Saturday 2 November 2024

Sweet Jesus, Bless The Holy Souls

"The belief that love can reach into the afterlife, that reciprocal giving and receiving is possible, in which our affection for one another continues beyond the limits of death—this has been a fundamental conviction of Christianity throughout the ages and it remains a source of comfort today. Who would not feel the need to convey to their departed loved ones a sign of kindness, a gesture of gratitude or even a request for pardon?"


My first All Souls Day as a speccy four eyes, and I went to Mass with only my distance glasses, wearing them of course, leaving my reading glasses at home. As I entered the church, I was asked to read. Still, I got through it. Lesson learned. As it were.

Purgatory is not a second chance. It is only for souls that are already on the way to Heaven. If you are going to Hell, then you are going to Hell. To the charge that Purgatory is unbiblical, there are four answers.

First, the idea of Christianity as baldly "based on the Bible" is purely sixteenth century, and it has been minoritarian and contentious from the day that it was first proposed. Secondly, the Second Book of Maccabees is part of the Old Testament Canon of historic Christianity, again undisputed for the first three quarters of Christian history to date, and again acknowledged by the great majority of the world's Christians at any given time.

Thirdly, the Catholic reading of 1 Corinthians 3:10-15, which is the direct New Testament and indeed Pauline basis of the doctrine of Purgatory, is many centuries older than any Protestant reading of anything. And fourthly, those who charge that the doctrine of Purgatory is unbiblical almost invariably hold a view of life after death that cannot begin to be sustained out of Scripture, a view according to which newly disembodied souls entered immediately into their final, but incorporeal, bliss or torment.

For all the talk of oxymoronic "spiritual bodies", the people in the pews would be shocked to learn that many of their most revered leaders have held, and openly if obscurely continue to hold, the original Protestant position that the souls of the dead were unconscious until the General Resurrection, effectively as dead as their bodies. That can at least claim some relationship to Scripture, although only such as to bring us back to the first of our four points.

Martin Luther's theory of justification by faith alone is directly unbiblical. See instead James 2:24, all attempts to reconcile which with Luther's teaching are contrary as much to his own example as to every word on the subject before his relatively recent time. ὁρᾶτε ὅτι ἐξ ἔργων δικαιοῦται ἄνθρωπος καὶ οὐκ ἐκ πίστεως μόνον, as they say in Diocesan Safeguarding Offices.

According to Luther's theory, justification is merely forensic, with the righteousness of Christ only imputed to the saved, and not also imparted through the Church's ministry of Word and Sacrament. This is contrary to the very etymology of iustum facere, terminology that Protestants choose to retain. But it purports to remove the need for many things, including Purgatory.

There is no reason why a soul that God had declared righteous as a kind of legal fiction ought not to go to Heaven immediately at bodily death, although, as set out above, Luther himself did not believe that. But there is every reason why a soul that was still in the process of being brought to "the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ" would have to continue that process, although now at no risk of being lost. "Be ye perfect," and who dies perfect? But just as you cannot be saved after death, so you cannot be damned after death, either.

Therefore, the Holy Souls are members of the Church. They pray for us, and we may, and therefore must, pray for them. The old Mass for the Most Abandoned Soul in Purgatory may call to mind the nul points of the Eurovision Song Contest, but it points to the sublime truth that no one in the Church has nul points. Whoever that member is, then there is someone praying for them. The Church, as such, is praying for that member, as for every other.

Seen in this light, indulgences make perfect sense. The grace obtained by the Salvific Work of Jesus Christ is superabundant both according to Saint John's Gospel and according to Saint Paul's Epistle to the Romans, which are classically seen in Protestantism as exercising a kind of controlling influence within the New Testament. And according to the latter, "We, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another."

Yes, there is an element of pain to Purgatory. "God has created us for Himself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Him." After all, this is a process of correction, after death as before it. That must be a punishment for sin, without which no correction would be necessary. Yet in the pain of correction, there is also the joy of improvement. To deny Purgatory is to deny that joy, that gift from God; the gift of being made, and not merely declared, righteous through the Church's impartation, and not only the imputation, of Christ's righteousness.

