“Everybody is wonderin’ what and where they all came from.” Iris Dement, lyrics from the song
“Let the Mystery Be“
When we discovered the document below in my grandmother’s effects after her death, we thought it was a “Papal Pardon”. It got us ‘wonderin’ what it meant and how and why our grandmother obtained it. For a long time, before we learned many of the details that informed my book, we thought it meant she had never been able to confess her secret relationship with our grandfather, perhaps out of fear that her confession would bring disastrous consequences to them and to their children. As a Catholic, Grandmother must have believed her affair with our grandfather was a ‘mortal sin’, and that she would never be welcomed into heaven with this unconfessed sin on her soul. We thought the ‘pardon’ forgave her unconfessed ‘mortal sin.’ My cousin Matt helped me research the actual meaning of the document. We discovered that a “Plenary Indulgence” effective at the time of death could not be given and eventually fulfilled if one had a ‘mortal sin’ on their soul. Thus, she must have confessed her ‘mortal sin’ at some point in her life.
A Writer's Trek 