Following on from the Virgins in the Islamic Paradise thread, which has gone off topic a bit (partly my fault!) does anyone know how long the Catholic Church claims people spend in Purgatory if they’ve not been good enough to get straight to Heaven? I vaguely remember reading it could be 1000s of years. Is that right?
In the good old days your relatives could just buy your way out! 
I don’t really see what’s so bad about purgatory; for that matter, I don’t really see the point at all. I mean, sure, you have to wait around for a while, but (finite amount of time)/(infinite amount of time) = a negligible portion of your afterlife, regardless of how long you actually spend in purgatory.
You might be thinking of indulgences, which are a remission of the temporal punishment due to sin, the guilt of which has been forgiven.
I’m relying on what I learned at school here (nearly 30 years ago), but I don’t think the Church has ever spoken in terms of specific lengths of time in Purgatory. Purgatory 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. Nobody knows how long any specific soul spends in Purgatory.
It’s true that the former Enchiridion of Indulgences referred to indulgences of a certain number of days or years for performing specific acts (e.g. an indulgence of X days for saying certain prayers). But this didn’t mean that the soul’s time in Purgatory was reduced by X days. Instead it meant that the time in Purgatory was reduced by the amount it would have been reduced by had the person performing the indulgenced act (saying the prayer) performed instead X days’ worth of the canonical penances that were formerly prescribed by the Church. And nobody knew how long those canonical penances reduced a soul’s stay in Purgatory.
The revised *Enchiridion * no longer talks in terms of indulgences of X days. It merely refers to *partial * and plenary indulgences.
tomndebb or Bricker might know better than I, but so far as I know, the Catholic church does not have an official position on how long it is. The only data points available are that by the time any given saint is canonized, that saint is assumed to have made it to Heaven (but then, canonized saints could reasonably be expected to have shorter than average stays in Purgatory), and at least some people stay in Purgatory for at least long enough to give those still on Earth a chance to say a few prayers for them.
Thanks for the responses guys.
Cubctator - can you explain more about indulgences - plenary or partial etc… I was never clear on what they were/are exactly. I know from time to time the Pope announces one, eg to mark some special occasion and it’s something to do with sins being forgiven.
Howexactly do they work, and what do you mean by remission of temporal punishment? What sort of thing did the canonical penances you referred to use to consist of?
Previous posters have been correct, there is no official length of time spent in Purgatory.
We can, however, indulge ourselves and take a look at what medieval poets thought about length spent in Purgatory. Specifically, Dante has a lot to say about this.
Antepurgatory: The place where souls spend time before embarking on their purgations. Late repenters spend 30 times the amount they delayed repenting in Antepurgatory, where they prepare for the journey ahead.
Purgatory Proper: Dante speaks of some souls spending over 500 years in a single terrace purging themselves of a type of sin (such as Pride or Gluttony). Other souls spend very little time, helped by the prayers of the living. (Dante expects to spend a lot of time on the terrace of Pride.)
According to Dante, it could take many centuries from the time a soul lands on the shores of the Mount Purgatory until they reach the earthly paradise at the peak of the mountain and can continue their journey through the heavenly spheres.
Dante also says that every soul is undertaking their purgation willingly (that is, they are not forced to endure, nor are they compelled from outside, but they take it on as their duty).
Of course, Dante is only speaking as a poet; the Divine Comedy should not be confused with actual church doctrine, which doesn’t say anything about Purgatory other than that there will be suffering for a finite amount of time.
(All quotes are from The Divine Comedy Volume 2: Purgatory as translated by Mark Musa.)
When it was possible to buy indulgences, how much did they cost? I know certain cathedrals were built with money from indulgences, but was the money gathered from a small number of large indulgences or a large number of small ones?
Thanks LtningBug
Good old Dante eh. had to study him at uni, but didn’t get beyond the Inferno (not a nice place). Rather a unique view of the set-up of the afterlife he had, but I believe it was taken pretty seriously, at least in Medieval times. How he was supposed to know anything about it all I’m not sure, unless perhaps people took his concept of having had a guided tour literally?
As noted, above, there is no attempt by the church to establish an earthly reckoning of time associated with Purgatory. (Even the concept of there being time and duration associated with Purgatory tends to be metaphorical.) I took a shot at providing a brief description of the RCC teaching on sin, redemption, forgiveness, penance, etc. in this thread. The “times” associated with indulgences and Purgatory refer to the amount of earthly time one would engage in penitential acts in order to be healed of sin. (See the linked post for more information of indulgences.) Given that eternity and Purgatory are both outside earthly time and history, there is no way to reckon the passing of time in Purgatory. Dante was trying to give a poetic exploration of punishment, repentance, and joy through concrete imagery (and much of his Divine Comedy is based on the writings of Thomas Aquinas), but in the end it remains poetry and not church doctrine.
When indulgneces were first offered, they were not associated with money, but with charitable works. (See my linked post for the rationale.) Of course, one notable charitable work involves providing money for good causes–feeding the poor, providing for the homeless, and, in some cases, providing a place of worship for the community. It was not that difficult for that practice to degenerate from one of doing a charitable work that involved donating money to concentrating on the money, itself, follwing which various sharpers within the church figured that they could increase the take by offering benefits in a tit-for-tat exchange.
However, even among the grifters setting up those transactions, I have never heard that there was a fixed price or a shopping list that listed so many days’ indulgence for so many ounces of gold. (There may well have been such a price list in various places, but I would guess that each location that turned it into a business would have set (or bargained) their own prices.) The church, itself, never established a straight price list.
As to the diffierence between partial and plenary: plenary simply means full. A plenary indulgence is supposed to provide all the healing necessary for one’s life (up to that point–you can’t buy healing for sins not yet committed). Partial is generally accompanied by the number of days of penitence for which the indulgence has provided.