Viswanathan K's Thoughts

‘Indulgence’ started off as a term to describe “a piece of paper that promised that God would forgo any earthly punishment for the buyer's sins” (from Gerald Posner’s book, God's Bankers ). It is famous for being the trigger for Martin Luther’s protestant movement. But indulgences weren’t always available in return for money. They started off being given instead of cash by the Church to anyone willing to fight the first crusades! Successive popes then realized this was an easy way to make money; and so the ease with which they could be bought increased over the centuries. The initial requirement that a pilgrimage to Rome be made to get an indulgence was soon done away. Then Sextus IV expanded indulgences to apply to souls stuck in Purgatory. Or as Posner wrote: “Any Catholic could pay so that souls trapped in Purgatory could get on a fast track to Heaven.” This “innovation” opened the floodgates and funded the construction of the Sistine Chapel. And pretty soon:

In case you don’t know what hashtags (symbol: #) are used for on Twitter, read this paragraph; but if you know what they are, move on to the next paragraph. Hashtags were created by Chris Messina in 2007 as a way to “tag” a tweet as being about a particular topic or event. Tagging this way then makes search easy. It is left to users to use the hashtag appropriately because indiscriminate usage would just garble everything up. An example of hashtags are used is: “The growth of #socialmedia has been exponential”. Ok, so now onto the topic of this blog. When we talk about the old meeting the new, I don’t think anyone had in mind the Vatican combining indulgences (an indulgence is what the Church sold granted to Catholics to reduce the time they spent in purgatory; or in Monopoly lingo, a Get Out Of Hell Free card) with Twitter. So how does it work? The Vatican announced that one of the ways to get an indulgence now includes following the Pope on Twitter! Imagine that: this is