The First American Pope

by Donald Michaud

CHAPTER 21

  POPE JOHN XXIV’S ADDRESS AT ABJUJA STADIUM IN ABUJA, NIGERIA

  PURGATORY

  There has been much written about whether “purgatory” exist. Many believe that since the bible does not mention the word purgatory that it does not therefor exist. Many only believed that at death only hell and heaven existed. Thus souls in “limbo” or awaiting the opening of the gates of heaven were in hell.

  The subject of purgatory has been exhaustively been written about over the centuries, but a very authoritative book should be utilized for an in depth understanding of critical thinking on this subject. I will be quoting from this document. “The Hope of Eternal Life”, was developed as a resource by the Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and the Ecumenical and Inter-Religious Relations section of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). Copyright C 2011 by Lutheran University Press, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops

  “If we die still deformed by sin, but will finally live before God fully transformed into what God intends for humanity, then some sort of change or transformation must occur between death and entry into eschatological glory. In this sense, the general topic of "purgation" is unavoidable. What is the nature of this transformation?

  In Matthew 12:32, where Jesus says: "Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come. That the sin against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven in the age to come sometimes has been interpreted to mean that there are other sins that can be forgiven in the world to come, that is, in purgatory.

  Augustine, substantially contributed to the development of the doctrine of purgatory. His City of God, especially its last three books (20-22) addresses the final judgment, punishment, and heaven. These works became the source par excellence for later Western eschatology. In Book 21, he asks whether divine punishment beyond death is strictly retributive, the just consequence of earlier sin, or also purgative and remedial. A remedial punishment would clearly end if and when it brings about its intended improvement. Some punishments within this life are remedial. Augustine believes the same is true of some post-death punishment. He states, "Not all who suffer temporal punishment after death are doomed to the eternal pains that follow the last judgment. For, as I have said, what is not forgiven in this life is pardoned in the life to come, in the case of those who are not to suffer eternal punishment."

  Pope Benedict XVI, in his encyclical on hope, Spe salvi, describes this fire as Christ in a passage that deserves to be quoted at length:

  “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 judgment. 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 forever 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 judgment 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.”

  This teaching makes clear that the Catholic doctrine of purgatory and the Lutheran teaching of the self being purified by death-and-resurrection intend to describe the same reality - namely, the process by which the self, distracted during this life by sin and the remnants of sin, is turned fully to Christ, purified of all that would hinder perfect communion with God, Christ, and the saints that will be the life of heaven. Expiation for residual effects of the consequences for sinful acts emphasize our personal responsibility for sin and are contextualized and integrated within a more comprehensive picture of the power of God's love to transform the justified into persons fit for the kingdom.

  As Ratzinger stated: "Purgatory is not, as Tertullian thought, some kind of supra-worldly concentration camp where man is forced to undergo punishment in a more or less arbitrary fashion. Rather is it the inwardly necessary process of transformation in which a person becomes capable of Christ, capable of God and thus capable of unity with the whole communion of saints."

  3) A greater integration of purgation with death and judgment.

  The images of purgatorial fire as Christ symbolizes the integration of purgatory with judgment itself. The encounter with Christ as Judge is the moment of purification. Must this purification be interpreted as temporally extended in time? "Time" in this context must be understood analogously. Pope Benedict XVI explains: "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." Karl Rahner, while granting that this purification is a process (i.e., every aspect of the person is perhaps not transformed simultaneously), nevertheless sought to incorporate purification as a moment within the entire event of death as a closing of life and a confrontation with God. If purification works within the person, cleansing the self in accord with the self's nature, then it perhaps must have a certain extension or "duration," but the temporal categories for understanding that extension must be applied with restraint, as was explicitly stated by the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments in its 2001 Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy.

  4) A specification of the ecumenically necessary.

  Recent discussions of purgatory have stressed the bond of love that unites the living and the departed, a unity expressed in an unbroken community of prayer. In Spe salvi, Benedict acknowledged that while the Orthodox do "not recognize the purifying and expiatory suffering of souls in the afterlife," they do share with the Catholic Church the practice of praying for the departed. In his earlier book on Eschatology, he had affirmed in relation to the Catholic-Orthodox disagreement on purgatory: "What is primary is the praxis of being able to pray, and being called upon to pray. The objective correlate of this praxis in the world to come need not, in some reunification of the churches, be determined of necessity in a strictly unitary fashion. . . ."

  While such a common basis in practice does not exist between Catholics and Lutherans, the openness to a variety of conceptualizations of the state of those who die in need of further purification is important.

