Purgatory: A Pathway to the Splendor of Heaven!

Are you on fire for God’s love? Our Lord’s Sacred Heart is indeed burning with love and desire for you to spend eternity with Him in heaven. But, as the saying goes “God who created you without your consent will not save you without your consent”.

Contrary to a popular misassumption our citizenship in heaven is not guaranteed. Hell and Purgatory also exist as abodes for the deceased. Not everyone who passes away is automatically “in a better place” as people say about them to comfort themselves at funerals.

Our sinful proclivities can indeed jeopardize our eternity if we don’t try to follow Jesus regularly in prayer and living a sacramental life, including frequent time spent in confession. But in Purgatory we have a great antidote to despair about losing our souls to Satan in Hell forever. But it does involve physical suffering for many souls being “cleaned up” from sinful stains, as it were, and it can take a long time for some to reach heaven.

So, how on fire are you for Christ? How burning is your desire to be with him forever? Your desire, or lack of it, may well determine your salvation. Purgatory doesn’t get discussed much these days outside of the month of November which is dedicated to remembering, praying for, and having masses said for the deceased which include the Holy Souls in Purgatory with All Souls Day. This falls on the 2nd of November following All Saints Day on the 1st.

Keep in mind here that as much as we may be inspired by focusing on the Saints, they are citizens of heaven. We here on our earthly pilgrimage are in effect “citizens-in-training” for Eternal Life.

Thus, November is traditionally an especially important month to pray for those in Purgatory, and many visit the graves of the departed on All Souls' Day, November 2nd, and during the rest of the month as well. It is also important to arrange for Masses to be said for the deceased, not just in November but year round, as can be done by requesting they be said in many local parishes.

These masses can be of great value in shortening the time your loved ones and others spend in Purgatory if they’re not quite ready for heaven. Some Holy Souls appearing to certain religious and laity have requested Masses said for them for that very reason!

While our Lord advised us in the Sermon on the Mount to be “perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” we all know too well how we in Fallen Humanity all struggle with our own day to day imperfections.

While the sacrament of penance (Confession) is essential for the forgiveness of sins, Purgatory may still be necessary for many of us to satisfy the temporal punishment that still may be necessitated for some sins. To get a better handle on what this means, think of a kid who breaks a window while playing ball. He can, and should, apologize to the person whose window has been broken, but even if this is forgiven, either he or his parents, (or both!) still have to pay to fix the damages!

It is crucial to remember here when remembering the dead that, while being in Purgatory can be seen as good news in knowing that your salvation is certain, your soul might still need to be fully purified from any imperfection to enter heaven nonetheless.

Keep in mind as well that the duration for purification, like the intensity of the suffering involved can vary greatly, from a short amount of time as we figure it to literally decades or even in some cases centuries!

The Holy Souls may suffer pains similar in intensity to those of Hell, including what tradition calls a purgatorial fire. Unlike that of Hell, though, this suffering is temporary and purposeful, ending completely once the soul has been fully purified and enters into the joy of Heaven.

There have also been cases of souls appearing to people with a burning desire not shown in flames, but rather just filled, like all souls in Purgatory, with an intense longing to be with God as fully and as soon as possible upon the end of their Purgatorial purification.

Keep in mind that at death we see and feel just how much we need God and long to be with Him in heaven! Your soul then has a heightened sense of its surroundings, strengths and most importantly, its weaknesses before God.

It’s important to note as well here that, speaking of Masses being offered for the dead as mentioned earlier that unfortunately nowadays, too many of our funeral masses are more like canonizations, where we don’t ask God for mercy for the loved one’s soul but just pay tribute to them, trusting they’re now “in a better place”! And while Purgatory is certainly a better place than Hell, it’s no day at the beach!

There was a time when funeral liturgies had more of a sense of supplication for God's mercy, as opposed to assuming that the departed went straight up to heaven. The danger there, of course, is forgetting that many souls wind up in Hell, as our Lady of Fatima told the three shepherd children there in 1917 because they had no one to pray and make sacrifices for them.

Like Purgatory, Hell is real. Our actions in our earthly pilgrimage matter, as do our prayers. And it has been said that the stakes are eternal!

This is all the more reason for us to offer up our own sufferings, prayers and penances, to help the Holy Souls in their trials get to heaven that much more quickly. Pray for both your dearly departed and those you might not even know who might be in Purgatory. Then you’ll have saints in heaven rooting for you to join them there when you pass away. After all, we're all in this together!

There are a number of moving accounts given in a great book called Hungry Souls published by Tan Books of people who have appeared to special witnesses seemingly as if in flames or in various stages of misery and even groaning asking for our help. That is where you and I can come in! They can no longer pray for themselves but they can pray for you and we can pray for them.

Can you imagine how delighted they'll be if they can make it to heaven by the help of our prayers and (especially the Rosary) sacrifices, and by the masses we have offered for them, which a number of these suffering Holy Souls have asked for with God’s permission to make those requests. If somebody did you a tremendous favor, a literally life-saving favor, wouldn't you want to feel and show them your gratitude?

That's what they can do, to pray for us to join them in heaven once they get there. But in the meantime it's important not to assume that your loved ones are in a better place, but to pray that they might be. {they are?} Those prayers and your supplications might just get them to heaven if they're not there already.

The beauty of God's design is that if they are already in heaven that these prayers can then be passed on to other souls who might need them. Your sufferings, penances and prayers offered up to God for the Holy Souls can help them get to heaven that much more quickly than otherwise.

But it's important to note here that unfortunately, in many ways Catholicism has dropped the ball mightily in downplaying sin and two of the four last things, judgment and hell. How many homilies do we hear nowadays about we’re all going to heaven, as if only Hitler and maybe a few other such evildoers are in Hell?

Do you think you would have anywhere near the number of sexual harassment issues and suits if some of these predatory prelates could understand just how dangerously and seriously that they have been playing fast and loose with their salvation?

We should never just assume we're just going to go waltzing into heaven when we stop breathing. In the end while we should trust in God's mercy we should never take it for granted as license to sin. Keep wary of the twin traps of presumption (thinking your salvation is certain) and despair (thinking that God can never show you mercy and you’ll never reach heaven.)

That’s why it’s best to not just profess your faith but to live it as fully as possible in prayer and in a sacramental life. Keep your gaze fixed on heaven, and persevere in your love for God. And as they say keep your hope alive of being able to spend eternity with Him, for the rest of your earthly pilgrimage!

God Bless,

Christopher Castagnoli
for www.ourcatholicrprayers.com

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