For a while now, I’ve wanted to write about praying for the dead, because it’s one of my favorite devotions. Personally, I find it to be a very beautiful and profound practice — but not everyone agrees with me. While the vast majority of Christians throughout history have prayed for the souls of the faithful departed (and most non-Christian religions and cultures have similar practices), there has arisen a minority of Christians in recent times who object to the idea. But as is almost always the case with objections to Catholic beliefs, the objections to praying for the dead are built upon deeper theological disagreements or misunderstandings. And as I began writing my post on praying for the dead, I realized quickly that I would first need to address one of these deeper theological issues: Purgatory.

You see, belief in Purgatory and praying for the dead go hand in hand for Christians, due to our understanding of Heaven and Hell. The souls in Heaven have attained perfect happiness through their union with God, which means that things cannot possibly get any better for them. The souls in Hell, on the other hand, have definitively rejected God, and this choice has become final with their death — they cannot possibly change their minds, no matter what, which means that things can never get any better for them. So neither the souls in Heaven nor the souls in Hell would benefit from our prayers; and it follows from this fact that if every human soul, immediately upon dying, entered into either Heaven or Hell, then praying for the dead would essentially be pointless.

This, of course, is where Purgatory comes in. But many Protestants don’t believe in Purgatory, and this is why they cannot support praying for the dead. So what I’d like to do here is give a defense of Purgatory, showing why it is not only a logically-sound, theologically-sound, and biblically-sound doctrine, but why Purgatory is a necessity if we want to have a coherent Christian worldview. And for those of you who already accept the reality of Purgatory, I’m sure you’ll still find this discussion educational and enriching. While this blog is becoming more apologetic than I originally planned, Catholics always benefit from learning more about their own faith — and I know as well as anyone that our catechesis has been severely lacking in recent decades. So it brings me great joy to be able to share what I’ve learned, and to help Catholics come to a deeper understanding of their faith in whatever small way that I can.

Alright, let’s get started.

What Purgatory Is

While there are many misconceptions about Purgatory, one of the most common is that it’s a location. This misunderstanding isn’t surprising, though, because Catholics often use figurative language when discussing various aspects of our faith, and this language is often taken too literally by non-Catholics (indeed, even sometimes by Catholics). In regards to Purgatory, it is frequently talked about as though it’s a place, but this language is purely symbolic (more on that in a moment). If Purgatory isn’t a location, though, then what exactly is it?

Let’s look at a few different sources.

Here is a quote from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

All who die in God’s grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation; but after death they undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven.

The Church gives the name Purgatory to this final purification of the elect, which is entirely different from the punishment of the damned.

— CCC 1030-1031

And here’s a quote from the Catholic Encyclopedia entry on Purgatory:

Purgatory (Lat., “purgare”, to make clean, to purify) in accordance with Catholic teaching is a place or condition of temporal punishment for those who, departing this life in God’s grace, are not entirely free from venial faults, or have not fully paid the satisfaction due to their transgressions.

Finally, here is the etymology of the word “purgatory”:

purgatory (n.)

c. 1200, purgatorie, “place or condition of temporal punishment for spiritual cleansing after death of souls dying penitent and destined ultimately for Heaven,” from Old French purgatore, purgatoire and directly from Medieval Latin purgatorium (St. Bernard, early 12c.), in Latin, “means of cleansing,” noun use of neuter of purgatorius (adj.) “purging, cleansing,” from purgat-, past-participle stem of Latin purgare “to cleanse, purify” (see purge (v.)).

— Online Etymology Dictionary

So, to summarize, the word “Purgatory” describes the event, state, or process of a soul being cleansed or purged of his remaining impurities after bodily death. While we may speak of Purgatory as a place in a figurative sense, like the Catholic Encyclopedia does above, we should not think of it as a location; Purgatory is more accurately understood as a temporary state of existence, an experience which takes place entirely in the spiritual realm, which means it is non-physical, and therefore non-locational (spirits are not anywhere, because they are immaterial). When we talk about souls who are “in Purgatory”, it’s not like saying “I’m in my car” but rather like saying “I’m in distress” — obviously “distress” is not a location, but a state of being. The same is essentially true of Purgatory.

