Q. I have a non-Catholic friend who doesn’t understand our belief about Purgatory. Can you provide me with a good explanation to pass on to him? — J.M., Missouri.
A. First of all, what do we mean by Purgatory? It is a place or state where persons who died in God’s friendship are detained for a time before going to Heaven. They will eventually go to Heaven, but they will have to undergo a period of purification because of unforgiven venial sins on their soul or because they had not made up completely for the temporal punishment due from mortal sins that had been forgiven.
For example, a person who had been in serious sin, but repented and received forgiveness just before death, would not be holy enough to go right to Heaven, but would need to atone after his death for the sinful deeds committed in his life. Or perhaps a person had no mortal sins on her soul before she died, but she had still engaged in lesser sins, such as carelessly misusing the name of Jesus or gossiping about other people or failing to pray every day.
Jesus may have been thinking of people like this when He said in Matt. 12:32 that “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 age or in the age to come.” Persons in Heaven don’t need forgiveness in the age to come, and those in Hell cannot get forgiveness, so Jesus must have been talking about Purgatory. As He also was in Matt. 5:26 when He talked about persons in prison who will not be released “until you have paid the last penny,” that is, paid the punishment attached to their sins.
It’s similar to removing nails from a board, with the nails representing our sins. The removal of the nails means that our sins have been forgiven, but the holes in the board still have to be filled in. We fill in those holes and make up for our sins by prayer, fasting, penance, and good deeds, but if we don’t do enough in this life to make up for our sins, then we will have to make up for them in Purgatory because, as the Book of Revelation tells us, no unclean person can enter Heaven and see God (21:27).
Second, there are two kinds of suffering in Purgatory: the pain of loss and the pain of sense. Pain of loss means the person can clearly see that their suffering could have been avoided, and they could be in Heaven already, if only they had prayed more and done enough penance during their life. Pain of sense means experiencing some kind of fire, nowhere near the eternal fire of Hell, but painful nevertheless.
In his 2007 encyclical on Christian hope (Spe Salvi), Pope Benedict XVI said it is possible that “the fire which both burns and saves is Christ Himself, the Judge and Savior. The encounter with Him is the decisive act of judgment. Before His gaze all falsehood melts away. . . . In the pain of this encounter, when the impurity and sickness of our lives becomes evident to us, there lies salvation. His gaze, the touch of His heart, heals us through an undeniably painful transformation ‘as through fire’ [1 Cor. 3:15]. But it is a blessed pain, in which the holy power of His love sears through us like a flame, enabling us to become totally ourselves and thus totally of God” (n. 47).
Third, we pray for the souls in Purgatory because they cannot pray for themselves and cannot get to Heaven without our prayers. Don’t believe those priests who say at funerals that so-and-so is in Heaven, when they cannot know that and when all the prayers of the Mass say no such thing. We can pray for the holy souls all day long. Every time we go by a cemetery, we can say a prayer for the souls in Purgatory. Every time we hear that someone has died, perhaps in an earthquake or a hurricane, we can pray for their souls and the souls of all the “faithful departed.”
That is the phrase the Church uses — the faithful departed. There is no point in praying for those who were not faithful to God when they died because they are in Hell. When we pray for those whose obituaries are in the newspaper, we have no way of knowing if they were faithful to God or not. But we should pray for them anyway and leave it up to God to apply our prayers where they are most needed.
Fourth, we also should have Masses said for departed loved ones. That’s what you see in parish bulletins every week, the names of people whose family or friends loved them enough to want to help them get to Heaven, if they are not already there. Our parents or grandparents may have died many years ago, and we hope they are in Heaven. But we don’t know that, so we pray for them every day. If they are in Heaven, then God will apply our prayers and the Masses we have said for them to someone else who needs those prayers.
Make it part of your daily routine to say this prayer: “May the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.”
Q. I have had priests tell me that while they believe in Hell, they don’t believe anyone is in Hell, except for Satan and the fallen angels. How would you respond to this? — M.E.W., Massachusetts.
A. We would start by reminding these priests that Jesus talked more about Hell than about Heaven, using the word “Gehenna” to refer to the “unquenchable fire” (Mark 9:43) and “the fiery furnace, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth” (Matt. 13:41-42). Speaking of the Last Judgment, Jesus warned that those who did not help the least of His brothers and sisters will be told, “‘Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels’” (Matt. 25:41). That sounds to us like there will be persons in Hell.
Second, we would note that the Catechism of the Catholic Church states explicitly that “to die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God’s merciful love means remaining separated from him forever by our own free choice. This state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed is called ‘hell’” (n. 1033). The Catechism also says that “the teaching of the Church affirms the existence of hell and its eternity” (n. 1035), and that those who fail to tell their people about the warnings of Sacred Scripture and the Church neglect to inform them about what the Catechism describes as “an urgent call to conversion” (n. 1036).
Third, without knowing for certain who is in Hell (there is always the possibility of repentance at the end), may we suggest some likely candidates for the “fiery furnace”? How about those dictators who have murdered untold numbers of their subjects, men, women, and children?. We know, for example, that King Herod ordered the execution of boys under age two in the region of Bethlehem in an effort to kill Jesus. We know, too, that this same man, wanting there to be tears of sorrow and not joy when he died, summoned many prominent Jews to Jericho shortly before he died and ordered his soldiers to slaughter all of them after his death.
How about many modern-day Herods, from Lenin to Stalin to Hitler to Mao, who were responsible for the murders of tens of millions? How likely is it that they repented before the end? What about those doctors who have murdered millions of unborn babies, some of whom have shown no remorse? What about the terrorists who have murdered thousands of innocent people? Can there be a place in Heaven for them? Not only did they end many lives, but they deprived their victims of the chance to repent for their own sins.
How about those who traffic in drugs or in young children and consciously and deliberately ruin young lives? Can there a place hot enough for these monsters in Hell?
We know that Our Lady of Fatima showed the three children a vision of Hell with demons and souls in human form shrieking and groaning as they floated in a sea of fire. “You have seen Hell where the souls of poor sinners go,” said our Lady. “To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace.” After this scary vision, our Lady taught the children a prayer to be said at the end of each decade of the rosary: “O my Jesus, forgive us our sins. Save us from the fire of Hell. Lead all souls to Heaven, especially those in most need of thy mercy.”
Similar horrifying visions were given to St. Teresa and St. Faustina. They did not report their relief that no souls were in Hell. On the contrary, St. Faustina said, “I am writing this at the command of God, so that no soul may find an excuse by saying there is no Hell, or that nobody has ever been there and so no one can say what it is like.”
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