According to the centuries-old rules of the Roman Catholic Church, sin-reduction is a two-step process. Guilt is absolved through confession and prayer, but punishment - on earth or in purgatory - can be avoided through indulgences, an ancient form of church-granted amnesty that critics deride as a shortcut to salvation. The door for indulgences is not always open, though, and for years after the Vatican Council reforms of the 1960s, they were rarely offered - until 2000, when Pope John Paul II started using them to attract pilgrims to World Youth Day. Today, Pope Benedict XVI put out the latest offer of indulgences, with two highly-detailed options. The harder way to get one, at least if you don’t live in southwestern France, involves making a pilgrimage to Lourdes, where the faithful believe that the Virgin Mary appeared to a teenage girl 18 times over a five-month span in 1858. The pilgrimage, which must be made in the next year, can be accomplished using Vatican charter flights that began over the summer. The easier way involves a tighter window of time - just nine days in February - but what will probably be a much shorter trip, to […]