Catechism and Bible on Purgatory

III. THE FINAL PURIFICATION, OR PURGATORY

1030 All who die in God's grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation; but after death they undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven.

1031 The Church gives the name Purgatory to this final purification of the elect, which is entirely different from the punishment of the damned. The Church formulated her doctrine of faith on Purgatory especially at the Councils of Florence and Trent. The tradition of the Church, by reference to certain texts of Scripture, speaks of a cleansing fire: 

As for certain lesser faults, we must believe that, before the Final Judgment, there is a purifying fire. He who is truth says that whoever utters blasphemy against the Holy Spirit will be pardoned neither in this age nor in the age to come. From this sentence we understand that certain offenses can be forgiven in this age, but certain others in the age to come.

1032 This teaching is also based on the practice of prayer for the dead, already mentioned in Sacred Scripture: "Therefore [Judas Maccabeus] made atonement for the dead, that they might be delivered from their sin." 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. The Church also commends almsgiving, indulgences, and works of penance undertaken on behalf of the dead:

Let us help and commemorate them. If Job's sons were purified by their father's sacrifice, why would we doubt that our offerings for the dead bring them some consolation? Let us not hesitate to help those who have died and to offer our prayers for them.

Scripturally, we have to go through "the fire" as St. Paul tells us in his first letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 3: 11-20, New English) says and have our works tested.  If they are like gold, we pass through unharmed.  If they are like straw, they burn and we suffer. Exact quote from the New English version: 

There can be no other foundation beyond that which is already laid; I mean Jesus Christ himself.  If anyone builds on that foundation with gold, silver, and fine stone, or with wood, hay, and straw, the work that each man does will at last be brought to light; the day of judgement will expose it.  For that day dawns in fire, and the fire will test the worth of each man’s work.  If a man’s building stands, he will be rewarded; if it burns, he will have to bear the loss; and yet he will escape with his life, as one might from a fire.  

KJV: 

For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.  Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble;  Every man's work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is.  If any man's work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward.  If any man's work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire.

Catholicism and Salvation

That they who sin had been cut off from God, may be disposed through His quickening and helping grace to convert themselves to their own justification by freely assenting to and cooperating with that grace, so that, while God touches the heart of man through the illumination of the Holy Ghost, man himself neither does absolutely nothing while receiving that inspiration, since he can also reject it, nor yet is he able by his own free will and without the face of God to move himself to justice in his sight.

--Council of Trent, “Decree Concerning Justice,” Sixth Session, 13 January 1547.

Pope Benedict on Communio

In other words, common human nature creates the very possibility that we can communicate with one another. We are not only nature but also persons, and in such a way that each person represents a unique way of being human different from everyone else. Therefore, nature alone is not sufficient to communicate the inner sensibility of persons. If we want to draw another distinction between individuality and personality, then we could say that individuality divides and being a person opens. Being a person is by nature being related. But why does it open? Because both in its very depths and in its highest aspirations being a person goes beyond its own boundaries towards a greater, universal “something” and even toward a greater, universal “someone.” The all-embracing third, to which we return so often can only bind when it is greater and higher than individuals. On the other hand, the third it itself within each individual because it touches each one from within. Augustine once described this as “higher than my heights, more interior than I am to myself.” This third, which in truth is the first, we call God. We touch ourselves in him. Through him and only through him, a communio which grasps our own depths comes into being. 

[Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal. "Communio-a Program." Communio 19 (1992): 436-449.]

Tolkien's Profound Love of the Eucharist

When the potential producer of a movie version of The Lord of the Rings showed Tolkien the script, Tolkien was aghast. In addition to too many oversimplifications and wrong-headed ideas, which ran contrary to the spirit of the tale, Tolkien discovered that the script writer had changed the “Lembas,” the food given by Galadriel to the Fellowship to sustain themselves for their journey, to a “food concentrate.” No chemical analysis, Tolkien wrote back, could uncover its properties. Instead, it “has a much larger significance, of what one might hesitatingly call a ‘religious’ kind.”[1] Properly translated, lembas means “way-bread” or “life-bread.”[2] In his “On Fairy Stories,” Tolkien notes that fairy allows us to see everyday things as something more than everyday things. One of his examples is of “wine and bread.”[3] As Frodo struggles up Mount Doom to destroy the Ring, the lembas sustains him.

