If you wanted to know what a country was like, you could read its laws. Or you could talk to people who had lived there. The councils and the Catechism are the Church's laws on Purgatory, clear, careful, and deliberately modest. The saints are the people who have lived near the border, so to speak, and have written home about it.
They don't always agree on the details, and that's worth saying first. Augustine admitted he wasn't sure what the fire was. Aquinas had firm views that later theologians softened. Catherine of Genoa saw it as a place of love, and others have pictured it as a place of terror. What they share is something more important than the details. All of them took it for granted that those who die in God's friendship are helped by the prayers of the living, and all of them lived and prayed as if that were true.
How to read them
A short word of caution before we go on. Some of what the saints wrote is theology, argued from Scripture and reason, and some of it is private revelation, which is to say a vision or an inner experience that the saint believed came from God. The Church takes both seriously, but not in the same way. A saint's theology can carry authority for the whole Church, especially if the saint is a Doctor of the Church. A private revelation, even one the Church has approved, is never added to the faith. No Catholic is obliged to believe it, and the details are often shaped by the language and imagination of the person who received them.
So when we read a saint on Purgatory, the useful question is: what is here that rings true, and what is just the style of the age?
St. Augustine (354-430)
Augustine is the right place to begin, because his teaching on the dead began with someone he loved.
Monica at Ostia
In the Confessions, he tells the story of his mother's last days. Monica had followed him across the sea to Italy, praying for his conversion for years. Not long after his baptism, the two were waiting at the port of Ostia, preparing to sail home to Africa, when she fell ill. In her last days she spoke to her sons about not worrying where her body would be buried. Lay this body anywhere, she said. The only thing I ask is that you remember me at the altar of the Lord, wherever you are.
She died at fifty-six. Augustine was thirty-three. His account of the grief that followed is among the most honest passages in ancient literature: he tried to hold back his tears, and then gave up. And then he did what she had asked. He offered the Eucharist for her, and, in the book itself, he prays for her soul, begs God to forgive whatever sins she committed, and asks his readers to remember her and her husband at the altar.
The thinker
Augustine was also a bishop who had to explain what the Church did and why. In The City of God, the Enchiridion and other works, he returned to the subject again and again. The ideas he developed became part of the foundation for the doctrine:
- The Church's prayers and sacrifices help the dead. He held this as an established practice, handed down from the apostles, and used it as a basis of his argument.
- Not every soul is helped in the same way. He distinguished the very good, who don't need help, the very wicked, who can't be reached by it, and those in between, for whom prayer and sacrifice are a real mercy.
- Some souls are purified after death by "temporary punishments." He believed that some of the faithful pass through a purification before the final judgment, and he connected this to Paul's words about being saved "as through fire."
- It's better to be cleansed here. In a sermon on one of the penitential psalms, he prays that God would purify him in this life so that he would have no need of the cleansing fire to come. It's a very Augustinian sentiment: he takes the doctrine seriously enough to want to avoid needing it.
His honesty
What makes Augustine so reliable is that he says where he doesn't know. On the nature of the fire after death, he allows that it may be as Paul describes, and that it's a question that can be examined, but he doesn't pretend to settle it. He doesn't claim to know who is helped, or how, or for how long. A less honest teacher would have filled those gaps. Augustine leaves them open, and the Church has followed his restraint.
There's a small work of his called On the Care of the Dead, written in response to a friend who asked whether burying a loved one near the tomb of a martyr would help the dead person. His answer is gentle and practical. Burial rites are a comfort to the living, he says. What truly helps the dead is the prayers, Masses and alms of the Church. In a few pages, he separates the human instinct from the actual doctrine.
St. Catherine of Genoa (1447-1510)
Of all the saints who wrote about Purgatory, Catherine of Genoa is perhaps the best loved, and her story is nothing like what you'd expect.
An unlikely mystic
Born into a noble Genoese family, Caterina Fieschi was married at sixteen, for political reasons, to a man named Giuliano Adorno. By all accounts, the marriage was unhappy. Giuliano was unfaithful and wasteful, and for years Catherine tried to lose herself in social life. Then, one day in March 1473, in her twenties, she went to confession in a church, and something happened. She described it as a wound of love, a sudden and overwhelming awareness of God's goodness and her own sin.
