David McLoughlin explains how the Christian community from its earliest days, has taken upon itself the merciful practice of praying for the dead. This hope-filled participation in the salvation of everyone continues anew as we celebrate the Feast of All Soul's Day.
The Church’s teaching on the Holy Souls in Purgatory is not a clear extrapolation from a set of transparent Scriptural texts. But it is a realistic appraisal of the human condition and its encounter with divine mercy. The Scriptures, especially the Psalms, bear witness to the long history of the faithful loving-kindness of the creator God who refuses to abandon his wayward creatures. And the Gospels explore the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus who both reveals the depth of God’s capacity for mercy and reconciliation, and models it in human life that we might copy.
The realist in us accepts that most of us arrive at death as unfinished projects. We have rarely achieved the growth and maturation we might have hoped for. There are things we have said and done that we regret and things we wish we had said and done and did not. While we might have liked the opportunity to put things right with those closest to us, there is the dawning awareness of things in our lives that will inevitably have repercussions after our death, that we are now no longer able to limit or control.
And so, the Christian community from its earliest days has taken upon itself the merciful practice of praying for the dead. Both prayer for the forgiveness of their sin and for the grace that can open them to life in God, promised so spontaneously by Jesus on the cross to the repentant thief. Our prayers for the “faithful departed” participate in the prayer of Christ the High Priest “who always lives to make intercession” for us (Hebrews 7:25). A sense of the possibility of purification in and after death has been present in Eastern and Western Christian preaching and teaching since at least the third century. Vatican II expresses this simply in its Dogmatic Constitution on the Church: Lumen Gentium 49-50:
“Some of [Christ’s] disciples are pilgrims on earth, while others have died and are being purified, and still others are glorified…we will all in various ways…share in the same love of God and neighbour, and we all sing the same hymn to the glory of God.”
Sometimes in Christian art purgatory has been depicted as a terrifying hell-like reality only preferable in the knowledge that its pains will eventually cease. But something of the original hope-filled vision of this intermediate state can be found in the remarkable writings of St Catherine of Genoa who has the clear understanding of a purification willingly embraced for the sake of more perfect union with the loving Creator of all:
“I believe no happiness can be found worthy to be compared to the soul in Purgatory except that of the saints in paradise. And, day by day, this happiness grows as God flows into these souls more and more, as the hindrance to his entrance is consumed. Sin’s rust is the hindrance, and the fire burns the rust away, so that more and more the soul opens itself up to the divine inflowing. As the rust lessens and the soul is opened up to the divine ray, happiness grows, until the time be accomplished, the one wanes and the other waxes… As for the will, never can the soul say these pains are pains, so contented are they with what God ordains with which, in pure charity, their will is united.”
(A Treatise on Purgatory, 1510, Sheed and Ward).
In the Communion of Saints, we all participate in the salvation of each and everyone. We will share Christ’s own compassion (John 15:13; 1 John 3:16). And we will understand more deeply the words of John: “we have passed from death to life because we love one another.” (1 John 3:14)
Origen of Alexandria, the early Church’s greatest bible scholar, spoke of this in these words:
“You will have joy when you depart from this life if you are a saint. But your joy will be complete only when no member of your body is lacking to you. For you too will wait, just as you are awaited. But if you who are a member do not have perfect joy as long as a member is missing, how much more must our Lord and saviour who is the head and origin of this body consider it an incomplete joy if he is still lacking certain of its members…Thus he does not want to receive his perfect glory without you: that is, not without his people which is “his body” and “his members”. (From a homily on Leviticus 7:1-2).
So the suffering that is spoken of in relation to purgatory is not punitive but more like that which the great mystics speak of as they enter the terrifying dark night before the pure encounter with the light and love of God. There, as the Holy Spirit surrounds, sustains and penetrates us, we are opened up to the love that called us into being and desires to share the divine life with us. St John of the Cross famously celebrates this love in the following words:
“O living flame of love
that tenderly wounds my soul at its deepest centre!
Since now you are not oppressive, now consummate.
If it be your will: tear through the veil of this sweet encounter!”
(The Living Flame of Love, stanza 1)
The Dominican Theologian, Yves Congar comments: “…in Purgatory we will all be mystics”.
May it be so! Happy Feast Day.
David McLoughlin is Emeritus Fellow of Christian Theology at Birmingham Newman University.
Download our free resource and create your own healing tree, based on the image in the book of Revelation, as you pray for loved ones who have died.
Fleur Dorrell explores why we celebrate the feast days of All Saints and All Souls.
