ELUSIYAN ‘TOLULOPE FRANCIS
INTRODUCTION
The Catechism
of the Catholic Church defines purgatory as a "purification, so as to
achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven," which is
experienced by those "who die in God’s grace and friendship, but still imperfectly
purified" (CCC 1030). It notes that "this final purification of the
elect is entirely different from the punishment of the damned" (CCC
1031).
The
purification is necessary because, as Scripture teaches, nothing unclean will
enter the presence of God in heaven (Rev. 21:27) and, while we may die with our
mortal sins forgiven, there can still be many impurities in us, specifically
venial sins and the temporal punishment due to sins already forgiven.
TWO JUDGEMENTS
When we
die, we undergo what is called the particular, or individual, judgment.
Scripture says that "it is appointed for men to die once, and after that
comes judgment" (Heb. 9:27). We are judged instantly and receive our
reward, for good or ill. We know at once what our final destiny will be. At the
end of time, when Jesus returns, there will come the general judgment to which
the Bible refers, for example, in Matthew 25:31-32: "When the Son of man
comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious
throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate them
one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats." In
this general judgment all our sins will be publicly revealed (Luke
12:2–5).
In his
book The City of God, Augustine said that "temporary punishments
are suffered by some in this life only, by others after death, by others both
now and then; but all of them before that last and strictest judgment"
(21:13). It is between the particular and general judgments, then, that the
soul is purified of the remaining consequences of sin: "I tell you, you
will never get out till you have paid the very last copper" (Luke
12:59).
MONEY, MONEY, MONEY
One
argument anti-Catholics often use to attack purgatory is the idea that the Catholic
Church makes money from promulgating the doctrine. Without purgatory, the claim
asserts, the Church would go broke. Any number of anti-Catholic books claim the
Church owes the majority of its wealth to this doctrine. But the numbers just
don’t add up.
When a
Catholic requests a memorial Mass for the dead; that is, a Mass said for the benefit
of someone in purgatory; it is customary to give the parish priest a stipend,
on the principles that the laborer is worth his hire (Luke 10:7) and that those
who preside at the altar share the altar’s offerings (1 Cor. 9:13–14). In the
United States, a stipend is commonly around five dollars; but the indigent do
not have to pay anything. A few people, of course, freely offer more. This
money goes to the parish priest, and priests are only allowed to receive one
such stipend per day. No one gets rich on five dollars a day, and certainly not
the Church, which does not receive the money anyway.
But look
at what happens on a Sunday. There are often hundreds of people at Mass. In a
crowded parish, there may be thousands. Many families and individuals deposit
five dollars or more into the collection basket; others deposit less. A few
give much more. A parish might have four or five or six Masses on a Sunday. The
total from the Sunday collections far surpasses the paltry amount received from
the memorial Masses.
A CATHOLIC ‘INVENTION’
Fundamentalists
may be fond of saying the Catholic Church "invented" the doctrine of
purgatory to make money, but they have difficulty saying just when. Most
professional anti-Catholics, the ones who make their living attacking
"Romanism", seem to place the blame on Pope Gregory the Great, who
reigned from A.D. 590 to 604.
But that
hardly accounts for the request of Monica, mother of Augustine, who asked her
son, in the fourth century, to remember her soul in his Masses. This would make
no sense if she thought her soul would not benefit from prayers, as would be
the case if she were in hell or in the full glory of heaven.
Nor does
ascribing the doctrine to Gregory explain the graffiti in the catacombs, where
Christians during the persecutions of the first three centuries recorded
prayers for the dead. Indeed, some of the earliest Christian writings outside
the New Testament, like the Acts of Paul and Thecla and
the Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicity (both written during
the second century), refer to the Christian practice of praying for the dead.
Such prayers would have been offered only if Christians believed in purgatory,
even if they did not use that name for it. (See Catholic Answers’ Fathers Know
Best tract The Existence of Purgatory for quotations from
these and other early Christian sources.)
WHY NO PROTESTS?
Whenever a
date is set for the "invention" of purgatory, you can point to
historical evidence to show the doctrine was in existence before that date.
Besides, if at some point the doctrine was pulled out of a clerical hat, why
does ecclesiastical history record no protest against it?
A study of
the history of doctrines indicates that Christians in the first centuries were
up in arms (sometimes quite literally) if anyone suggested the least change in
beliefs. They were extremely conservative people who tested a doctrine’s truth
by asking, was this believed by our ancestors? Was it handed on from the
apostles? Surely belief in purgatory would be considered a great change, if it
had not been believed from the first. so where are the records of
protests?
They don’t
exist. There is no hint at all, in the oldest writings available to us (or in
later ones, for that matter), that "true believers" in the immediate
post-apostolic years spoke of purgatory as a novel doctrine. They must have
understood that the oral teaching of the apostles, what Catholics call tradition
and the Bible not only failed to contradict the doctrine, but, in fact,
confirmed it.
It is no
wonder, then, that those who deny the existence of purgatory tend to touch upon
only briefly the history of the belief. They prefer to claim that the Bible
speaks only of heaven and hell. Wrong. It speaks plainly of a third condition,
commonly called the limbo of the Fathers, where the just who had died before
the redemption were waiting for heaven to be opened to them. After his death
and before his resurrection, Christ visited those experiencing the limbo of the
Fathers and preached to them the good news that heaven would now be opened to
them (1 Pet. 3:19). These people thus were not in heaven, but neither were they
experiencing the torments of hell.
Some have
speculated that the limbo of the Fathers is the same as purgatory. This may or
may not be the case. However, even if the limbo of the Fathers is not
purgatory, its existence shows that a temporary, intermediate state is not
contrary to Scripture. Look at it this way. If the limbo of the Fathers was
purgatory, then this one verse directly teaches the existence of purgatory. If
the limbo of the Fathers was a different temporary state, then the Bible at
least says such a state can exist. It proves there can be more than just heaven
and hell.
