Necessity of Purgatory

This is how Pope John Paul II explains why purgatory is necessary. For, he continues, we are called "to be perfect like the heavenly Father during our earthly life... sound and flawless before God the Father 'at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints' (1 Thess 3:12)."

Here John Paul re-affirms the old wisdom concerning the existence of a "state of purification" after death. Purification means atonement for sins and their effects on the soul. It is not a painless, automatic process of "growing" the soul, of attaining full "self-realization" through the acquisition of ever more insight after death, as is the soothing theory of some spiritualists. It is not an accumulation of learning, through a series of "reincarnations," until some point of perfect wisdom is reached, as in the fantasy of some Western New Age disciples. Such are childish attempts to suppress man's deep awareness that the basic dimension determining his destiny in the next world is not knowledge or experience, but moral purity: sin, and the traces it leaves on the soul, versus holiness.

In our culture today, of the three destinations that traditional Christian doctrine teaches may follow death and judgment — heaven, hell, and purgatory — only belief in heaven or some such happy state has widely survived. The prevailing cheap optimism holds that (if there is anything at all across the threshold of death) the life of practically everybody automatically ends up in a state of bliss. De-christened and inwardly impoverished Western man may acknowledge having his imperfections and shortcomings, but doesn't look upon himself as sinful. To him, atonement for or purification from sin is a "medieval" idea.

Already 150 years ago, Cardinal John Henry Newman saw the rise of this superficial, humanist mentality:

We are cherishing a shallow religion, a hollow religion, which will not profit us in the day of trouble. The age [our age considerably more than his!] loves an exclusively cheerful religion. It is determined to make religion bright and sunny and joyous, whatever the form of it which it adopts. And it will handle the Catholic doctrine in the same spirit... we take what is beautiful and attractive, shrink from what is stern and painful.

Purgatory (to say nothing of hell), penance, expiation, God's holy Justice: these just do not fit in with today's cheerfully cheap religiosity. However, the truth remains that man has to be "sound and flawless before God the Father" when, after death, he appears before Him to render an account of his life. Only holy souls have direct access to the blissful abode where "nothing unclean shall enter." Therefore, "every trace of attachment to evil must be eliminated, every imperfection of the soul corrected." The place for this correction of the soul's imperfections is purgatory.

This is a profound and holy mystery, and also an appalling mystery, whose frightening aspects cannot be glossed over. But the reality should not terrify us. John Paul II continues: "One last important aspect which the Church's tradition has always pointed out should be re-proposed today: the dimension of 'communio'... the ecclesiastical solidarity which works through prayer, prayers of suffrage, and love." Here John Paul teaches us that penance and pain in purgatory are mitigated by the comfort of mercy. In the final analysis, purgatory is the mercy of Christ working through his Mystical Body, the Church.

Close to the Vatican, alongside the Tiber in Rome, stands a beautiful neo-gothic church — the only one in that style in the whole city — which is devoted to the Sacred Heart of Suffrage; suffrage in the meaning of help to the souls in purgatory. In a room in the sacristy are exhibited a small number of strange, fascinating "relics": objects bearing visible, physical traces left by souls in purgatory. The collection is known as the little Museum of Purgatory, the Piccolo Museo del Purgatorio. The Museo and the church of the Sacred Heart of Suffrage represent two sides of purgatory: the collection offers impressive bits of tangible evidence for the harrowing existence of the souls there, while the church itself displays the Christian comfort of the mercy and charity for the suffering souls as practiced since time immemorial by the Catholic Church. The great central triptych in the church, representing the Sacred Heart, the poor (or holy) souls, and various saints, has even been called "a visual compendium of Catholic doctrine on purgatory" by Pope Benedict XV.

The church is a monument in honor of the mercy of the divine-human Heart of Christ for the souls in purgatory, and at the same time an invitation to the faithful to practice charity for them in union with his merciful Heart. For the devotion to the suffering souls is inextricably linked to the devotion of the Sacred Heart. That has been made especially clear by St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, the apostle of the devotion to the Sacred Heart. As Father John Croiset wrote:

The revelations she received about the sufferings of these souls, about our Divine Lord's tender love for them and His eager desire for their deliverance, of the great efficacy of the devotion to the Sacred Heart for their early release, and the fact that ... (she) combined these two devotions so intimately in her own person, indicate that there is such a close connection between the two devotions that the devotion to the souls in Purgatory may be said to form a part of the devotion to the Sacred Heart.

The "paranormal" evidence displayed in the Little Museum of the church and some additional evidence, notably the burned-in hand in the corporale of Czestochowa in Poland, is instrumental in developing devotion to the suffering souls. It brings us nearer to the reality of purgatory by allowing us a closer look into this awful abyss of purification.
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Love and Fear

Shame and bitterness overcame me when the priest said that my parents were not married. They had spent thirty years together and had raised three children, but because my father was a Catholic who had married outside the church, the church held that he had never married at all. Or so this priest told me. I thought him a bastard—after all, he was saying I was one.

Truth can sting. Pope Francis wants to soften it, to minimize its assaults. In his apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia, he uses the euphemism “irregular unions” to describe relationships that Catholics consider objectively adulterous. He suggests that people living in a persistent state of sin may receive communion if certain conditions are met—not least, if they are “tactful.” Francis would like the church to be tactful, as well.

I have felt the Church’s teaching on marriage land like a sharp blow, yet I take no encouragement from this shift. Amoris Laetitia suggests that an objective assessment of whether or not one is in a state of mortal sin can be replaced with a more subjective “discernment” of one’s “interior disposition.” While this may seem merciful, it leaves Catholics less sure of how they stand before God.