The lembas has a virtue without which they would long ago have lain down to die. It did not satisfy desire, and at times Sam’s mind was filled with the memories of food, and the longing for simple bread and meats. And yet this way bread of the Elves had a potency that increased as travellers relied on it alone and did not mingle it with other foods. It fed the will, and it gave strength to endure, and to master sinew and limb beyond the measure of mortal kind.[4]

The lembas plays a vital role throughout the entirety of The Lord of the Rings. Not only does it sustain Frodo and Sam as they complete their mission, but it also protects and feeds the wills of Merry and Pippen as captives of the orcs, and Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli as they search for the demonic enemies who have captured the two Hobbits.[5] Conversely, evil refuses to partake of it, and when some orcs find the lembas on Frodo’s person, they attempt to destroy it.[6]


Lembas also appears several times in The Silmarillion and the History of Middle-earth. The first man to receive it, Turin Turambar, received it from a Maia, Melian, mother of Lúthien. In no way, Tolkien wrote, could Melian have paid Turin a greater honor. It served Turin and his company well, as it quickly healed all wounds and illnesses during their mission. Rarely, though, did the Elves share it with men.[7] The men of Númenor also made a form of lembas, but it never equaled the quality or enchantment of the Elven lembas. Tellingly, Isildur carried the man-made substitute en route to his death on the Gladden Fields.[8]


As Charles Columbe has written, such stories regarding a supernatural substance enhancing and embracing the good and Godly reflect numerous medieval legends surrounding the Blessed Sacrament.[9] Indeed, the Elven lembas arguably serves as Tolkien’s most blatant symbol of Christianity in The Lord of the Rings; it is a representation, though pre-Christian, of the Eucharist. For Tolkien, nothing represented a greater gift from God than the actual Body and Blood of Christ. “I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament,” Tolkien wrote to his son Michael. “There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth.”[10] Like all devout pre-Vatican II Catholics, Tolkien always attended confession before receiving the Sacrament.[11] Indeed, the sacraments for Tolkien served as the best and, perhaps, only effective means of preventing Satan from taking over the world. Tolkien encouraged his children to receive it daily, as it “must be continuous and grow by exercise.”[12] Even the screaming children of others failed to distract or taint Tolkien’s reception of the Blessed Sacrament.[13] The Sacrament wielded so much power, that only the most corrupt soul would lose faith after taking it, he believed. To deny it, was to “call Our Lord a fraud to His face.”[14]


Even more powerfully to a devout Catholic, Tolkien once experienced a holy vision while praying before the Blessed Sacrament. “I perceived or thought of the Light of God and in it suspended one small mote (or millions of motes to only one of which was my small mind directed), glittering white because of the individual ray from the Light which both held.” Tolkien also witnessed his guardian angel in the vision, not as a go-between but as the personalization of “God’s very attention.”[15]

Notes [all taken from J.R.R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth (copyright, 2003 by Brad Birzer and ISI Books):
[1]Carpenter, ed., Letters, 274-75.
[2]J.R.R. Tolkien, The Peoples of Middle-earth, ed. Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 404.
[3]Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” 113.
[4]Tolkien, The Return of the King, 213.
[5]Tolkien, The Two Towers, 29, 31.
[6]Tolkien, The Two Towers, 92; and Tolkien, The Return of the King, 190-91.
[7]Tolkien, The Silmarillion, 202-5, 207.
[8]Tolkien, Unfinished Tales, 276.
[9]Columbe, “The Lord of the Rings–A Catholic View,” 57.
[10]Carpenter, ed., Letters, 53.
[11]Sayer, “Recollections,” 10.
[12]Carpenter, ed., Letters, 338.
[13]Carpenter, Tolkien: A Biography, 143.
[14]Carpenter, ed., Letters, 338.
[15]Carpenter, ed., Letters, 99.

C.S. Lewis and the Weight of Glory

Meanwhile the cross comes before the crown and tomorrow is a Monday morning. A cleft has opened in the pitiless walls of the world, and we are invited to follow our great Captain inside. The following Him is, of course, the essential point. That being so, it may be asked what practical use there is in the speculations which I have been indulging. I can think of iat least one such use. It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbour. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour’s glory should be laid on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you say it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations--these are moral, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit--immortals horrors of everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously--no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner--no mere tolerance, or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat--the glorifier and the gloried, Glory Himself, is truly hidden. 

