According to Vatican officials (so we’re not making this up) the Catholic Church is now offering ‘indulgences’ to Catholics who follow Pope Francis on Twitter.
We’re sure you paid attention back in primary school when the teacher taught you about purgatory and how you were going to stay there for eternity because you were a little shit. No? Just me?
Thankfully, there’s a way out for all us sinners through ‘indulgences’, which supposedly reduce the time you spend in the half-way-house before getting into heaven.
Back in the good bad old days, the Middle Ages to be precise, people used to pay large sums of money to dodgy priests for indulgences that would help to get them out of purgatory sooner, but now the Vatican says you can simply follow the Pope on Twitter to knock some time off.
However, like everything that sounds too good to be true, there’s a catch. “You can’t obtain indulgences like getting a coffee from a vending machine,” Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, head of the pontifical council for social communication, told Corriere della Sera.
“It’s not enough just to watch a Mass online or follow Pope Francis via live streaming on your iPad or by connecting to Pope2You.net. These are just devices. What really counts is that the Tweet that the Pope will send from Brazil or the photos from World Youth Day produce genuine spiritual fruit in the heart of the person.”
So simply following @Pontifex on Twitter and forgetting about it isn’t going to be enough. You’ll have to keep up to date with the Pope’s Twitter account while also going to confession every once in awhile. It probably won’t hurt if you actually went to mass as well.
If all that still sounds like too much work in order to knock off a few years in purgatory then you can check out the full list of indulgences (aka. the Catholic cheat codes) over on the Catholic.org website here.