‘PURGATORY NOT IN SCRIPTURE’
Some
Fundamentalists also charge, as though it actually proved something, "The
word purgatory is nowhere found in Scripture." This is true, and yet it
does not disprove the existence of purgatory or the fact that belief in it has
always been part of Church teaching. The words Trinity and Incarnation aren’t
in Scripture either, yet those doctrines are clearly taught in it. Likewise,
Scripture teaches that purgatory exists, even if it doesn’t use that word and
even if 1 Peter 3:19 refers to a place other than purgatory.
Christ
refers to the sinner who "will not be forgiven, either in this age or in
the age to come" (Matt. 12:32), suggesting that one can be freed after
death of the consequences of one’s sins. Similarly, Paul tells us that, when we
are judged, each man’s work will be tried. And what happens if a righteous
man’s work fails the test? "He will suffer loss, though he himself will be
saved, but only as through fire" (1 Cor 3:15). Now this loss, this
penalty, can’t refer to consignment to hell, since no one is saved there; and
heaven can’t be meant, since there is no suffering ("fire") there.
The Catholic doctrine of purgatory alone explains this passage.
Then, of
course, there is the Bible’s approval of prayers for the dead: "In doing
this he acted in a very excellent and noble way, inasmuch as he had the
resurrection of the dead in view; for if he were not expecting the dead to rise
again, it would have been useless and foolish to pray for them in death. But if
he did this with a view to the splendid reward that awaits those who had gone
to rest in godliness, it was a holy and pious thought. Thus he made atonement
for the dead that they might be freed from this sin" (2 Macc. 12:43-45).
Prayers are not needed by those in heaven, and no one can help those in hell.
That means some people must be in a third condition, at least temporarily. This
verse so clearly illustrates the existence of purgatory that, at the time of
the Reformation, Protestants had to cut the books of the Maccabees out of their
Bibles in order to avoid accepting the doctrine.
Prayers
for the dead and the consequent doctrine of purgatory have been part of the
true religion since before the time of Christ. Not only can we show it was
practiced by the Jews of the time of the Maccabees, but it has even been
retained by Orthodox Jews today, who recite a prayer known as the Mourner’s Kaddish for
eleven months after the death of a loved one so that the loved one may be
purified. It was not the Catholic Church that added the doctrine of purgatory.
Rather, any change in the original teaching has taken place in the Protestant
churches, which rejected a doctrine that had always been believed by Jews and
Christians.
WHY GO TO PURGATORY?
Why would
anyone go to purgatory? To be cleansed, for "nothing unclean shall enter
[heaven]" (Rev. 21:27). Anyone who has not been completely freed of sin
and its effects is, to some extent, "unclean." Through repentance he
may have gained the grace needed to be worthy of heaven, which is to say, he
has been forgiven and his soul is spiritually alive. But that’s not sufficient
for gaining entrance into heaven. He needs to be cleansed completely.
Fundamentalists
claim, as an article in Jimmy Swaggart’s magazine, The Evangelist,
put it, that "Scripture clearly reveals that all the demands of divine
justice on the sinner have been completely fulfilled in Jesus Christ. It also
reveals that Christ has totally redeemed, or purchased back, that which was
lost. The advocates of a purgatory (and the necessity of prayer for the dead)
say, in effect, that the redemption of Christ was incomplete. . . . It has all
been done for us by Jesus Christ, there is nothing to be added or done by
man."
It is
entirely correct to say that Christ accomplished all of our salvation for us on
the cross. But that does not settle the question of how this redemption is
applied to us. Scripture reveals that it is applied to us over the course of
time through, among other things, the process of sanctification through which
the Christian is made holy. Sanctification involves suffering (Rom. 5:3-5), and
purgatory is the final stage of sanctification that some of us need to undergo
before we enter heaven. Purgatory is the final phase of Christ’s applying to us
the purifying redemption that he accomplished for us by his death on the
cross.
NO CONTRADICTION
The
Fundamentalist resistance to the biblical doctrine of purgatory presumes there
is a contradiction between Christ’s redeeming us on the cross and the process
by which we are sanctified. There isn’t. And a Fundamentalist cannot say that
suffering in the final stage of sanctification conflicts with the sufficiency
of Christ’s atonement without saying that suffering in the early stages of
sanctification also presents a similar conflict. The Fundamentalist has it
backward: Our suffering in sanctification does not take away from the cross.
Rather, the cross produces our sanctification, which results in our suffering,
because "[f]or the moment all discipline seems painful rather than
pleasant; later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness" (Heb.
12:11).
NOTHING UNCLEANN
Purgatory
makes sense because there is a requirement that a soul not just be declared to
be clean, but actually being clean, before a man may enter into eternal life.
After all, if a guilty soul is merely "covered," if its sinful state
still exists but is officially ignored, then it is still a guilty soul. It is
still unclean.
Catholic
theology takes seriously the notion that "nothing unclean shall enter
heaven." From this it is inferred that a less than cleansed soul, even if
"covered," remains a dirty soul and isn’t fit for heaven. It needs to
be cleansed or "purged" of its remaining imperfections. The cleansing
occurs in purgatory. Indeed, the necessity of the purging is taught in other
passages of Scripture, such as 2 Thessalonians 2:13, which declares that God
chose us "to be saved through sanctification by the Spirit."
Sanctification is thus not an option, something that may or may not happen
before one gets into heaven. It is an absolute requirement, as Hebrews 12:14
states that we must strive "for the holiness without which no one will see
the Lord."
ELUSIYAN ‘TOLULOPE FRANCIS