Also important to emphasize is that Purgatory is not a third potential afterlife destination in addition to Heaven and Hell, which seems to be a less common misconception but still one that I’ve heard. Purgatory is a preparation for Heaven, so everyone who goes through Purgatory has Heaven as his final destination.

What many people may find most surprising, though, is just how little the Church explicitly teaches about Purgatory. To quote Jimmy Akin: “In essence, there are only three points on the matter which the Catholic Church insists: (1) that there is a purification after death, (2) that this purification involves some kind of pain or discomfort, and (3) that God assists those in this purification in response to the actions of the living.” Anything beyond these three points is theological speculation. Even the notion that Purgatory takes time is not something taught by the Church, which means that if you feel more comfortable believing that Purgatory is instantaneous — that immediately upon death we have our imperfections “burned away” in an instant — you are absolutely free to do so, as far as the Church is concerned, so long as you accept that this instant purification will still involve some form of pain or discomfort, and that the prayers and sacrifices of others can help lessen the suffering of those experiencing Purgatory.

The truth is, we simply cannot know for sure how spirits may or may not experience the passage of time or the succession of events, but I think it’s reasonable to assume that time does work differently for spirits than in the physical world. As Saint Peter says in his second letter, “with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day”. So while Purgatory may be instantaneous from an objective perspective, it may feel like it takes a long time for the soul who’s enduring it. But the bottom line is that the question of whether or not Purgatory actually takes time has no bearing on what the Church teaches about it.

Now that we’ve clarified what Purgatory is, we’ll look at why it’s necessary.

Why We Need Purification

The notion that we must be purified of our sinfulness before entering Heaven is somewhat intuitive; if Heaven is perfect, then there cannot be any sinfulness in Heaven, because sin is imperfection. Revelation 21:27 tells us that “nothing unclean shall enter [Heaven], nor any one who practices abomination or falsehood…”, and Hebrews 12:14 tells us to strive for “the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.” In the Old Testament, Habakkuk 1:13 says of God: “Your eyes are too pure to look upon wickedness, and the sight of evil you cannot endure”. So throughout Scripture, it is made quite clear that if we want to attain union with God — both in this life and in the next — we must be holy, we must be pure, we must be unattached to sin.

The process of detaching from sin and becoming holy is a core aspect of the Christian life, often referred to as “sanctification” or “justification” — though keep in mind that both of these words can be used in slightly different ways by different denominations. But most Christians agree that the followers of Christ will be sanctified throughout their lives, and that this sanctification involves being purified of our sinfulness.

Here are some Scripture passages discussing this idea:

For if the sprinkling of defiled persons with the blood of goats and bulls and with the ashes of a heifer sanctifies for the purification of the flesh, how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify your conscience from dead works to serve the living God.

— Hebrews 9:13-14

For the grace of God has appeared for the salvation of all men, training us to renounce irreligion and worldly passions, and to live sober, upright, and godly lives in this world, awaiting our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all iniquity and to purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good deeds.

— Titus 2: 11-14

Note, too, that this sanctification happens as a result of God’s grace offered to us through Christ’s Sacrifice, meaning that we are not sanctified by our own power — we cannot make ourselves holy; only God can make us holy. And what the doctrine of Purgatory tells us is simply that if we die before we are fully sanctified, we must be purged after death of our remaining impurities and attachments to sin so that our sanctification may be complete and we may be prepared to be in God’s immediate presence and meet Him “face to face”.