  Agreements:

  Catholics and Lutherans agree:

  1. During this life, the justified "are not exempt from a lifelong struggle against the contradiction to God within the selfish desires of the old Adam (see Gal. 5:16; Rom. 7:7-10)" (JDDJ, 28; cf. Trent DS 1515 and 1690 and LC, Baptism, paras. 65-67).

  2. This struggle is rightly described by a variety of categories: e.g., penitence, healing, daily dying and rising with Christ.

  3. Borne in Christ, the painful aspects of this struggle are a participation in Christ's suffering and death. Catholic teachings call these pains temporal punishments; the Lutheran Confessions grant they can, "in a formal sense," be called punishments.

  4. This ongoing struggle does not indicate an insufficiency in Christ's saving work, but is an aspect of our being conformed to Christ and his saving work.

  5. The effects of sin in the justified a
re fully removed only as they die, undergo judgment, and encounter the purifying love of Christ. The justified are transformed from their condition at death to the condition with which they will be blessed in eternal glory. All, even martyrs and saints of the highest order, will find the encounter with the Risen Christ transformative in ways beyond human comprehension.

  6. Christ transforms those who enter into eternal life. This change is a work of God's grace. It can be rightly understood as our final and perfect transformation by Christ (Phil 3:21). The fire of Christ's love burns away all that is incompatible with living in the direct presence of God. It is the complete death of the old person, leaving only the new person in Christ.

  7. Scripture tells us little about the process of the transformation from this life to entrance into eternal life. Categories of space and time can be applied only analogously.

  Distinctive Teachings

  Catholics are committed to the doctrine of purgatory, i.e., to a process of purgation that occurs in or after death, and to the possibility that the living by their prayers can aid the departed undergoing this process. This aid will be discussed in the next section of this treatise, but here it should be noted that, for Catholic teaching, purgatory must be so understood as not to exclude this possibility. As the survey of Catholic teaching on purgatory above shows, there is no binding Catholic doctrine on the spatial or temporal character of purgatory, on how many Christians go through purgatory, or on the intensity or extent of their sufferings. While all the justified are transformed by eternal glory, Catholics admit the possibility that some people incur no further punishment after death.

  Lutherans teach that all the justified remain sinners unto death. Sin and the effects of sin in those who die in Christ will be removed prior to entrance into eternal glory. In effect, they teach the reality of purgation, even if not as a distinct intermediate state. The rejection by the Lutheran Reformers of the doctrine of purgatory as they knew it focused on practices and abuses perceived as bound up with this teaching. They judged that the doctrine of purgatory obscured the gospel of free grace. The Lutheran Confessions explicitly express a willingness to discuss purgatory if the doctrine were separated from these practices and abuses, although at the same time expressing doubt about the biblical foundation of any such teaching.

  The differences between Catholic and Lutheran teaching on purgatory thus focus on 1) how the living relate to those undergoing this purgation, and 2) the extent and explicit character of the binding teaching on purgation and purgatory. The more explicit the binding teaching, the greater the difficulty Lutherans have in seeing this teaching as biblical and thus binding. We have seen in this dialogue that explicit Catholic doctrine on purgatory is more limited than often recognized. As the Catholic attitude toward differences with the Orthodox indicates, these two differences are not entirely separable. Common practices toward the dead can provide an assurance that permits diversity in formulation. The following discussion of prayer for the dead must thus be considered in assessing the ecumenical significance of Catholic-Lutheran understandings of purgatory.

  Convergences

  Today, Lutheran and Catholic teaching integrates purgation with death, judgment, and the encounter with Christ. Recent Catholic and Lutheran understandings of purgation sound remarkably similar. While the word "purgatory" remains an ecumenically charged term, and for many Catholics and Lutherans signals a sharp division, our work in this round has shown that our churches' understandings of how the justified enter eternal glory are closer than expected.

  In light of the analysis given above, this dialogue believes that the topic of purgation, in and of itself, need not divide our communions."6

  As can be seen from the dialogue between the Catholic and Lutherans in this book, finding common acceptance on the existence of purgatory has not been resolved. It is therefore important that the theology of purgatory be regarded as part of the Catholic Doctrine with the appropriate understanding for those who are to become members of the Universal Catholic Church. Each of the various Christian denominations has their own interpretation of this theology, and therefore in order to be one with the Catholic Church, it must be reconciled. It must be accepted as part of the universal Catholic doctrine.

  When we remember the parable of the workers in the vineyard who were paid the same regardless of the length of time they had actually worked, we have a glimpse of the mercy and love of our heavenly Father. If we also consider the premise given on the subject of God’s judgement and it’s transformative healing power of the soul in HIS presence that time in purgatory cannot be measured in human understanding.

