Purgatory

Purgatory is the state of purification that those who die in the friendship of God without yet being fully purified pass through after death. Their salvation is secured: they will enter heaven with certainty. Before seeing God face to face, it remains for them to finish purifying themselves of all that, in them, is not yet fully turned toward him.

The fault and the penalty

Where does this need for purification come from? Every sin wounds twice: it offends God, and it leaves in man a mark, a disordered attachment to created things. When sin is forgiven, the offense is remitted, and with it the eternal penalty, the separation from God. There often remains a temporal penalty: a debt to be acquitted, the time it takes for God's love to finish straightening in us what sin had bent. This debt is paid here below, by penance and the works of charity; what has not been acquitted before death is acquitted in purgatory. “You will not come out of there until you have paid the last penny.” Matthew 5:26

What Scripture attests

Scripture shows that one can pray for the dead and that this prayer profits them. In the time of the Maccabees, Judas has a sacrifice offered for the fallen soldiers: “It is a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from their sins.” 2 Maccabees 12:46 Such a prayer would be vain for the blessed, who have no need of it, and for the damned, whom no one can succor: it supposes a third state, where the soul purifies itself. Saint Paul evokes it as a passage through fire: “He will suffer loss, but he himself will be saved, but as through fire.” 1 Corinthians 3:15 And Jesus suggests that certain faults can be remitted beyond death: “It will not be forgiven him, neither in this age nor in the age to come.” Matthew 12:32

A suffering in hope

The purification of purgatory is real and painful: the soul suffers there from being still held far from the God it loves and desires with all its strength. This suffering is wholly inhabited by hope, for these souls know that they are saved and that their waiting has a term. This fire purifies like gold in the crucible: it consumes what remains impure to make the soul worthy of the full light. The state is transitory; it will end, and all these souls will see God.

We can help them

The souls of purgatory can no longer merit for themselves, but we, the living, can relieve them and hasten their deliverance. This is the sense of suffrages: prayer, almsgiving, penance offered for their intention, and above all the sacrifice of the Mass, where the Cross of Christ is made present for them. In this we live the communion of saints: the Church of earth comes to the aid of the Church that purifies itself, in the one charity that links all the members of Christ.