"I believe no happiness can be found worthy to be compared with that of a soul in Purgatory except that of the saints in Paradise; and day by day this happiness grows as God flows into these souls, more and more as the hindrance to His entrance is consumed." — Saint Catherine of Genoa, Treatise on Purgatory
There is one question that burns in the heart of every Catholic who has stood at the graveside of someone they loved: What is it actually like for them now? What are they experiencing?
The Church does not leave us without an answer. Among all the saints whom God has raised up to illumine this mystery, none was given a deeper or more direct insight than Saint Catherine of Genoa — and her Treatise on Purgatory, examined by the theologians of the Church and confirmed at her canonisation by Pope Clement XII in 1737, stands as the supreme mystical document on the state of the Holy Souls.
Saint Francis de Sales — that great master of souls — read the Treatise twice a year. It belongs to every Catholic home.
Who Was Saint Catherine of Genoa?
Catherine Fieschi was born in Genoa in 1447, of one of the noblest families in Italy. She was married at sixteen to Giuliano Adorni — a man of difficult temperament, given to disorder — and spent her early married years in a slow spiritual desolation. Then, on a single day in 1474, kneeling before a confessor she had gone to out of mere duty, she was suddenly pierced to the heart by what she later described as a dart of God's immense love. She saw her own wretchedness and the measureless goodness of God — and from that moment forward she was entirely His.
For the remaining thirty-six years of her life she gave herself to prayer, severe fasting, the daily reception of Holy Communion, and the care of the sick poor in the great hospital of Genoa — especially the dying and the plague-stricken, whom she tended with her own hands. Her husband, moved by her example, was received into the Third Order of Saint Francis and became her companion in works of mercy.
God led her, in the last years of her life, through interior sufferings so profound and so precisely corresponding to what the mystics teach about Purgatory that her confessor and biographers — after long and careful study — concluded that she had been permitted to experience in her own soul, during life, the actual state of the purifying fire. Out of this experience she spoke. What she said has never been contradicted by the Church. It has been confirmed, approved, and treasured.
She died on 15 September 1510. She was canonised by Pope Clement XII on 30 April 1737.
The Two Realities: Greatest Suffering and Greatest Joy — Together
The first and most astonishing truth Saint Catherine teaches about Purgatory is this: the suffering and the joy exist simultaneously, each in its fullest intensity, and neither diminishes the other.
This is something the human mind, formed by earthly experience, finds almost impossible to hold. We know that great pain drives out pleasure. We know that great joy dulls the edge of sorrow. Not so in Purgatory. In Purgatory, the soul endures what Saint Catherine calls the greatest possible suffering short of Hell — and at the same time enjoys the greatest possible happiness short of the fullness of Heaven.
How can this be?
Because both the suffering and the joy spring from the same source: the soul's love for God, burning with a purity and intensity it never achieved in this life.
The suffering is the anguish of a love that longs for its fulfillment and cannot yet attain it. The joy is the certainty — held with absolute, unshakeable peace — that the fulfillment is coming, that nothing can prevent it, that God Himself is at work purifying the soul so that it may receive Him fully.
Saint Catherine's own words:
"The souls who are in Purgatory cannot, as I understand, choose but be there, and this is by God's ordinance, who therein has done justly. They cannot turn their thoughts back to themselves. Being then in charity from which they cannot now depart by any actual fault, they can no longer will nor desire save with the pure will of pure charity."
They are in charity. They are incapable of sin. They are incapable even of self-pity or rebellion. They see with perfect clarity that the purification is just, necessary, and loving — and they embrace it with the wholehearted willingness of a soul that loves God more than it loves its own comfort.
"Never can the souls say these pains are pains, so contented are they with God's ordaining with which, in pure charity, their will is united."
The Soul Sees Itself As It Truly Is
At the moment of death, the soul is stripped of everything that obscured its self-knowledge during life: the flattery of friends, the distractions of pleasure, the comfortable fog of self-deception, the mercy of forgetting. It stands before God — and before itself — in perfect clarity.
Saint Catherine teaches that God created the soul "pure, simple and clean of all stain of sin, with a certain beatific instinct towards Himself." Sin drew it away from that purity. And now, at death, the soul sees the distance it has placed between itself and God. It sees it with utter precision and without excuse.