A quick note: if you’re unfamiliar with the distinction between mortal sin and venial sin, I recommend reading my previous post, In Brief: Mortal Sin & Venial Sin. Like the Catholic Encyclopedia says in the excerpt I quoted earlier, Purgatory purifies us of our venial faults, but it cannot purify us of mortal sin. Anyone who dies in a state of mortal sin will have his fate sealed in Hell, because to sin mortally is to deliberately and fundamentally reject God by one’s own free choice. Sanctification is essentially a perfection of our relationship with Christ, and Purgatory is a continuation of this process, but you cannot continue to develop and perfect a relationship which you previously ended. The notion that someone in mortal sin could go through Purgatory is much like the notion that I could somehow finish a book despite the fact that I stopped reading it. Understanding the difference between mortal sin and venial sin is an important piece of the puzzle when trying to understand Purgatory.

Sanctification & Suffering

While Scripture makes it clear that our sanctification will involve purification, it also makes it clear that this process necessarily involves suffering, and even punishment or discipline. Returning to Hebrews 12, we read:

In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. And have you forgotten the exhortation which addresses you as sons? —

“My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord,
nor lose courage when you are punished by him.
For the Lord disciplines him whom he loves,
and chastises every son whom he receives.”

It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Besides this, we have had earthly fathers to discipline us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time at their pleasure, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant; later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.

— Hebrews 12:4-11

A shorter passage in a similar vein is found in Revelation 3:19, where the Lord says “Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline”. So, God actually punishes or disciplines us in order to make us holy and righteous. We are even told that we must shed our blood in our struggle against sin, and while this seems to be a figure of speech (not everyone will be required to literally shed their blood in their struggle against sin) the phrase is still clearly meant to indicate an intense level of suffering. We suffer like this not in spite of being Christians, but because of being Christians. To be Christian is to accept Christ’s invitation into the Divine Life of the Trinity, becoming adopted sons and daughters of God (see Romans 8 and Galatians 4), and this means entering into Christ’s suffering with him.

Scripture teaches in many places about the necessity of suffering for those who follow Christ. Romans 8:17 says that we will be not only children of God, but fellow heirs to God’s kingdom with Christ, “provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.” This passage explicitly teaches that in order to be with Christ in Heaven, we must suffer with Christ. Our Lord even says in Luke 9:23, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me“ — Christ likens following him to being crucified every day!

Here are several other verses that talk about how we must suffer in order to attain salvation:

For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer. Our hope for you is unshaken; for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort.

— II Corinthians 1:5-7

Indeed I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as refuse, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own, based on law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith; that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that if possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

— Philippians 3:8-11

Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the Church, . . .

— Colossians 1:24

For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps.

— I Peter 2:21

Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal which comes upon you to prove you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice in so far as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed.

— I Peter 4:12-13

Let’s take a step back for a moment and review. We’ve covered the fact that (1) Christians are sanctified throughout our lives by God, that (2) this sanctification necessarily involves suffering, and that (3) this sanctification is required in order to attain full union with God in Heaven. Therefore, it logically follows from these points that if a Christian’s sanctification is not complete by the end of his earthly life, he must undergo further sanctification between his death and his entry into Heaven, which means enduring further suffering of some kind. This is a valid logical argument, which means that if the premises are all true, then the conclusion must be true, because the conclusion logically follows from the premises. And when an argument is valid, the only way to deny the conclusion is to prove that one of the premises is false, which means that in order to deny the existence of Purgatory, one must deny one of the three premises I laid out above — a person must deny either that we are sanctified by God, that this sanctification involves suffering, or that this sanctification is required in order to be in full union with God. Yet each of these points is supported explicitly by Scripture, so it seems to me that the Christian who wants to deny Purgatory is in a bit of a pickle.

What I’ve done thus far is taken explicit biblical teachings and reasoned logically to the conclusion that if these doctrines are all true, then Purgatory must be real. But there are actually passages in the Bible which teach even more directly that Purgatory exists, and I’ll be looking at one of these passages in the following section.