  When Christ appeared to us recently, He provided for us the knowledge of what purgatory is and how the soul is to be purified until it can be accepted into its heavenly reward. We therefore have His own explanation as to the existence of purgatory.

  SACREMENT OF RECONCILIATION

  Jesus also instituted the Sacrament of Reconciliation so that all those living would have the means, by which all who believed in Him, could reconcile the state of their souls with that of His glorified existence. Because of man’s free will and the continued existence of evil influences in the world, our souls continually need cleansing till our hour of death, when we shall all be judged. When Christ died upon the cross, it opened the gates of heaven for all who had died previously in “limbo”, and for those after the resurrection whose souls shall have been judge purified. Saint Thomas Aquinas: "The words of The Lord (This day....in paradise) must therefore be understood not of an earthly or corporeal paradise, but of that spiritual paradise in which all may be, said to be, who are in the enjoyment of the divine glory. Hence, the thief went up with Christ to heaven that he might be with Christ, as it was said to him: "Thou shalt be with Me in Paradise"; but as to reward, he was in Paradise, for he there tasted and enjoyed the divinity of Christ, together with the other saints."[3][4][5][7]

  Jesus therefore was proclaiming that the gates of heaven, which had been closed since the original sin of Adam & Eve, as promised by HIS Father, would be open upon His resurrection. Jesus was not proclaiming that all future sins were forgiven, that is why he created the Sacrament of Reconciliation. As the thief who died on Calvary on that day, and for all those whose sins have been forgiven through reconciliation and remain in a state of grace, or through the anointing of the sick, which includes the forgiveness of their sins, shall go directly to their heavenly reward at the time of their deaths. They will not return for the “last judgment”, since they have already earned eternity with GOD.

  Much has been written and interpreted about the end times and the last judgment, which is to occur. It will occur only after the final era of the Lord, for those who still exist at that time, and for the souls still in purgatory. Those who upon their death entered directly into hell have already been judged for eternity. They will not be judged again at the final last judgment.

  Now is the time for the final era of the Lord to begin. And that is what the Lord Jesus is asking us to do. We must work diligently to achieve the unification of all who believe in God into one Universal Catholic Church Family. The daunting task of unification is the standard by which all those who are living will be judged at the time of their death.

  For those of us, whose time will come, at God’s choosing, we will have our final judgment based on how we responded to his call for living as disciples and our efforts in bringing about unification. This is not a whimsical order from anyone. For we have heard our Lord Jesus Himself make this request. Will our remaining life’s work be reflected in actions that truly demonstrate our commitment to the beliefs of our faith, our own families, our work, our church, our community, our nations, and in the world we live in?

  For various religions around the world, including the Catholic Church, who relish their own individual identities and whose religious beliefs are centered on self-glorification and not on the Commandments and the teachings our Lord Jesus Christ, they will need to change in order that unificat
ion of a Universal Catholic Church can be achieved.

  The Commandments and the teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ will have to be the central faith doctrines for discussions in the unifications of all Christian churches. All church doctrines, regulatory guidelines, and operational guidelines will need to be revised in order for the Universal Catholic Church to be inclusive rather than exclusive.

  We are to be a Universal Catholic Church Family, in beliefs, actions, and committed to each other. We must live as the Lord taught us in his prayer of the “Our Father” teaching us about forgiveness, treating each other with love, and compassion. We cannot be an island onto ourselves. We must treat each other as brothers and sisters as part of Christ’s body; we are our brothers and sisters keeper.

  Our work is to unify all Christian churches around the world into one body. It is God’s belief that by our example, not by aggressive methods of control, we will influence the people of the world to emulate the peacefulness of our united existence, in love, acceptance, and charitable co-existence. In doing so, we can bring about a peaceful existence for all inhabitants of mother earth, a world without the threat of wars or hunger. A world that can utilize money previously spent on military superiority or defense, on recovery of disasters, curing diseases, cancer, helping to change the cycles of human indignities and diseases affecting the lives of people living on the fringes of society, cleaning our environment, and providing new sources of food and energies.

  Christ himself has returned to ask us to take on this endeavor. The Catholic Church Episcopacy has previously failed so far in its obligation to evangelize to the extent desired by GOD the Father. It will take each and every one of us to become Disciples of Christ to achieve this undertaking. We are his workers in the vineyard for generations that will follow us. BE A DISCIPLE OF CHRIST

  I bless you in the Name of the Father, The Son, and the Holy Spirit.”

  Pope John XXIV