There was time, especially during the Late Middle Ages, when Purgatory was an intrinsic element within popular Christian piety. The popularity of Indulgences and their subsequent abuse went hand in hand. Not so any longer. Purgatory seems to belong to a superstitious past, part and parcel of a piety of fear. A doctrine more than a belief, it is more like a Catholic punchline to a joke tinged with false humility. Why it became this is a long and complicated story, but why it shouldn’t have, or more to the point, why we should make this doctrine one of our core beliefs in the here and now, is worth reflecting upon.
God always anticipates various attacks upon belief by raising up saints to counter them. Very often these saints appear before the attack. In this regard, Purgatory is no different for God inspired St. Catherine of Genoa, who died just before the start of the Protestant Revolution, to be the Prophetess of Purgatory. The saint was given a vision of Purgatory and the tremendous suffering of its inhabitants. But rather than focus on their pains, St. Catherine instead was struck by the joy of the suffering souls. Rather than feeding the piety of fear, she places Purgatory in its proper context.
The Mindset of the Holy Souls
The fires of Purgatory are the flames of Divine love. All that is not pure is being burned away in the fire of Christ’s love. This of course is very painful, but everyone there knows that it is necessary. In fact, the members of the Church Suffering “can remember nothing of themselves or others, whether good or evil, which might increase the pain they ordinarily endure; they are so completely satisfied with what God has ordained for them, that He should be doing all that pleases Him, and in the way it pleases Him, that they are incapable of thinking of themselves even in the midst of their greatest sufferings.”
While their pain is great, they find it nearly impossible to focus on it. That is because all the ways in which they loved themselves more than they loved God is being purified. They can only focus on what God is doing in them and they are “completely satisfied” with it. They trust that moment by moment, no matter how acute their suffering is, they are approaching the fulfillment of all their desires. So they choose to focus only on that and not the pain. They have learned the lesson that would have served them well during their earthly sojourns, the same lesson the saint wants us to learn now as well: that each and every suffering we experience is a gift of Divine love meant to purify us. We simply need to trust that is what God is doing and will to focus on that. All too often we see suffering as an end, where God sees it as a means to our purification. If we can take our eyes off ourselves long enough, then this becomes easy to grasp and it actually makes suffering easier. This is the power of the Cross and we should never empty it of its power.
But it is not just a matter of trust. The Holy Souls also see the sufferings as necessary. They realize that even if it wasn’t purifying them, they still deserve it. This is a lesson for us as well. All too often we cannot see how a particular suffering is sanctifying us until later. Our perseverance wavers. This is because we don’t grasp that we deserve the punishment. And this doesn’t mean just the big things like sickness, the loss of a loved one, or the loss of a job, but the little contradictions that we wrestle with every day. The annoying habits of coworkers, our children and our spouses, the ones that we grumble against regularly, were sent to us by God to sanctify us. But we must will them as such and therefore bear with them, knowing that they are necessary. We must be convinced that not only do we need them, but we also deserve them. The souls in Purgatory are satisfied because they are paying their debt to Divine justice.
The Joy of the Holy Souls
Many people think the belief in Purgatory in merely fear based. But St. Catherine wants us to know it is the exact opposite. “I do not believe it would be possible to find any joy comparable to that of a soul in purgatory, except the joy of the blessed in paradise—
a joy which goes on increasing day by day, as God more and more flows in upon the soul, which He does abundantly in proportion as every hindrance to His entrance is
consumed away.” Rather than Purgatory being backed up to the Gates of Hell, it is the Mudroom of Heaven. The souls there, even though they suffer, they still experience an unimaginable joy because they know that suffering is the gravitational force of Paradise. Each moment they are approaching God’s orbit and they are increasingly joyful. They are so joyful, in fact, that their joys, according to St. Catherine, are second only to the blessed saints in heaven.
The saint is revealing to us the secret of being joyful amid suffering—to see each suffering, big or small, as producing in us “an eternal weight of glory” drawing us ever closer to our deepest desire. She wants us to be aware of the plight of the suffering souls so that we will in charity do all we can to alleviate their suffering, but she mainly speaks so that we will have the courage to embrace our Purgatory now. This is the difference between a doctrine and a belief. Purgatory is more than an idea, because ideas have consequences. The consequence is that we learn from the actions of the suffering souls to joyfully accept all our sufferings now, knowing that they are necessary, not in any generic sense, but as coming from the purifying fire of Divine love.