A Purgatory of Purgatory?
The word “purgatory” evokes in the mind of many Catholics a place of torment, a painful place of waiting where those who are already saved, yet not totally, await their time to enter “heaven.” Meanwhile, they suffer all kinds of trouble.
It happened with purgatory the same as it happened with hell. These absurd representations were accumulated in the popular tradition, which are unworthy of the faith in a God who is love, and improper to Christian hope.
To a certain point, purgatory is imagined as an immense chamber of torture wherein the souls, according to their sins, are subjected to a cold glacier, or submerged in big receptacles of fused metal, or in a lake of boiling oil or an ocean of flames, from which heads and lifted arms emerge in a desperate gesture of pain and supplication.
Some theologians affirmed that the demons, with permission from God, visited them to torment them with innumerable ordeals. In the 13th century, St. Thomas of Aquinas taught that purgatory was very near hell, and the fire that tortured those in hell served to purify the souls in purgatory.
In Rome, way back in time, there was a “Museum of Purgatory” in the Church of the Sacred Heart of Suffrage. There, the visitors were shown a dozen hands and marks of fire in woods, tapestries, pillows, engraved by the souls in purgatory that appeared to prevent the faithful from going near the place of suffering.
What We Should Not Believe
There were worse things. Some devotional books came out with lists of sins with their respective duration of punishment in purgatory, as if the time beyond is measurable in terms of years, months and weeks.
The Church rejected these allusions. In the 16th century, the Council of Trent issued a decree which prohibited additions of secondary and useless questions to the doctrine of purgatory, in order that the faith of simple people may not be perturbed. After some time, the Roman Museum with its macabre stories from beyond was closed by order of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith.
The theologians, beginning with the Bible, have tried to portray a better image of “purgatory” and its relation with the authentic God of our salvation. Let us look at the true teaching of the Church on this theme.
Does Purgatory Appear in the Bible?
Since Luther separated from the Church in the 16th century and declared that “the existence of purgatory cannot be proven by Sacred Scriptures,” the Catholic Church made efforts to search for evidence in biblical texts to prove its existence to the Protestants. In this dispute, many abuses were committed.
For example, Matthew 12:32 was cited as a proof: “Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this world or in the other.” And it was argued: if Jesus made certain that there are sins that cannot be forgiven in the other world, it is because others can be forgiven there. Therefore, purgatory exists.
This interpretation does not take the phrase, “either in this world or in the other” in the Semitic mentality, where citing the two extremes is to mean “never.” The phrase wants to say that the sins against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven. It does not pretend to make any affirmation on purgatory.
How Could the Maccabeans Know About It?
Another classical text in favor of purgatory is 2 Maccabees 12:38-46. There it says that in the year 160 BCE, in a battle against the Syrians, many Jewish soldiers died. When the dead bodies were about to be buried, it was found that they had amulets and talismans hanging beneath their clothes, which were prohibited by God. With this violation, Judas the Maccabean gathered the rest of the soldiers and ordered them to offer a sacrifice for the sins of the dead soldiers in the temple of Jerusalem to invoke God’s forgiveness so that they could enjoy the resurrection.
It was interpreted that the dead soldiers committed a “light sin,” and so they were not “in hell.” Neither were they in heaven, otherwise they would not have offered a sacrifice for them. Judas the Maccabean assumed them to be in purgatory and for this, he ordered the soldiers to offer a sacrifice for them.
Such an interpretation is anachronic. In the 2nd century BCE, the Jews did not yet believe in a state of purification after death. How could Judas the Maccabean have assumed it? Considering the mentality of the epoch, the correct interpretation was that the sin committed by the soldiers was truly grave, nothing less than idolatry, which was severely prohibited by God. But such a sin was pardoned in life with a sacrifice called Kippur which was done in the Temple (Lev 4 and 5). The dead soldiers could not go to the Temple to offer the sacrifice for their sins. Therefore Judas ordered that their companions offer it for them. This started the solidarity between the living and the dead. But the sin of the soldiers, according to Judas, was forgiven by the Kippur, not in purgatory, of which they absolutely knew nothing about.
How About St. Paul?
The most quoted biblical text in favor of purgatory is 1 Cor 3:10-17. Paul, writing to the Corinthians, divided the preachers of the gospels into three categories: those who used good materials in their construction (v. 14), those who destroyed what was built (v. 17), and those who have been mediocre in their choice of construction materials. Talking of the last category he says: “if the work is burned, the builders will suffer loss; the builder will be saved, but only through fire” (v. 15). It is the third category that caught the attention of the commentators, who asserted that “through fire” implied the doctrine purgatory.
The passage is nothing more than a simple allegory of a house that has been set on fire. The fire was given a figurative value. It means that the faithful with less fervor can also be saved, but with much fatigue and pain. Paul refers to the effort that the mediocre must exert in order to be saved. He does not present a theme on purgatory, nor mentions it in his letters.
Why Do Catholics Believe in Purgatory?
While the Bible clearly mentions heaven and hell, it does not say any explicit word on an intermediary state of purification. For this, the Protestants reject the Catholic doctrine on purgatory. Why then do the Catholics believe in this?
That the Bible does not mention it, does not mean that purgatory has no foundation at all. On the contrary, the Catholic Church bases its existence in the Bible, not in a concrete and particular text, but on two general ideas that clearly appeared repeatedly in the Bible. They serve as the nucleus of this teaching.
