A note on faculties
The Office
We sell remissions for small faults. Who authorizes this is a longer letter than we can print on the wrapping.
Discount Indulgences is the public counter of the Office of Temporal Offerings. We concern ourselves with non-serious transgressions: the domestic, the digital, the social, the table, and the minor discourtesies of transit. Mortal questions, doctrinal questions, and anything involving a lawyer are outside the catalogue.
By what right
The instruments sold here are issued under faculties presently in force. The See that granted them — if See is even the word — has asked not to be named in the circulars. Some correspondents have suggested a city of some antiquity. Others have suggested a rented room with excellent letterhead. We can confirm only that the stationery arrives already franked, and that our replies are sometimes answered.
We do not claim episcopal standing. We do not deny it with any particular energy. If a more regular authority should write to us, we will of course place the letter in the tray marked Pending.
What is sold
Each indulgence is a printed instrument, written in the old style, describing a petty fault and declaring it remitted insofar as anyone later agrees we were entitled to say so. Photographs of the papers will be shown when the illuminator returns. Until then you must take the prose as the likeness.
Rates begin at $19.99 and climb, according to the gravity of the petty. Conveyance of the packet is additional. Rates are discounted from an older tariff we no longer display, on the grounds that it made people melancholy.
What is not sold
Absolution of a serious kind. Advice. Membership. A seat at any table we cannot point to. The satisfaction of having actually washed the dishes.
This Office is a satire that keeps a straight face. The footer on every page is the one true rubric.