The dogma of purgatory can be confounding to both Catholics and Protestants. Just what is it?
Well, like heaven, like hell, like limbo and yes, like hell, our language can be confusing and often misleading.
Purgatory is often depicted as the faithful departed burning in a “good fire” although for me as a child, there was no good fire when you were being burned. It hurt and painfully so and could destroy your skin and everything else.
Of course, “fire” is a metaphor and in purgatory is meant to be positive, like an impure ore begin made into pure gold by fire. God knows that everyone one of us, save the Blessed Virgin Mary, have impurities within the gold that we are because we are created in the image and like of God.
Purgatory is the ante-room of heaven, thus a part of heaven. Maybe we could call it a decontamination chamber. Anyone in purgatory is redeemed already. It isn’t a second chance for unrepentant sinners with the possibility if you don’t repent, you’ll go to hell. Purgatory is a one way ticket to heaven.
How long, though, O Lord. We don’t know! We’re speaking about eternity here. Perhaps purgatory is the moment of our particular judgement when all justice and perfection is attained for the repentant sinner.
Even our particular judgement, though, is at the throne of justice and mercy, not vengeance.
The four last things are death, judgement, heaven and hell. If we die in the Lord, if we truly abhor our sins, even the ones we can’t conquer because they are so habitual, we can rest assured that if we seek forgiveness daily, live a sacramental life, to include penance, we can trust in Jesus’ Divine Mercy.
Perhaps the suffering of this life, the death we all will experience, some more painfully and tragic than others who seem to die so peacefully and the anticipation of judgement is the “suffering” of purgatory.
We do know, that if we find ourselves in heaven after having lived on earth, something is changed, we are made perfect, all of us. How that happens by God’s grace is a mystery. Is their pain involved. Yes, if this world is any sort of symbol of that. Do we remember the pain? No!
And hell? Yes it is a dogma and exists. It is for those who love their sin, hate God and have made a “full consent of the will decision, with forethought and planning” to exclude God from their lives and to love their sin and hate God and goodness.
They will love hell and thus experience the fulfillment of what they loved in their sins.
3 comments:
I think I've read just about every book on Purgatory that's in print, including the big black one by TAN books, but the one I would most heartily recommend is Hungry Souls by Gerard J.M. Van Den Aardweg. It has photos from Rome's "Museum of Purgatory" and some incredible testimonies as well as some solid explanations.
Purgatory has long held a fascination for me, probably because of an incident in the third grade when we heard the story of Our Lady of Fatima. My third grade teacher, a lovely nun who was the sweetest person and the best religion teacher I ever had, told us that one of the children (the seers) had a young cousin who died and when Lucia asked our Lady about her fate, she was told, "She is in Purgatory, where she will be until the end of the world." It horrified me to think that a mere CHILD could commit so many sins that she would be sentenced to such a long Purgatory!
The other reason I have kept up such an interest in Purgatory is because after about 1969, it seems like the Church just dropped it altogether and paid it minimal lip service every November 2. Imagine! One of the three branches of our Church hardly ever mentioned--thus hardly ever thought of at all! It's beyond criminal.
I am old and getting older. It is terrifying to think that I am going to be accountable not just for every idle word I've uttered, but EVERY IDLE THOUGHT. I try to remain in a state of grace, I confess with some regularity, but I know many of my sins are terrible. My only hope is that God's Mercy is infinite and exceeds the perfect demands of His Justice.
We should be mindful of Purgatory every day of our lives and offer some kind of prayer or sacrifice for these poor souls every chance we get.
Finally, I would recommend that interested readers look into the 12 Year Prayer Devotion of St. Brigid. She was given 7 prayers by Our Lord and was told to tell others to pray these prayers every day for 12 years. I started in 2017 and I don't know if I have 7 years left to complete them, but they have a wonderful set of Promises, including:
1. The soul who prays them will suffer no Purgatory.
2. The soul who prays them will be accepted among the Martyrs as though he had spilled his blood for his faith.
3. The soul who prays them can choose three others whom Jesus will then keep in a state of grace sufficient to become holy.
4. No one in the four successive generations of the soul who prays them will be lost.
5. The soul who prays them will be made conscious of his death one month in advance.
Here is the link:
https://www.theworkofgod.org/Devotns/bridget_12years.htm
Finally, I know this is the kind of devotion that makes the enlightened modernists who currently hold sway in our Church just cringe.
All the more reason to pray these prayers.
A true Ghost Story
Fr. Demetrius Augustine Gallitzin(now Servant of God), the “Apostle to the Alleghenies,” offered a firsthand account of the the below story. Fr. Gallitzin was no country bumpkin or easily impressed naïf: once he had been Prince Demetrius, a Russian aristocrat whose pedigree rivaled that of the Czar. His father, the Russian ambassador to Holland, was the close friend of Enlightenment thinkers Diderot and Voltaire. Prince Demetrius had future kings as playmates, and his tutors were elite European intellectuals.
But at age seventeen, Demetrius rejected rationalist atheism and embraced his mother’s Catholicism, taking the confirmation name of Augustine. Sent by his parents to travel the world as a prince, Demetrius horrified his father by obtaining permission from Bishop John Carroll to enter the new St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore.
The-truest-ghost-story-ever-told
In the comment above, that highlighted in blue at the bottom, is the link to click on for the story.
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