th ...
and the
Albigensian Crusade.
See also
*
Crusade bull
A crusade bull or crusading bull ( la, bulla cruciata) was a papal bull that granted privileges, including indulgences, to those who took part in the crusades against infidels.. A bull is an official document issued by a pope and sealed with a lea ...
Notes
Bibliography
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*{{cite journal , last=Chevedden , first=Paul E. , title=Canon 2 of the Council of Clermont (1095) and the Crusade Indulgence , journal=Annuarium historiae conciliorum , volume=37 , issue=2 , year=2005 , pages=253–322
Crusades
Catholic moral theology