Francis writes: “We must make room for the conscience of the faithful, who very often respond as best they can to the Gospel.” This notion of conscience as a licensing agency, as “making room” for actions that otherwise would count as sins, is strange to me. Far from reassuring me that I am worthy to receive communion, my conscience has often reminded me that I am not. As Mary Geach said:

One way in which moral advisers may fail people who have doubts about whether to commit respectable sins, is telling them that they must follow their consciences . . . would you say “follow your conscience” to a man whose code of honour obliged him to kill his father’s killer?

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Priest Shortage

The Catholic Church is in dire need of priests. She had plenty of priests before the onset of liturgical abuses not sanctioned by the Second Vatican Council's Sacrosanctum Concilium. Mathematician and computer programmer David Sonnier has plotted out the precipitous decline in vocations after the Council, illustrating it by an asymptotic curve he calls, with mordant irony, the Springtime Decay Function, whereby he concludes that we are missing more than 300,000 priests who otherwise might have been ministering to the people of God today. He shows his students the data, telling them that it marks enrollment at a college, and he asks them to guess what happened. They reply in one way or another that the college in question must have made a dreadfully bad decision in 1965.
“Did they get rid of football?” asked one of the students.
The answer to that is yes, they did “get rid of football.” Nowhere in Sacrosanctum Concilium or in other documents of Vatican II, as Professor Sonnier observes, are the following liturgical innovations mandated or recommended or even suggested:
* orientation ad populum
* Communion in both species
* Communion received in the hand
* Communion received while standing, as at a delicatessen
* removal of altar rails
* prohibition of Masses said according to the 1962 missal
* exclusive use of the vernacular
* girls serving at the altar
Instead, Sacrosanctum Concilium forbids innovations in the liturgy, “unless the good of the Church genuinely and certainly requires them; and care must be taken that any new forms adopted should in some way grow organically from forms already existing” (SC, 23). Not one of those innovations above can pass that severe test, and, as Sonnier notes, several of them had already been condemned.
Sonnier understands that correlation and causation are not the same; though it defies all reason to suppose that a decline so sudden and so calamitous was strictly coincidental. One way to show that it was not coincidental – that the foot's agony had something to do with the shotgun and the trigger – would be to go to those dioceses and communities that did not pull the trigger, and to see whether they are walking about hale and hearty and on two feet. And so they are: Lincoln, Nebraska; Arlington, Virginia; Ciudad del Este, Paraguay; the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate; the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter.
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Mexico

I find it interesting that the Good Friday ceremony took place in the Coliseum, a place where Christians were butchered as entertainment for the cause of Christ. It is a statement, to have the ceremony in such a place, as though to say, ‘Christians were once killed in this place of despotic pomp, but now it is in ruins; Christianity is still here, and we have vanquished your edifices.’
The Catholic world is under attack and it is being flooded by both heretic and pagan, Muslim and infiltrator. Even in Mexico, where the Catholic Faith once flourished, Satan is making his onslaught and conquering the souls of the people.
The nations of the West have been quite weak with their borders in so many disturbing ways. The US, for example, makes it difficult for good people to enter the borders, but easy for evil people to get through the borders. We have Mexican cartel agents entering with ease into the US. Look at what evils they are doing in their own country!
I would greatly encourage you to watch my interview with Jorge Vazquez Valencia, the official spokesperson for a self-defense militia fighting the cartels, on the diabolical and very brutal atrocities being committed by the cartels in Mexico:
The Mexican drug cartel in the state of Guerrero entered a village — consisting of Catholic Christians — and ordered everyone to leave. When the local people refused the cartel took a fourteen year old boy, and before the entire village ritually cut out the heart  and presented the heart to everyone in the village in a pagan ritual. They then declared that if everyone did not leave the village, that they would take all the women and decapitate them all. To discuss this satanic violence that is flooding all of Mexico, I interviewed Jorge Vazquez Valencia, the official spokesperson of the Autodefensas, a self-defense group that has been fighting the cartel in gun battles that I believe are eventually going to escalate into a full out civil war:
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Friday Fast

It used to be that Catholics would abstain from meat every Friday — except when it falls on a major feast — and not just Fridays in Lent. Some think that the bishops or Vatican II did away with this Friday penance. Not only is that not true but we are commanded by Christ to do penance. Despite what some may think neither the Vatican nor the bishops can completely abrogate this obligation.
In the same way the Church gathers together to celebrate the Mass on Sunday, the day Christ rose, we unite in penance on Friday, the day Christ died. Historically this penance has been mandated as abstaining from meat. In 1966 Pope Blessed Paul VI removed the obligation to refrain from meat provided it is replaced with a substantial penance. This alternative penance could take the form of abstaining from alcohol or adding a rosary or act of charity.
Meat was chosen because of its connection to sacrifice. Warm blooded animals were offered to God in the Old Testament and Christ gave up His flesh as part of His sacrifice on the Cross.
The reasoning behind Blessed Pope Paul VI's desire to lift the obligation to fast from meat — but not the obligation to do penance — is that around the world meat wasn't and isn't a common part of many cultural diets and other individuals simply don't like meat so the penance didn't mean much for a large swathe of the Catholic population.
When Blessed Pope Paul VI lifted the obligation in the late 1960s, American bishops began to tell Catholics they could now eat meat on Fridays outside of Lent and left it at that. The silence on this issue is deafening to this day. It's possible that bishops are concerned that penance will harm ecumenical efforts, or maybe they don't believe American Catholics are capable of fasting, but whatever the reason Catholics simply gave up fasting and penance on Fridays outside of Lent.
However, despite the bishops' reluctance, the requirement to do penance on Friday remains on the books and to simply blow it off is grave matter, similar to skipping Mass without cause. Since the bishops will not teach the flock it is up to the flock to teach themselves. Continue to give up meat on Friday, or if that's not your preference, give up something else or add a Mass or rosary.
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