My sunday school class only covered heaven and hell but not purgatory. What is purgatory, would a catholic believe in purgatory, where in the bible is purgatory mentioned, and am i spelling purgatory right?
My Catholic understanding is that purgatory is the place where people go if they die with unforgiven sins still weighing against them. In purgatory, you experience the horrors of hell for a certain period of time to expunge these sins from your soul. Once you’ve done your time, you can then be promoted to heaven.
It is also my understanding that purgatory as a concept ended after the famous Vatican II conference, where it was determined that neither purgatory nor limbo exist (but please correct me if I’m wrong on that one, all you religion experts). So, by my understanding, Catholics no longer accept purgatory as part of our universe. And, yes, you’re spelling it correctly.
I think that the concept of purgatory continues to exist, although limbo became a discouraged idea - that was where the Catholic Church taught that unbaptized babies went when they died.
Can’t produce a cite at the moment - I’m in class.
From the Catholic Encyclopedia:
Purgatory gets no mention in the Bible. The closest thing you have to a Biblical justification for purgatory is one or two instances of people praying for the dead. (cf. 2 Maccabees 12:38-46, 2 Timothy 1:18) The reason this is a justification for purgatory is that if they’re in either heaven or hell, praying for them won’t help them. [cite]
Lsura is correct, according to the online essay “Purgatory: An Essential Roman Catholic Doctrine” by James McCarthy, adapted from his book The Gospel According to Rome:
The Catechism on the Vatican’s website contains these paragraphs on Purgatory:
OK, so no more limbo (I do definitely recall that Vatican 2 promoted all virtuous non-Christians to Heaven), but we still have purgatory. So noted.
It’s where all purged documents and files go to.
1 Corinthians 3 is also used as a justification for Purgatory:
1 Corinthians 3 is also used as a justification for Purgatory:
Purgatory is a golf course in Noblesville, IN. This may be a link: http://www.fredericktalbottinn.com/Golf.htm that contains its address.
** slight hijack **
My grandfather died when I was 7, and my Mother told me he went to Purgatory. No mention of cleansing fire; rather, it was described more like Heafven’s waiting room. (This was probably not due to some misunderstanding on the part of my Mother, who was pretty down with the dogma, but rather her not wanting to give her children nightmares.) I was advised to pray for Grampa and do good deeds in his honor, to help him get out of Purgatory and into Heaven.
Based on this, I conjured up an indelible image of Purgatory as an infinite checkerboard. All the dead souls occupied one square each. They all faced Heaven, which I imagined as the Sun. Every time you said a prayer, they would move up one square. While they waited, they sat in beach chairs, under umbrellas, sipping lemonade served by angels.
A much nicer, if somewhat boring, purification, I should think.
** end hijack **
Along those lines, I don’t know how common it is to think of purgatory as some sort of limbo, but I am reminded of an episode of Family Guy that shows a shot from their vacation in purgatory. The family is floating in an infinite field of white. “It’s not bad. It’s not good, but it’s not bad.” “Yeah. It’s kinda… so-so.”
I though THIS was purgatory…
I always thought of Purgatory as like a car wash. Only they’d lay your soul out and sponge away your sins.
Pope John Paul II gave a series of homilies a few years ago on the afterlife: Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory.
One point he drove home was that these were more like states of being than places.
If we remove the medieval materialism from the doctrine, then purgatory can make sense for the modern Catholic and Protestant.
Consider that no one’s perferct. We’ve all sinned. Do you think that we just translate into heaven exactly as we are with all that baggage? If purgatory is a state of being, then it is a transitionary stage going from this world, being perfected, and ending up in the heavenly state of being of pure contentment and unity with God.
For some with a lot of baggage, perhaps purgatory will be an unpleasant experience as one comes face to face with one’s unfiltered history of sin. The personal reaction of shame and guilt just might be punishment enough.
And since this all takes place outside of space and time, for us on earth, a deceased loved one’s purgatory is just a blink of an eye.
