The Church wants to promote salutary spiritual practices and devotions, and for that reason she adds the ‘incentive’ of an indulgence to something we should be doing anyway.
The Church distinguishes between partial and plenary indulgences, which bear on the remission of temporal punishment due to our sins. Four practices are specifically promoted for our own welfare: recitation of the Rosary in family, a half hour of adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, the Stations of the Cross, and a half hour of reading of Sacred Scripture. Each practice merits a plenary indulgence.
Five conditions are required for gaining the plenary indulgence: 1. pray the rosary in family or...; 2. Mass and Communion that week; 3. Confession that week; 4. pray for the Pope; and finally, the clincher is 5. be completely detached from any desire to sin.
By Father Rocky Hoffman