Stultus natus est omni momento*

Far be it from me to tell fifteenth century English Catholics how to Catholic, but seriously you guys? Indulgences?

Luckily, this was the shadiest thing priests ever did...

Pretty far down the list on Weinstein's
crime list, but it still kind of sucks.

If you haven't ever heard of indulgences, maybe you're familiar with the concept thanks to Dogma. The Kevin Smith movie? Matt Damon, Ben Affleck? No? Well, that's a shame because you actually can't watch it now. Something to do with Harvey Weinstein. Doesn't matter, the idea is that when a Catholic dies, depending on the life they led, and how penitent they are they may be required to spend an amount of time in a place called purgatory which is I gather is not as bad as hell, but pretty bad. The upside is that it's temporary and you can buy your way out. 

"The court finds that remark to be a sick burn 
and orders it to be stricken from the record."

"Buy you say?" you say. Kinda? To be clear, I wasn't raised Catholic, but I was raised by parents who were raised Catholic. So I have the guilt, but not a lot of knowledge. Like I was saying, prayers and good deeds can shorten your stay in purgatory, but so can, at least in medieval times, money. People, well, rich people, could use their wealth to take time off their punishment. So I guess the Catholic afterlife functions a lot like the U.S. justice system in this respect. Oh, and cool fact: purgatory isn't explicitly mentioned in the Bible. That will come in handy later.

"Hey I found a--oh, never mind, just an earl."

-Some detectorist

I bring all this up because a metal detectorist in England found a--huh? Yeah, detectorist. My autocorrect is giving it the red squiggly line because no one outside the detectorist community even recognizes it as a word. Anyway, it's what the people who use metal detectors to look for artifacts are called, and one recently found a medieval seal that was used specifically to stamp indulgences. Found it in a field. Because in England you can't stick a shovel in the ground without turning up a King or a copy of the Magna Carta.

Affixing a wax seal would actually be less
of a pain than going through this nonsense
every time you log into Instagram or whatever.

It seems almost incredible that someone could, after five hundred years, find something so small and so historically interesting in the middle of a field. Like, you'd think it'd get trampled into the dirt or plowed over or something. Seals were like pre-internet authentication apps or DRM so you wouldn't want too many of them floating around for fear of scammers selling fake indulgences. That is, faker indulgences. Which, I mean, c'mon the whole idea is a bit of a scam to begin with isn't it?

The only thing more incredible than the unlikelihood of finding the seal is that Europe, as a continent, fell for the idea of indulgences for as long as they did. Look, I am in no way suggesting that people are fools for believing in an afterlife. I am however suggesting that anyone who hands over their gold pieces because a guy dressed like a wizard tells them that it'll shave time off their sentence in a place they may well have just made up in order to sell "get out of purgatory free" cards deserves to get taken.

"Yes? Hello? Excuse me, I don't think I'm supposed to be in here. While I
did lead a cruel and selfish life, I have this document here that says..."

-That guy

*according to google translate, this is a reasonable approximation of "There's a sucker born every minute."