From then on, her life changed. She gave herself to the care of the sick at the great hospital of Pammatone in Genoa, and she served there for years, including through a plague that swept the city in the 1490s. Her husband, once he saw what had happened, changed too. He became a lay Franciscan and joined her work, and the two of them lived the rest of their marriage as brother and sister, caring for the sick together.
The Treatise on Purgatory
Catherine left behind a short work, usually called the Treatise on Purgatory, along with a Spiritual Dialogue. A note of caution is in order: scholars generally believe that these books were assembled after her death by close followers, drawing on her sayings and teaching, so they reflect her thought rather than being a book she sat down to write. The Church has treated them as a faithful expression of her teaching, and she was canonized in 1737.
What does she say? Her central idea, which is both simple and radical, is that the souls in Purgatory suffer, and are also joyful. The two aren't in competition.
They long for God, and they can't yet have Him. She describes the souls as being drawn toward God with a longing greater than any appetite we know on earth, and held back by the very imperfections that stand in the way. That is the pain.
They accept it entirely. Catherine says the souls in Purgatory can't regard their suffering as unjust, and wouldn't wish it removed before its work is done. They see that it's God's love at work, and they agree. That is the peace.
The fire is love. For Catherine, the purifying fire isn't something outside God that is imposed on the soul. It is God's own love, burning away whatever stops the soul from being one with Him. A theme Pope Benedict XVI would pick up centuries later, in his own reflection on the fire of Purgatory as Christ Himself.
She also uses an image I find unforgettable. A covered object, she says, can't be lit by the sun. It isn't the fault of the sun. The light shines on everything equally. But if the covering is slowly burned away, the object begins to receive the light, and the more it receives, the brighter it becomes. So it is with the soul. God's light is always shining, and it is the soul's own coverings that are removed.
Why she matters
Catherine gives a picture of Purgatory that corrects a lot of popular fear. She shows a state that's hard and happy at once, and she insists that no one who loves God needs to dread it. If there's a single sentence to take from her, it might be this: God is not waiting at the end of the road to punish us, but to receive us. And the road has to be completed first.
St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)
Aquinas is the great systematizer of the Catholic tradition, and his thinking about Purgatory has shaped how theologians have discussed it ever since. He's a different kind of guide from Catherine. Where she speaks from experience, he speaks from argument.
The reasoning
In the Summa Contra Gentiles and the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas works out why Purgatory makes sense. He doesn't start from visions. He starts from the nature of sin, grace and justice.
His argument goes roughly like this. Some people die in grace, but with venial sins still unforgiven, or with a debt of penance unpaid for sins already forgiven. Their friendship with God is intact, so they can't be damned. But they aren't wholly clean, and nothing unclean can enter into the vision of God. So there has to be a way of being made clean after death. That way is Purgatory, and what happens there is the payment of the debt that remains.
A few things about his approach are worth noticing.
It's an argument from justice and mercy together. Aquinas shows that Purgatory isn't something added to the Gospel. It follows from taking the Gospel seriously: God's love requires purity, and His mercy provides a way to it.
It takes the prayers of the Church seriously. Aquinas teaches that the living can help the dead by prayer, alms and especially the Mass, and that Mass offered for the dead is the most effective of these, because it's Christ's own sacrifice.
He is more confident than later theologians on details. In the questions on the afterlife that were compiled after his death from his earlier commentary, Aquinas asks where Purgatory is, and gives the answer common in his time: that its fire is probably under the earth, near Hell. Today, the Church doesn't hold that as doctrine, and as we saw, John Paul II spoke of Purgatory as a condition rather than a place. It's a good reminder that even a great saint's speculation isn't the same as the Church's teaching.
The last year
There's a small story about Aquinas's final months that is worth telling. In December 1273, while celebrating Mass, he seems to have had some kind of overwhelming experience of God. Afterward he stopped writing. When his secretary, Reginald, urged him to go on with the unfinished Summa, Thomas is said to have replied that he couldn't. Everything he had written, he said, seemed like straw compared to what had been shown to him.