--CSLewis, The Weight of Glory, 45-46)

B16 and Morality in a Fallen World

“Accordingly, the refusal to refer to God in the Constitution is not the expression of a tolerance that wishes to protect the non-theistic religions and the dignity of atheists and agnostics; rather, it is the expression of a consciousness that would like to see God eradicated once and for all from the public life of humanity and shut up in the subjective sphere of cultural residues from the past. In this way, relativism, which is the starting point of this whole process, becomes a dogmatism that believes itself in possession of the definitive knowledge of human reason, with the right to consider everything else merely as a stage in human history that is basically obsolete and deserves to be relativized. In reality, this means that we have need of roots if we are to survive and that we must not lose sight of God if we do not want human dignity to disappear.” (44-45)

“This means that both parties must reflect on their own selves and be ready to accept correction. Christianity must always remember that it is the religion of the Logos. Christianity is faith in the Creator Spiritus, from whom comes everything that is real. Precisely this ought to give Christianity its philosophical power today, since the problem is whether the world comes from an irrational source, so that reason would be nothing but a ‘by-product’ (perhaps even a harmful by-product) of the development of the world, or whether the world comes from reason, so that its criterion and its goal is reason. The Christian faith opts for this second thesis and has good arguments to back it up, even from a purely philosophical point of view, despite the fact that so many people today consider the first thesis the only ‘rational’ and modern view. A reason that has its origin in the irrational and is itself ultimately irrational does not offer a solution to our problems. Only that creative reason which has manifested itself as love in he crucified God can truly show us what life is.” (49)

“We need men whose intellect is enlightened by the light of God, so that their intellect can speak to the intellect of others and their hearts can open the hearts of others. It is only by means of men who have been touched by God that God can return to be with mankind.” (52)

“This is why morality, which beings with this look directed to the other, is the custodian of the truth and the dignity of man: man needs morality in order to be himself and not lose his dignity in the world of things.” (70) 

“In reality, morality is always embedded in a wider religious context in which it ‘breathes’ and finds its proper environment. Outside this environment, morality cannot breathe; it weakens and then dies.” (70)

“We too succeed in looking at others in a manner that respects their personal dignity if we experience how God looks at us in love.” (71)

“Christianity is the remembrance of the look of love that the Lord directs to man, and that look preserves the fullness of his truth and the ultimate guarantee of his dignity” (71).

“For Paul, the moral decadence of society is nothing more than the logical consequence and the faithful reflection of this radical perversion. When man prefers his own egoism, his pride, and his convenience to the demands made on him by the truth, the only possible outcome is an upside-down existence. Adoration is due to God alone, but what is adored is no longer God; images, outward appearances, and current opinion have dominion over man. This general alteration extends to every sphere of life. That which is against nature becomes the norm; the man who lives against he truth also lives against nature. His creativity is no longer at the service of the good: he devotes his genius to ever more refined forms of evil. The bonds between man and woman, and between parents and children, are dissolved, so that the very sources from which life springs are blocked up. It is no longer life that reigns, but death. A civilization of death is formed (Rom 1:21-32). The description of decadence that Paul sketches here astonishes us modern readers by its contemporary relevance.” (95)

“The knowledge of God has always existed. And everywhere in the history of religions, in various forms, we encounter the significant conflict between the knowledge of the one God and the attraction of other powers that are considered more dangerous or nearer at hand and, therefore, more important for man than the God who is distant mysterious. All of history bears the traces of this strange dilemma between the non-violent, tranquil demands made by the truth, on the one hand, and the pressure brought to make profits and the need to have a good relationship with the powers that determine daily life by their interventions, on the other hand. Again and again, we see the victory of profit over truth, although the signs of the truth and of its own power never disappear completely. Indeed, they continue to live, often in surprising forms, in the very heart of a jungle full of poisonous plants.” (98)

The above from: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Christianity and the Crisis of Culture (San Francisco, California: Ignatius Press, 2005).

September 18, 2011 Class

Hillsdale College Community: Please don't forget that we'll be having our second Catholic Inquiry class this Sunday, 1-2:30pm, at St. Anthony's RC Parish.  Food (I've seen the menu--it looks great) will be provided.  We'll finish our discussion of Pope Benedict XVI's theology.  All members of the HC community--students, faculty, staff, Catholic/non-Catholic--are welcome.