And here is the remarkable thing: this very vision — painful beyond description — is also an act of mercy. Because the soul that truly sees itself can truly be healed. Purgatory is God's healing of the soul that sees and consents to be healed.
The Fire That Is God's Love
What is the fire of Purgatory, in Saint Catherine's understanding? It is not primarily an external punishment inflicted from outside. It is the soul's own love for God — purified and intensified by death until it burns away everything in the soul that is not yet worthy of Him.
"God holds the soul close to Himself with the greatest tenderness and with the warmest love — and the soul's own love for God burns and cleanses it, as fire does with iron, making it more brilliant the more it burns."
The same fire that causes the pain causes the joy. The same love that aches with longing fills the soul with peace. This is the mystery that Saint Catherine was given to understand — and that she could barely find words to express:
"So that the souls in Purgatory enjoy the greatest happiness and endure the greatest pain; the one does not hinder the other."
A Happiness That Grows Day by Day
Here is the consolation that is, as Fr. O'Sullivan says, "almost too beautiful to take in":
"I believe no happiness can be found worthy to be compared with that of a soul in Purgatory except that of the saints in Paradise; and day by day this happiness grows as God flows into these souls, more and more as the hindrance to His entrance is consumed. Sin's rust is the hindrance, and the fire burns the rust away so that more and more the soul opens itself up to the divine inflowing."
Day by day. The happiness grows. God flows in, more and more, as the rust of sin is burned away. The soul opens, wider and wider, like a window being cleared of its grime, letting in more and more of the light that was always there waiting.
This is not a place of stagnation. It is a place of the most intense spiritual progress — more rapid, perhaps, than anything possible in this life — directed entirely toward the one end for which the soul was made: the full possession of God.
The Souls Cannot Pray for Themselves
Saint Catherine, and the entire tradition of the Church's theologians, confirms an important truth: the souls in Purgatory cannot pray for themselves in the sense of meriting or shortening their own purification. Their time of merit is ended at death.
They can — and do — pray for us, their friends on earth, with great power and great gratitude. But for the relief of their own suffering, they depend entirely on the prayers, Masses, and works of charity that we offer for them.
This is the urgency of devotion to the Holy Souls. These are not strangers. They may be our parents, our children, our dearest friends. They are burning with love for God and aching to reach Him — and the one thing that can hasten their arrival is us.
"Most of all the holy souls pray for their benefactors. Our slight remembering of them wins for us a great measure of intercession from them." — The Novena for the Holy Souls in Purgatory (purgatorysouls.blogspot.com)
What Saint Catherine Saw at the End
Saint Catherine herself, in the last agony of her death on 15 September 1510, was heard to say words that her confessor and biographers recorded as expressing the state of a soul that has been, in this life, something of what the Holy Souls are:
She spoke of the love of God as a fire that consumed everything in her — and of her longing to be with Him as an anguish that was simultaneously the greatest joy she had ever known. She died, by all accounts, in a state of such transparent peace and burning love that those who witnessed it never forgot it.
The Church placed her among her saints. Her Treatise stands. And every Catholic who reads it with an open heart comes away changed — no longer able to think of the dead as merely "gone," but as living, loving, longing, and needing our prayers more than we will ever know until we stand where they now stand.
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine. Et lux perpetua luceat eis. Requiescant in pace. Amen.
Continue Reading:
➡ Where and What Is Purgatory — The Doctrine Explained ➡ How Long? What Determines Our Time in Purgatory ➡ The Saints Who Witnessed Purgatory — Padre Pio, St Frances, St Faustina ➡ How to Help the Holy Souls — Mass, Rosary, Indulgences ➡ Purgatory Is Mercy — The Consoling Doctrine
Sources: Saint Catherine of Genoa, Treatise on Purgatory (canonisation edition approved Clement XII, 1737; published EWTN Library) · Fr. Paul O'Sullivan, O.P., Read Me or Rue It (approved Cardinal Patriarch of Lisbon, 1936) · The Novena for the Holy Souls in Purgatory (purgatorysouls.blogspot.com) · Biographical details from the bull of canonisation of Clement XII, 30 April 1737
