Whatever Happened to Purgatory?!

The 4 minute special is back – so check your watches and keep me honest!

The topic this weekend is Purgatory. For those of us from an older generation, the question we may be asking is “whatever happened to Purgatory?” those from a younger generation may be asking “What’s Purgatory!?” - Purgatory is the Catholic Christian belief that affirms a transitional spiritual stage after death that, if it’s necessary, gets us ready for the fullness of God’s presence and kingdom.

When I was growing up the general opinion was that when we die, most of us won’t be bad enough to go to hell or good enough to get into heaven, so Purgatory provides a space to work out the rough edges and serves as a kind of “Catholic safety net” or “Christian finishing school” and we would pray regularly to help our deceased friends and relatives to graduate quickly.

Now here’s what’s happened to our belief in Purgatory. Not all, but a great many Catholics have figured out that while the basic belief in the need to be made ready to meet our God is rooted in both scripture and common sense, our way of imagining Purgatory, our descriptions, our images and much of our way of thinking about Purgatory does not come from our faith or from our Church but from poets like Dante and artists like Michelangelo, who with their dramatic and medieval flair end up giving us the image of having to “do time” in a fiery prison, and the impression of our God acting like a punitive warden rather than the loving God revealed by Jesus.

When it comes to that final “getting ready” which is really accomplished by the loving grace of God – the new Catholic Catechism was careful to remove any dramatic descriptions and even deleted the word “painful” from its original draft; when it comes to the amount of time to be spent in detention, many modern scholars suggest that our Purgatory, or getting ready, may well be instantaneous, or that it coincides with the moment of death.

But have you noticed we Catholics still pray for the dead – why is that – I don’t think it’s really to get our loved ones an early pardon from purgatory or to help them escape from a divine “lock up.”

1. Praying for the dead is a Catholic way of saying that their life goes on;
2. Praying for the dead witnesses to a communion and solidarity – that we continue to gently hold on to one another even after death by faith and by prayer;
3. Praying for the dead is both a human and Christian way of saying “we do not forget,” “we will not forget;”
4. And, finally if our day to day experience of life is any indication, whether before or after death, there is constant change, growth, ongoing dynamic blossoming – so we pray that our loved ones may continue to grow and to advance in bliss and in joy until one day, with their rough edges gone and our rough edges made smooth, we will all meet again.

Our belief in Purgatory and prayer for the dead remains; but for most of us, our feeling for and understanding of Purgatory has changed a great deal and that’s what’s happened to Purgatory.