This means that all heaven-bound humans have gone through purgatory, even the most famous saints who we regard as being in heaven right now.
Yes, the medieval notions and ways of thinking still exist in the church. But this updated theology of purgatory is something the Pope has expounded on, and so is also a legitimately Catholic way of belief.
Peace.
Catholic Theology 101 - Eschatology
As far as I know, the concept of purgatory comes from the Divine Comedy, written by Dante Aligheiri in the 13/14th century.
The poem is composed of 3 parts, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. The protagonist starts his journey by travelling down through the 9 circles of hell. At the top is Limbo, which is as high as you can get without being Catholic. This is where Dante placed anyone who wasn’t afforded the opportunity to be baptized. As he travels further down, he sees the Elysian Fields, the River Styx and the boatman Charon, and all sorts of other neat stuff. There’s a great deal of detail on what sort of torture the corrupt church and governmentt officials of the time are suffering.
At the bottom of hell, the protagonist finds Satan, and the 3 worst people Dante could think of. One of them is Brutus, but I can’t remember the other 2. Contrary to what you may think, the bottom level of hell is frozen. I was told that this represents a freezing of the will. Will is one of the central themes throughout the poem. Where you end up when you die is essentially based on how you exercised your willpower while alive.
After leaving the pits of hell, the protagonist goes to Purgatory. He starts on a beach, and then travels up a mountain. Purgatory is where the average Catholic would go. Anyone with sin goes to purgatory, so there are only a few exceptions. The whole concept here is atonement for one’s sins. There are 7 levels, one for each of the seven deadlies. Again, people from history are described as toiling at each level. As in hell, the punishments are appropriate to the sins committed while alive (Ironic Punishment Division :)). Prayer was said to speed along the climb, and later the church corrupted this concept by selling indulgences to people, which were basically just pieces of paper saying that there was a monk somehwere praying for your dead mom’s soul. Regardless, progress up this mountain was exceptionally slow, taking thousands of years.
At the top of the mountain is Paradise. I’m not really going to say anything about Paradiso, because it was pretty boring and I didn’t really read much of it. The handful of people up there are all free of sin, there’s lots of hanging gardens and radiant golden light, pretty much what you’d expect in heaven.
Anyway, Dante meant all this to be an allegory, but as usual, the Church took it literally. Many of his ideas were later incorporated into official doctrine. The Divine Comedy also had a great influence on people when it was written – you can see this reflected in a lot of Renaissance art.
Dante may have popularized Purgatory, but he hardly invented it. The Catholic tradition of praying for the dead is as old as the Church, and appears in writings as early as the late 2nd and early 3rd centuries, particularly Clement of Alexandria (fl. 190-215), Tertullian (b. ca. 160), and Cyprian (fl. 218-54):
From The Catholic Encyclopedia.
The Second Council of Lyons (1274) recognized that “from the beginning the Church has honored the memory of the dead and offered prayers in suffrage for them, above all the Eucharistic sacrifice, so that, thus purified, they may attain the beatific vision of God.” Cathechism of the Catholic Church ¶ 1032.
Dante wrote the Divine Comedy between 1308 and 1321.
You have that reversed. Dante’s portrayal of hell, purgatory, and heaven was an attempt to translate the philosophical ponderings of Thomas Aquinas into poetry. The concept was there, then Dante elaborated upon it.
Teeming asks:
what the hell (or heaven) is purgatory?
My sunday school class only covered heaven and hell but not purgatory. What is purgatory, would a catholic believe in purgatory, where in the bible is purgatory mentioned, and am i spelling purgatory right?
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Would you like to ask also, teeming, what are the advantages in everyday life to Catholics in their belief in the existence of purgatory whether as a state of existence or a place?
And also the advantages to the temporalities of the Catholic Church from the dogma of purgatory.
O.K., I take that last one back; it’s already an old old controversy.
Susma Rio Sep