A Cleansing Fire

I want to make it clear right away that the Catholic Church does not teach that Purgatory will involve literal fire. This is another misconception that’s relatively common, because the imagery of fire has been utilized very frequently in discussion of Purgatory throughout the Church’s history. This imagery is symbolic, not literal; Purgatory is a spiritual phenomenon, one which occurs “outside” of the material world, so it’s reasonable to conclude that material things like fire will not actually exist there. Nevertheless, this fire imagery wasn’t just dreamed up by theologians, it was derived from Sacred Scripture.

That last passage I quoted above from Saint Peter, with his mention of “the fiery ordeal which comes upon you to prove you”, is a perfect example. Peter is likening the suffering which we must endure for our sanctification to fire, and he’s not the only one who uses this metaphor.

In both Matthew 3:11 and Luke 3:16 we’re told that John the Baptist proclaimed:

“I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me [Jesus Christ] is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry; he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.”

Fire has represented the cleansing power and judgment of God since the Old Testament. Deuteronomy 4:24 says “For the Lord your God is a devouring fire”; Sirach 2:5 tells us that those who follow God will endure trials, “For gold is tested in the fire, and acceptable men in the furnace of humiliation.”; Isaiah 4:4 describes a time “when the Lord shall have washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion and cleansed the bloodstains of Jerusalem from its midst by a spirit of judgment and by a spirit of burning.”

However, for our purposes here, one of the most important Scripture passages which uses this fire imagery in regards to God’s judgment and purification of his people is found in the New Testament, in Saint Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians:

According to the commission of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and another man is building upon it. Let each man take care how he builds upon it. For no other foundation can any one lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if any one builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw — each man’s work will become manifest; for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work which any man has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. If any man’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.

— I Corinthians 3:5-17

As he often does, Saint Paul has packed a great deal of theology into just a few lines. One important point to make right away is that when he says “for the Day will disclose it”, he is referring to the Day of Judgment, when we will stand before God and be held to account for how we lived our lives. Catholic theology makes a distinction between the particular judgment, which refers to us being judged privately by God immediately upon our death, and the final judgment, which will involve all of mankind being judged publicly. Based on the context, it seems reasonable to conclude that Paul is referring to the particular judgment.

Now, rather than giving my own commentary on this passage, I’m going to defer to a man who is far wiser and far holier than myself: Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. In his encyclical on Christian Hope, he briefly discusses Purgatory, and he looks specifically at this passage in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. This is a lengthy quote, so I considered cutting it down, but I think it’s very much worth reading the whole thing. Not only will this explain the passage in first Corinthians, but it will explain Purgatory as a whole, expanding a bit on some points I’ve already mentioned.

“With death, our life-choice becomes definitive—our life stands before the judge. Our choice, which in the course of an entire life takes on a certain shape, can have a variety of forms. There can be people who have totally destroyed their desire for truth and readiness to love, people for whom everything has become a lie, people who have lived for hatred and have suppressed all love within themselves. This is a terrifying thought, but alarming profiles of this type can be seen in certain figures of our own history. In such people all would be beyond remedy and the destruction of good would be irrevocable: this is what we mean by the word Hell.

On the other hand there can be people who are utterly pure, completely permeated by God, and thus fully open to their neighbours—people for whom communion with God even now gives direction to their entire being and whose journey towards God only brings to fulfilment what they already are.

Yet we know from experience that neither case is normal in human life. For the great majority of people—we may suppose—there remains in the depths of their being an ultimate interior openness to truth, to love, to God. In the concrete choices of life, however, it is covered over by ever new compromises with evil—much filth covers purity, but the thirst for purity remains and it still constantly re-emerges from all that is base and remains present in the soul. What happens to such individuals when they appear before the Judge? Will all the impurity they have amassed through life suddenly cease to matter? What else might occur?

Saint Paul, in his First Letter to the Corinthians, gives us an idea of the differing impact of God’s judgement according to each person’s particular circumstances. He does this using images which in some way try to express the invisible, without it being possible for us to conceptualize these images—simply because we can neither see into the world beyond death nor do we have any experience of it. Paul begins by saying that Christian life is built upon a common foundation: Jesus Christ. This foundation endures. If we have stood firm on this foundation and built our life upon it, we know that it cannot be taken away from us even in death.

