Is there a time requirement for the detachment from sin needed to gain a plenary indulgence?
A viewer asks whether there is any time-based criterion attached to the complete detachment from sin required to gain a plenary indulgence for the temporal punishment of forgiven sins.
Answer
No, the Church does not teach that. Nobody is standing there with a stopwatch saying you have to wait a certain amount of time before we can officially give you the plenary indulgence and relieve you of the punishment. The Church does not work that way, and thank God it does not, because if it did we would be in big trouble. It gives you the freedom. This is why Scripture counts things by days; you do not find minutes and seconds, nobody sitting there with a stopwatch. The smallest increment of time in Scripture is an hour, and there is only one place, Apocalypse 8, where it mentions a half hour. So if you really want to get out your stopwatch, that is as low as you can go.