The
Reality of PurgatoryThe
Reality of Purgatory"There is a purgatory, a place of purging, My child--suffering great as in the abyss, but with the knowledge of a reprieve in time to come. It is a bleak longing of the spirit to look upon the Father. Know, My child, this longing of the heart in the fires is of great magnitude encompassing the being of the waiting soul." - Our Lady, March 29, 1975
"It is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from sins." - 2 Macchabees 12:46
The existence of purgatory is explicitly attested by Holy Scripture and by the constant tradition of the Jewish and Christian I Church. It is said in the books of Maccabees that it is a holy and I wholesome thought to pray for the dead, so that they may be freed from the faults and imperfections by which they sullied themselves in life: ut a peccatis solvantur. (Cf. 2 Macc. 12:46) Speaking of easygoing and presumptuous preachers who, in the exercise of their ministry, are led astray by love of praise and yield to thoughts of vanity and feelings of self-satisfaction, St. Paul says that they will be saved, but after having first been tried by fire: sic quasi per ignem. (Cf. 1 Cor. 15:32) St. Gregory teaches that souls guilty of trespasses for which they have not sufficiently atoned during their life will be baptized in fire: ab igne baptizabuntur. It will be their second baptism. The first is necessary in order to introduce us into the Church on earth, the second to introduce us into the Church in heaven.
According to St. Cyril and
In the Canon of the Mass, the Church offers her petitions to God in order to obtain for these souls locum lucis, a place of light: whence it follows that they are in the night, and enveloped in dense, impenetrable darkness. She seeks for them locum refrigerii, a place of refreshment; whence it follows that they are in intolerable, burning pain. Again, she asks for them locum pacis, a place of peace: whence it follows that they are consumed by fears and inexpressible anxieties.
This simple description makes our whole being shake with horror. Let us hasten to say that the consolations these captive souls experience are also inexpressible.
It is true that their eyes are not yet refreshed by the sight of the gentle light, and the angels do not descend from heaven to transform their flames into a refreshing dew; but they have the sweetest treasure, one that is enough by itself to raise up the man most despondent beneath the weight of his afflictions, and bring the dawn of calmness to the most doleful and dejected countenances: they possess the good that, on earth, is left to the most wretched and deprived of men, when he has drained the ever-filling cup of all afflictions and pains: they have hope. They possess hope in the highest order, in that degree which excludes all uncertainty and apprehension, which sets the heart at rest, in the deepest and most absolute security: "a merited crown awaits me." (2 Tim. 4:8)
These souls are assured of their salvation.
Now, the souls of whom I speak are not given up to despair, do not see the faces of the demons, do not hear their curses and blasphemies: from this fact, they infallibly conclude that they did not die in a state of mortal sin, but are in a state of grace and pleasing to God.
Also, what a source of happiness
it is for them to be able to exclaim with
Oh, no doubt this soul will exclaim: How sharp my pains are! Nothing can be compared with the violence of my punishment; but this punishment and these sufferings are powerless to take me away from God, to destroy the fire of His love within me: "Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Trial, or distress, or hunger?" (Rom. 8:35) Oh! My weakness is now no longer liable to reveal itself in outbursts of temper, in impatience and murmuring. Resigned to God's will and pleasure, I bless the hand that chastises me; I accept joyfully all my torments.
These torments cannot crush my soul or make it uneasy, bitter, or anxious: Non contristabit justum quidquid ei acciderit (Cf. Prov. 12:21). I know that they are ordained and moderated by that Divine Providence which, for the good of creatures, arranges all things with love and equity.
I will say more: I should prefer my torments to the delights of heaven, if it could be granted to me to enjoy them against the desire of that sovereign will to which I am henceforth absolutely and irrevocably subject. My wishes and aspirations are summed up in a single motto: "All that God wishes, as He wishes it, and at the time He wishes it." O God of my heart, my treasure and my all, what am I that Thou deign to come down to me and, with Thy paternal hand, purify an ungrateful and unfaithful soul!
Oh, cut deep into the flesh, drain the unimaginable cup of Thy torments! Listen only to Thy honor and the interest of Thy justice, and, until this is fully satisfied, pay no heed to either my groans or my complaints.
Poor souls! They have but one passion, one burning desire, one wish: to break the obstacle that prevents them from springing forward toward God, who calls them and draws them to Himself with all the energy and all the violence of His beauty, mercy, and boundless love.
Oh, if they could, they would willingly stir up the flames that consume them, and vie with one another in accumulating torment upon torment, purgatory upon purgatory, in order to hasten the happy day of their deliverance. In these souls there are residual traces of sin, an alloy of afflictions, blemishes, and defects that do not permit them to unite with the divine substance. Their imperfections, the venial faults with which they allowed themselves to be tarnished, have darkened and maimed their inner eye. If, before their complete purification, the bright, dazzling light of heaven met their sick, enfeebled eyes, they would feel an impression a thousand times more painful and burning than those they feel amidst the deepest darkness of the abyss. God Himself would like to transform them immediately into the likeness of His glory by illuminating them with the pure rays of His divinity; but these rays, being too bright and dazzling, could not penetrate them. They would be intercepted by the dross and the remains of that earthly dust and mire with which they are still sullied. It is essential that, having been cast into a consuming crucible, they should lay aside the rest of human imperfections, so that, from being like base, black carbon, they may emerge in the form of a precious, transparent crystal. They must be made subtle, purged of every admixture of shadow and darkness, and become capable of receiving, without opposition, the irradiations and splendors of divine glory that, flowing in superabundance within them, one day, will fill them, like a river without banks or bottom.