[. . .]

In this text, it is in any case evident that our salvation can take different forms, that some of what is built may be burned down, that in order to be saved we personally have to pass through “fire” so as to become fully open to receiving God and able to take our place at the table of the eternal marriage-feast.

Some recent theologians are of the opinion that the fire which both burns and saves is Christ himself, the Judge and Saviour. The encounter with him is the decisive act of judgement. Before his gaze all falsehood melts away. This encounter with him, as it burns us, transforms and frees us, allowing us to become truly ourselves. All that we build during our lives can prove to be mere straw, pure bluster, and it collapses. Yet in the pain of this encounter, when the impurity and sickness of our lives become evident to us, there lies salvation. His gaze, the touch of his heart heals us through an undeniably painful transformation “as through fire”. But it is a blessed pain, in which the holy power of his love sears through us like a flame, enabling us to become totally ourselves and thus totally of God.

In this way the inter-relation between justice and grace also becomes clear: the way we live our lives is not immaterial, but our defilement does not stain us for ever if we have at least continued to reach out towards Christ, towards truth and towards love. Indeed, it has already been burned away through Christ’s Passion. At the moment of judgement we experience and we absorb the overwhelming power of his love over all the evil in the world and in ourselves. The pain of love becomes our salvation and our joy. It is clear that we cannot calculate the “duration” of this transforming burning in terms of the chronological measurements of this world. The transforming “moment” of this encounter eludes earthly time-reckoning—it is the heart’s time, it is the time of “passage” to communion with God in the Body of Christ.

The judgement of God is hope, both because it is justice and because it is grace. If it were merely grace, making all earthly things cease to matter, God would still owe us an answer to the question about justice—the crucial question that we ask of history and of God. If it were merely justice, in the end it could bring only fear to us all. The incarnation of God in Christ has so closely linked the two together—judgement and grace—that justice is firmly established: we all work out our salvation “with fear and trembling” (Phil 2:12). Nevertheless grace allows us all to hope, and to go trustfully to meet the Judge whom we know as our “advocate”, or parakletos (cf. 1 Jn 2:1).”

— Spe Salvi, 45-47

Final Thoughts

While there’s a great deal more that could be discussed here, I think this is a good place to end it for now. I considered responding to the main objection to Purgatory that I’ve heard from Protestants, which has to do with the sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross. Basically, the objection is that if Purgatory is really for those who “have not fully paid the satisfaction due to their transgressions” as the Catholic Encyclopedia says, this implies that Christ’s sacrifice wasn’t enough to pay for all of our sins. But this objection is built upon a misunderstanding of the Atonement and what Christ’s sacrifice actually accomplished, which is a whole discussion in itself, so I’m working on a separate post on this topic which I’ll publish in the near future.

Purgatory is not only a logical doctrine, but a beautiful one — which Pope Benedict shows well in his quote above (he’s one of the best writers today when it comes to harmonizing logic and beauty, in my opinion). I hope that at the very least you have gained a greater appreciation for the doctrine of Purgatory, regardless of what you believed coming into the discussion. As always, feel free to comment below or message me directly, either by email or on my Instagram page, if you have any questions, comments, or arguments you’d like to make. I welcome all feedback.

I want to stress, though, that this discussion isn’t over. In a future post, I’ll be discussing the practice of praying for the dead, and this will involve a continuation of the argument I’ve been making here in favor of the existence of Purgatory. This is because, as I said at the beginning, Purgatory and prayer for the dead go hand in hand; I’ll be sharing the biblical and historical evidence that Christians (and the Jews who preceded us) have always prayed for the dead, so this evidence will, by extension, be further evidence for the existence of Purgatory.

I hope to publish that post soon, so stay tuned.

God love you.