The first is the conviction that one can enter into the presence of God only with an absolute purity. Nothing that has even a minor defect can appear before God’s glory. Based on this conviction, the Israelites had a complicated purification ceremony in the Temple to avoid anything impure from being presented before Yahweh. And Jesus affirmed this idea, when he said: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Mt 5:8); or “Be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt 5:48). The book of Revelation teaches that at the end of time, in the heavenly Jerusalem, “nothing contaminated will be able to enter it” (Rev 21:27).
The second biblical idea is the more important. In the other life, God “will give to each one according to his deeds” (Rom 2:6). It is evident that death classifies human beings into distinct levels of perfection, according to their use of freedom and how they served their neighbors. And those who have not reached fullness at the moment of death will not be able to have an “immediate” entrance into the presence of God. Consequently, they will have to pass through a stage of purification.
The Meaning of Purgatory
Having said this, we now explain the meaning of purgatory.
Every one comes to this world with a mission. Its concretization will depend on our acts of love, our service and solidarity, our capacity for renunciation, our work for the well-being of others. God has given us, at the moment of conception, potentials and capacities which we can put into practice in our entire life.
Not all human beings maximize their capacities. Not all draw out the best of what they have to offer to others. They do not utilize the potentials God has given them to accomplish before death, their project of love for the world. This is why many do not reach the end of their lives as fully mature people. They have an unfinished agenda. Death comes unexpectedly in the midst of many incomplete tasks in life. And there is no telling at what age one will die. When people die at a young age, the little time that they had can be sufficient to accomplish their project of love, and achieve an interior maturity and perfection that God expects from them. All people must therefore use their possibilities to develop the interior life.
How Long It Lasts
What happens when people arrive at the end of their life with their possibilities intact, their potentials, undeveloped? Incomplete people with insufficient maturity cannot enter the presence of God.
It is only with Christ’s grace and love that any person comes to an encounter with Him. A gaze that penetrates into the innermost part of the human existence can facilitate a painful process—painful as all process for maturity are—for a person to actualize all his possibilities to fullness. This gaze is the “place” which we call purgatory.
We could say that incompleteness in the presence of Christ will be painful. It will be painful for persons to undo, instantaneously, all the wrong choices made during life with their sins. Seeing himself lacking will produce a pain, and this grief will purge his faults. This is the pain of purgatory, but it has nothing to do with the supposed “fire that burns the souls” of those who go there, as has frequently been said.
Therefore we have to dispel the famous error of its duration. After death, time does not exist. Purgatory cannot “last” for months or years, as it was thought. It is hardly an instant, a prompt moment in which God concedes the ultimate grace to the human person to help them overcome their egoism and the deficiencies of their life. It is a profound human process that does not happen in time because it is already in eternity.
Is it a Dogma of Faith?
Since the first century, the Fathers have taught the existence of a state of purification after death. In the middle of the 3rd century, they tried to determine more precisely what it was. In the 11th century, this process of purification was, for the first time, given the name “purgatory.” In 1254, Pope Innocent IV was the first to officially talk about the theme and incorporate the word into the ecclesiastical magisterium. Later the word referred to a designated “place,” a place of torment.
But it was not a dogma of faith. It came to be a dogmatic question in the Council of Florence. This assembly was inaugurated on the 26th of February, 1439 with the participation of 115 bishops. There were long debates on the theme. On July 6, 1439, they solemnly promulgated a decree called Laetentur Caeli, declaring the existence of purgatory as a dogma of faith for all Catholics.
What is it really that Catholics should believe about purgatory? Three things were defined by the Council: a) that purgatory exists; b) that it is not a “place” but a state, where the dead are purified; c) that the living can help the dead by means of prayers. These three things, and only these, form part of the dogma on purgatory.
Do We Need to Pray for the People There?
If purgatory lasts only for an instant, is it sensible to pray for the dead and offer Mass for them? Will they have not passed from that place? If purgatory occurs in a second, like the passing from this world to the other, are novena prayers and Catholic practices as anniversary commemorations of value? Of course these have value. As we are immersed in time, we remember the “dead” as we continue living. And in this time we pray especially for them, so that God may accelerate their process of maturity. But God, who is in eternity, sees as actual the prayers that we will be saying in the future. In consideration to all the prayers and Masses we offer for our dead, God may already apply them instantly upon the dead. Our acts of love can help them even after death. We can invest our prayers in their favor. And by our act of love, God may fill up what is lacking in theirs.
For this, the Church has maintained the old custom of praying for the dead. Much importance has been given to it. A certain moment at Mass has been reserved exclusively for the dead where we ask that God may “admit them to contemplate the light of His face.”
The Joy of Being in Purgatory
We were accustomed to see purgatory as a divine punishment for sinful people, a kind of a “hell with an exit.” It is not like this. In reality, purgatory is a grace from God. It is an ultimate grace conceded to people to be purified for a vision to be with God. It is the moment when human persons are completely transformed so they can look at God face to face and give themselves to Him in an eternal embrace. During the Mass, it is not said that the faithful in purgatory are tormented, but that “they sleep in peace.”
St. Catherine of Genova had a reason when she wrote: “There is no joy compared to those who are in purgatory, except for the saints in heaven. This state should be desired more than feared, because its flames are flames of immense love and longing.” How far are we in the 21st century to be able to reach that intuition of the 15th century!
Purgatory is a splendid doctrine of hope and of Christian solidarity. It teaches that death does not end the relationship between people. The people in purgatory can be helped by acts of love, as they themselves did while on earth.
Purgatory is the cry of humans, that love is stronger than death.