Straw. It's the same word Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 3 for the work that burns up in the fire. A man who had spent his life writing about divine things looked at it all and called it straw, not out of bitterness, but because he had glimpsed something far greater. A few months later, in March 1274, he died on his way to the Second Council of Lyons, the very council that gave the first formal definition of Purgatory.
St. Faustina Kowalska (1905-1938)
Faustina Kowalska is a saint of our own century, a Polish sister of the Congregation of Our Lady of Mercy, who died young and was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 2000. She's best known for the devotion to the Divine Mercy, which grew from the visions and messages she recorded in her Diary.
Her Diary
Faustina had little education, and her writing is plain and direct. Throughout her Diary, she describes what she believed to be encounters with Christ, with Our Lady, and with souls who had died. Some of these accounts concern Purgatory. In them, souls appear to ask for her prayers, and she describes, in simple terms, what she was shown.
Without trying to be definitive, a few themes stand out:
- The souls' greatest suffering is longing for God. In her account, the deepest pain is not the fire but the separation from God. That agrees with the tradition of the "pain of loss" and with Catherine of Genoa.
- Mary visits them. Faustina writes that Our Lady comes to the souls in Purgatory and brings them comfort. The tradition of Mary as consoler of the souls is much older than Faustina, but she gives it a particular image.
- Prayer and sacrifice help. She writes that she offered her own sufferings and prayers for the souls, and that others did too. The practical lesson she draws is the one the Church has always taught: the dead depend on the living.
How to hold it
This is a clear case for the distinction between theology and private revelation. The Church has declared Faustina a saint and approved devotion to the Divine Mercy, but that doesn't make every detail of her visions part of the faith. For a time, in fact, the Church restricted the spread of the devotion, in 1959, in part because of concerns about the way the Diary had been translated; those restrictions were lifted in 1978 after a fuller study. This is the Church doing what she should do with private revelation: testing it carefully before welcoming it.
For a Catholic reader, the right approach is to take from Faustina what is consistent with the faith and spiritually helpful, which is a great deal, and to hold the particular images lightly. What she gives us most clearly isn't a description of Purgatory. It's a model of what to do about it. She prayed. She offered her sufferings. And she trusted in mercy.
Other Friends of the Holy Souls
A handful of other saints are closely associated with the Holy Souls, and any reader of this blog should know them.
St. Odilo of Cluny (about 962-1049). He was the abbot of the great monastery of Cluny in France, and around the year 998 he established a day of commemoration of all the faithful departed at Cluny and its monasteries, on November 2, the day after All Saints. The practice spread across the Church, and eventually Rome adopted it. Every All Souls' Day we owe him a small debt of thanks.
St. Gertrude the Great (1256-about 1302). A Benedictine nun at Helfta in Germany, she was known for her deep devotion to the Holy Souls. A popular prayer is named after her, with a promise that it releases a thousand souls each time it is said. As we noted earlier, that promise is not a teaching of the Church, and it's best to say the prayer for love and not for arithmetic. But Gertrude's own care for the dead was real.
St. Nicholas of Tolentino (about 1245-1305). An Augustinian friar, he's traditionally honored as a patron of the souls in Purgatory. According to tradition, he had visions of the dead begging for Masses, and he offered Mass for them faithfully. Many parishes still keep a devotion to him in November.
St. Monica. She belongs on any list. She asked only for a remembrance at the altar, and she got it from her son, and through him from the whole Church.
St. Padre Pio and others. Many saints in more recent centuries have been known for their devotion to the dead, and for offering Mass and suffering for them. Stories about their experiences are plentiful, and they're best treated as devotion and not doctrine.
What the Saints Teach Us Together
When you set these voices side by side, a pattern emerges. They didn't agree on the fire, the place or the length. But they agreed on four things.
God is merciful. None of them presents Purgatory as a threat. They see it as part of how God loves people.
The dead can be helped. Monica asked for it, Augustine practiced it, Aquinas argued for it, Catherine and Faustina lived it.
It's better to begin now. The saints do all they can in this life, and they don't wait.
Love is the point. In each of them, the meaning of Purgatory comes down to love: God's love for the soul, the soul's love for God, and our love for those who are still on the way.
If the councils tell us what to believe, the saints show us how to live with it. They look at death without fear, and they take their responsibility for the dead lightly and seriously at the same time. That's about as good a model as we could ask for.
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