At the time, such purchases of absolution were almost de rigueur, but Martin Luther, then a thirty-three-year-old devout Augustinian monk and priest, started to voice extreme discomfort with the idea that blessings and forgiveness, which doctrine decreed were bestowed by God for a lifetime of good works, could be bought by a sinful human—or that sinful human’s descendant—in an instant. It further disturbed him that the worldly lavishness, if not debauchery, that he saw in St. Peter’s and throughout Europe’s churches was apparently being subsidized by the promised absolution of the spirits of
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