As the Church begins a new liturgical year, the readings continue with the theme that characterized the end of the previous liturgical year, the Second Coming of Christ. We often associate the Season of Advent exclusively with the first coming of Christ in His Incarnation. This theme is taken up more intentionally in the final days of Advent, but it is the Second Coming of Christ that the Church invites us to reflect on with greater attention, for we do not know the day or the hour, thus the need to always be prepared. This has hit close to home over the past few weeks here at the Cathedral as we have had a larger number of parishioners and family members of parishioners who have passed away, some of them rather unexpectedly. We keep all of them and their families in our prayers in a special way.
As I mentioned in my article two weeks ago, we find ourselves in the final few paragraphs of Pope Benedict’s document on Christian Hope, Spe salvi. In the sadness of the loss of our loved ones, we look for that light of hope given to us in the promises of Jesus Christ who has conquered death through His death and Resurrection. In these final paragraphs, the Holy Father is reflecting on the Church’s doctrine on Purgatory, a topic which many shy away from as being something negative, but when we truly understand the beauty of this teaching, we cannot help but be buoyed up with hope.
In the previous paragraph, the pope noted the two extremes of where people can find themselves at the end of their lives as they stand before the judgment seat of Christ. On the one hand, there are those who are utterly pure, filled with love for God and neighbor, and free from any sin, they enter immediately into Heaven. On the other extreme, there are those who have definitively rejected God, lived for hatred and suppressed all love. They have consciously chosen in life to be apart from God, and after death, they remain in that condition they have freely chosen. But as the Holy Father notes: “Yet we know from experience that neither case is normal in human life.” (SS 46) He then offers the following explanation of what he (and really the Church) presumes for the majority of those people of faith who die in friendship with the Lord:
For the great majority of people—we may suppose—there remains in the depths of their being an ultimate interior openness to truth, to love, to God. In the concrete choices of life, however, it is covered over by ever new compromises with evil—much filth covers purity, but the thirst for purity remains and it still constantly re-emerges from all that is base and remains present in the soul. (ibid.)
He goes on to explain how the firm foundation of faith in Christ upon which these lives are built cannot be destroyed by death, giving a firm hope in the promise of sharing in the victory of Heaven. But those places of impurity need to be dealt with, and the pope appeals to the words of St. Paul who speaks of a sort of fire which burns away that which is not of God, so that souls can be fully pure and capable of being admitted into Heaven. This “fire” of purification after death is Purgatory. Though the image evokes fear and seems somehow at odds with a loving God, the Holy Father will explain in the next paragraph a way of understanding this fire in a way which is far more hopeful and consoling.