Tag Archives: St. Catherine of Genoa

Living Purgatory Now

Apologetics, End Times, Last Things, Sin, Suffering, , , ,

The contested doctrines are almost always some of the hardest to live by.  This is not because they are difficult, but because they are contested.  When a doctrine falls into the contested realm and Catholics are forced to defend it, there is an almost innate tendency to treat the doctrine as an intellectual problem and not as a saving truth.  One example of this comes to mind and is particularly apropos for the season—Purgatory.  Since Luther’s revolt, Catholics have spent so much time on their heels defending its existence, that they haven’t always lived as if it does.  There are two main reasons for this.

The first is that we have not spent enough time meditating upon death.  Memento mori the desert fathers and early Christians were fond of saying, not just as a mere platitude, but because death is a fact of life.  Meditating on our own death is of course fruitful, but when it comes to living as if Purgatory exists it may be best to focus on those we know who have died.  All too often we are quick to canonize the dead and thus ignore the reality that if they were saved then they needed purgatorial purification to get there. 

Praying in Faith, Hope and Love

To speculate on the destiny of loved ones who have died is not being “judgmental”.  But it is presumptuous not to.  In the majority of cases, we will have known the person well enough to know (at best) that they weren’t yet perfected.  It is uncomfortable to think this way, but it is necessary because Purgatory then becomes the realistic basis for our hope that they were saved. 

And it is hope that can animate our prayers for them.  CS Lewis in A Grief Observed said he never really, really believed in Purgatory until his wife died.  Then he prayed with fervent hope that she would be purified so as to come quickly into the presence of God.  His belief in Purgatory took flesh because he realized his beloved still needed his help through prayers and penances. 

Meditating on the sufferings of the souls in Purgatory and being able to put faces on those otherwise general mass of suffering souls makes Purgatory a real doctrine.  Our prayer comes alive and with it, our faith in the doctrine itself.  Praying in faith, strengthens our faith.  Praying for suffering people increases our charity.  Knowing that they are approaching perfection increases our hope.  Those faces don’t need to be someone we know.  They can also be aimed at people in specific circumstances: “I pray for the soul that has entered Purgatory most recently”, “I pray for the soul who most loved Our Lord in the Eucharist”, “I pray for the soul who is most abandoned”, etc.  We might not know them personally now, but we will have gained a friend in eternity.

Undergoing Purgatorial Purification?

I mentioned above that we can be sure that our loved ones undergo purgatorial purification.  That is because, short of the Virgin Mary, everyone, even canonized saints underwent purgatorial purification.  Many of them underwent them in this life rather than in the next.  And herein lies the other way in which we might come to true faith in the doctrine of Purgatory: ask to undergo those sufferings now.

This begins by once again meditating upon the sufferings of Purgatory.  The pains of Purgatory are very similar to those of hell.  Although the person is completely in love with God, they experience a pain of loss in the knowledge that their sins and their momentary delight was traded for time with the Beloved.  Likewise they experience a pain of sense in that they are “saved through fire” (1Cor 3:11).  Cut off from uniting their suffering to the merits of Christ, they must suffer “alone” to heal the stains of their forgiven sins.  Now the face we put on it must be our own.  We must imagine how great the suffering is.

After doing this, we trade that suffering for suffering now.  The suffering now is different in that the pain of loss is felt less severely because it is in a certain sense natural.  Likewise the pain of sense is less because our sufferings can be united to those of Christ.  The obstacle of course is that we lack the courage to make this bargain.  It feels really scary to give God carte-blanche over our sufferings.  But we must remember that God is not a masochist but a Father Who disciplines in the wise and gentle way.  Our sufferings now, especially those dealt by Providence, are the most wise and gentle sufferings, hand-chosen by God in order to purify us.  Jesus told St. Faustina that He rather there not be Purgatory because He will send enough suffering, that united to His, will purify us, without the need for Purgatory.

But there is another aspect of this that we all too often forget.  The holy souls in Purgatory are suffering greatly, but they are also filled with joy.  This is important for us to remember because the reason we are hesitant to give this to God is because we are focused only on the suffering part.  But the suffering is just a means to the end of closer union with God.  Suffering is the gravity that thrusts us into the Heart of God.  It takes away all of the impediments to drawing closer to Him provided we will to suffer the things He sends through His Providence.  St. Catherine of Genoa speaks of how the pains in Purgatory is occasioned by love delayed.  By allowing our purification to happen now, that love will be less delayed.

Believing in Purgatory

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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.