Two weeks ago, we had the opportunity to celebrate the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed, better known as All Souls Day. Though Catholics are familiar with the existence of All Souls Day, many who only who go to Mass once a week do not observe it liturgically since it only falls on a Sunday every handful of years, as it did this year. Our wider exposure to this important celebration brought to our attention the Church’s beautiful, though often misunderstood, doctrine of Purgatory.
Over the next few paragraphs of Spe salvi¸ Pope Benedict offers some helpful theological considerations on this topic. During this month of November, during which the Church invites us to have a special care for the souls in Purgatory by praying for them, it is fitting for us to have this as the topic for our consideration as this document on Christian hope comes to an end. In paragraph 45, the Holy Father begins his reflections on Purgatory by acknowledging the belief by the Jewish people in an “intermediate state” between death and Resurrection. This is seen especially in Jesus’s use of the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus in Luke 16:19-31, which we heard at the end of September for the 26th Sunday in Ordinary Time. The pope writes:
This early Jewish idea of an intermediate state includes the view that these souls are not simply in a sort of temporary custody but, as the parable of the rich man illustrates, are already being punished or are experiencing a provisional form of bliss. There is also the idea that this state can involve purification and healing which mature the soul for communion with God. (SS 45)
He then explains how this Jewish belief was taken up by the early Church “and in the Western Church they gradually developed into the doctrine of Purgatory.” (ibid.) Not feeling it necessary to examine the complex historical development of this doctrine, the Holy Father offers a succinct explanation of what we believe regarding the judgment we all undergo at the moment of death, which will set up a more fruitful conversation about Purgatory:
With death, our life-choice becomes definitive—our life stands before the judge. Our choice, which in the course of an entire life takes on a certain shape, can have a variety of forms. There can be people who have totally destroyed their desire for truth and readiness to love, people for whom everything has become a lie, people who have lived for hatred and have suppressed all love within themselves. This is a terrifying thought, but alarming profiles of this type can be seen in certain figures of our own history. In such people all would be beyond remedy and the destruction of good would be irrevocable: this is what we mean by the word Hell. On the other hand there can be people who are utterly pure, completely permeated by God, and thus fully open to their neighbours—people for whom communion with God even now gives direction to their entire being and whose journey towards God only brings to fulfilment what they already are. (ibid.)
The pope begins the next paragraph with this following important assessment: “Yet we know from experience that neither case is normal in human life.” (SS 46) That paves the way for a consideration of Purgatory, to which we will return in two weeks.