Imagine a person afflicted with
a hideous ailment that gnaws his flesh and makes him an object of ostracism and
disgust for those around him. The doctor, seeking to cure him, applies forceps
and fire unsparingly. With his terrible instrument, he probes to the very marrow
of the bones. He will attack the source and root of the disease in its innermost
depths. So violent are the convulsions of the patient that he nearly expires;
but, when the operation is over, he feels reborn, the disease has disappeared,
and he has recovered his beauty, youth, and vigor. Ah! Far from flying into a
rage with complaints and reproaches, he has no words or blessing great enough to
express his gratitude to the skilled man who, by making him suffer a thousand
woes, gave him the most precious of things: health and life.
So it is with the souls in purgatory. They quiver with
joy as they see their stains and filth vanish through the marvelous effect of
that reparatory punishment. Under the action of those purifying flames, their
more or less disfigured being is refreshed and restored. The fire itself,
St. John Chrysostom says, "The
man who is inflamed with the fire of divine love is as indifferent to glory and
ignominy as if he were alone and unseen on this earth. He spurns all
temptations. He is no more troubled by pincers, gridirons, or racks than if
these sufferings were endured in a body other than his own. What is full of
sweetness for the world has no attraction for him, no taste; he is no more
liable to be captivated by some evil attachment than is gold, seven times
tested, liable to be tarnished by rust. Such are, even on this earth, the
effects of divine love when it firmly takes hold of a soul."
Now, divine love acts upon the souls of whom I am speaking with all the greater force, in that, being separated from their bodies, deprived of all human consolations, and abandoned to a thousand martyrdoms, they are compelled to have recourse to God and to seek in Him alone all that they lack.
One of the greatest of their
sufferings is the knowledge that the pains they endure bring no benefit to them.
Night has come for them, when they can no longer labor or acquire anything: "The
night comes on when no one can work." (John 9:4) The time when man is able to
make satisfaction himself for his sins, accumulate merit, and increase his
heavenly crown ceases with death. The moment he enters the other life, every
human being receives the pronouncement of his eternal sentence.
His fate is immutably fixed, and
he no longer has the option of accomplishing good or bad works, for which he can
once more be answerable at God's tribunal Yet, if the souls in purgatory cannot
grow in holiness and amass new merits by their patience and resignation, they
nevertheless know that they can no longer lose merit, and, for them, it is a
sweet joy to suffer out of a free, altogether disinterested, love.
Without doubt this peculiar
mixture of happiness amidst the most cruel torments is a state our dull minds
cannot comprehend; but ask the martyrs: the Teresas, the Lucians, the celestial
lovers of the Cross. They will tell you that, most often, it is in sorrow and
amidst afflictions and the most cruel spiritual desolations that he who seeks to
live in God alone experiences a kind of foretaste of paradise, and feels the
sweetest and most exhilarating joys and delights pour into his heart.
The souls in purgatory love God; furthermore, they are loved by the churches of heaven and earth, who maintain continuous contact and relations with them. The Catholic Church appeals to the charity of her children, and, through their mediation, lavishes her petitions and aid upon them day and night. Every moment the charity of the good angels bestows upon them the heavenly dew that the good Jesus sends down from His Heart. They love one another, and console each other by ineffable conversations.
No unfathomable gulf separates these souls and their friends on earth, and we are free at every moment to bring them that drop of water which the rich fool sought in vain from the pity of Lazarus. (Luke 16:24)
***
The Catholic Church has made no declaration on the location of purgatory. Different opinions have been expressed on this point by the Doctors and Fathers, and we are free to choose any of them without lacking in orthodoxy or departing from the true Faith.
Likewise, these words from Revelation: "But no one in
heaven or on earth or under the earth could be found to open the scroll
or examine its contents." (Rev. 5:3) From these words of
In fact, if the Patriarchs and the just of the Old
Testament, once purified of all their actual sins, had the lower regions of the
earth as their abode until the day when the sin transmitted to our race by Adam
had been completely erased on the Cross, it seems the more fitting that souls
guilty of actual sins for which they have not sufficiently atoned should be
punished and detained in the depths of the earth: Inferiores partes terrae.
The testimony of St. Augustine
adds a further degree of probability to this opinion: in his Epistle XCIX, ad
Evodium, he states that, when Christ descended into hell, He went not only
to limbo but also to purgatory, where He delivered some of the captive souls, as
seems to be indicated in the Acts of the Apostles: Solutis
doloribus inferni.
(Cf. Acts 2:24)
The second opinion concerning the location of purgatory
is shared by St. Victor and by St. Gregory the Great in his
Dialogues. Both maintain that
purgatory is not a fixed place, and that a large number of deceased souls atone
for their faults on earth, and in the same places where they sinned the most
frequently.
Sacred theology reconciles these different testimonies by establishing, first, that purgatory is a fixed place, with given bounds, situated at the center of the earth, where the majority of souls go in order to atone for the faults by which they were sullied.
Nevertheless, purgatory is not restricted to this one single place. Whether by reason of the gravity of their sins or through a special dispensation of divine wisdom, there are a considerable number of other souls who do not languish in that prison, but undergo their punishment on earth, and in that place where they had sinned. This interpretation, which comes from great theologians, explains and confirms a multitude of apparitions and revelations made to the saints, several of them having marks of truth that make it impossible to dismiss them.
In order fully to elucidate our doctrine, we shall select, among all the revelations quoted by St. Gregory in his Dialogues, those of which the authenticity is beyond all question.
In the annals of Citeaux, it is related that a pilgrim
from the district of Rodez, returning from
Directives from Heaven
Revised:
March 13, 2018
