The Pardoner of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is representative of the darker side of the corrupt church of the Middle Ages. A pardoner was a church official who had the authority to forgive those who had sinned by selling them pardons and indulgences. Although the pardoner was a church official, he was almost always part of the church only for economic reasons. The Pardoner of this tale is typical of this type of person: a devious and fraudulent individual whose sole goal was to obtain the greatest amount of money for pardons and indulgences by almost any means of coercion necessary. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Although most people today consider the indulgences sold by these pardoners only to be an evil practice of the medieval Church, the practice of selling indulgences and pardons actually began long before the Middle Ages and with noble intentions. The official definition of "indulgence", as stated by the Roman Catholic Church, is "a partial remission of the temporal punishment due for a sin after the sin has been forgiven through the sacrament of penance". Originally, indulgences that remitted punishment for sins could legitimately be granted only to people who confessed their sins to their parish priests, and not to pardoners. If the condition of confession was met, they could purchase indulgences and be exempt from a certain period of punishment that they would instead have received in purgatory. The first official pardoners were commissioned directly by the Pope, and offered indulgences to all those who contributed to the support of Christianity. Many donors were sent directly from Church-supported hospitals. These hospitals, often the storage area for religious relics used to treat the sick, instructed pardoners to take these relics on tour and offer indulgences to anyone moved by their belief in the relics to donate money for the hospital's upkeep. However, the practice of offering indulgences became corrupted. The sale of indulgences became a means for the Church to finance special projects, such as the construction of the Vatican in the 16th century. Pardoners also tended to exaggerate the power of their indulgences by pretending to have the authority to deliver buyers from hell as well as purgatory. Sometimes they might even claim that those who purchased indulgences did not need to either repent or amend their lives to be forgiven. The Pardoner openly admits to being one of these corrupt individuals in the prologue of his own story. Invited by the guest to "tell us something moral" (8), the Pardoner sets up a story that renounces the sin of greed and materialism by describing in detail how he carries out his frightening profession. He admits that he has completely lied about the power and origin of his supposed relics, boasts of the money he swindles from poor and ignorant citizens, and even states: "Of avarice and swich curednesse / Is at my preching, to set them free /For vomit his feathers, and precisely to me/Since my understanding is nothing other than to win/And nothing to correct the sin." (72-76) He also addresses anyone who expects him to act in the way the church originally intended for pardoners, saying, "I won't counterfeit the apostles / I'll have money, wolle, chese, and whete / Al were even of the most page poor." (119-121) The Forgiver obviously has no shame. to be so disgustingly hypocritical, perhaps because he believes his soul is protected by the Church, or because he, as part of the corruption of the Church, has no true faith in.