Certain Protestant tendencies do emphasise imparted righteousness, notably Methodism and its outgrowths in the Holiness movement, and thus in Pentecostalism and the Charismatic Renewal. The vocabulary there is of entire sanctification, of Christian Perfection, of "salvation to the utmost". Having lived in County Durham since the age of four, I have been around Methodists most of my life. But dear brothers and sisters, have you ever met an entirely sanctified person, saved to the utmost in this life? Perhaps very occasionally. Perhaps only once. Or perhaps never. And do you yourself realistically expect to die one?

Time cannot pass nowhere, so how can Purgatory exist in time but not in space? I wrestled for decades with petitionary prayer to the Immutable God, but He led me to the answer, and you can probably guess how. I always knew by faith that that answer was there; the same applies in this case, too. And in the end, so to speak, you either accept the Teaching Authority of the Catholic Church, or you do not. If you do, then you accept everything that is taught on that authority. Saint Augustine said that he believed that the Bible was the Word of God because that was what the Church taught that it was. Quite.

26 comments:

  1. "ὁρᾶτε ὅτι ἐξ ἔργων δικαιοῦται ἄνθρωπος καὶ οὐκ ἐκ πίστεως μόνον, as they say in Diocesan Safeguarding Offices." Ee, I did laugh at that. But this is a brilliant post, and the use of the King James Bible is inspired (see what I did there?). How do they argue with that? Indulgences defended from Paul as translated for King James. Genius, like all of this post.

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  2. You got the lowest possible pass mark and got banned from All Saints. What’s it like being thick?

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    1. I do not understand the first part of that, and nothing could be further from the second in three different cases, the Catholic church here, the Catholic primary school here (not that I have any reason to enter it, but I am certainly not banned), and the Anglican church here.

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    2. The lowest possible pass mark for what? I thought you got a 2:1.

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    3. I did. And an MA. A thousand years ago.

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    4. With a 2:1 how are you not Prime Minister? That's what they usually got.

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    5. Starmer got a First, as did Sunak. But yes, Johnson and May, like Thatcher and Blair, were 2:1s. Truss has never disclosed her class of degree.

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    6. We don't do Firsts or Thirds at Durham.

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    7. I doubt that the old place is still like that, alas. And of course there were always scientists, a completely different story where Firsts and Thirds alike were concerned.

      Classes of BA do depend largely on the extent to which the examiner agreed with you, and that is never truer than in Theology, but that Department was odd for the number of people reading for second, third and even fourth degrees with a view to ordination, as well as for people who specialised in the Biblical languages, meaning that they were examined by translation exercises, and seen translation exercises at that. People in either or both of those categories took Firsts routinely, but they were extremely rare otherwise, perhaps one or two per year.

      I cannot remember a Third in Theology. I cannot see how one would achieve such a thing. There did used to be a lot in Classics, though, where Firsts were practically unheard of, and where the normal degree was still a 2:2 into the twenty-first century.

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    8. Fabulous. You can’t be more explicit in being thick than BOASTING 🤣🤣 you’ve got a second class degree. Anyone with a brain would be humiliated but not you, oh no.

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    9. Boasting how? It is on my CV, of course, but run-of-the-mill things that I did a generation ago do not trouble my thoughts now. I was doing more remarkable things than that even then.

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    10. How many school governorships did you have by the time you graduated?

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    11. You got a second class degree and don’t even understand how humiliating that is. Anyone with a brain would.

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    12. To Anonymous 20:15, one when I took the BA, two by the time I started the MA.

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    13. Never trust people who mention their class of degree.

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    14. They are right down there with those who talk about themselves in the third person.

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  3. Thank you you for this beautiful post. As for the earlier comments you're the first name people mention when anyone says they're from Lanchester parish, "How is the great man?" and all that. You probably know a lot of the priests call you the Godfather, it must be the outfits. What do you think of people moaning about the cost of the new Lectionary?

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    1. They spend more than that, of our money, on a lunch for the ecclesiastical salariat and its hangers on. In any case, anything is worth being free of the Jerusalem Bible Lectionary.

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  4. James 2:24 wasn’t contradicting Paul or arguing justification was not by faith alone-he was arguing that real faith, as opposed to mere intellectual assent, is evidenced in actions.

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    1. There is no suggestion of contradicting Saint Paul, who does not teach justification by faith alone, whereas Saint James expressly rules it out. No one read them as you suggest until the sixteenth century, and most people never have.

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  5. James does not argue for justification by works, only that true faith should be reflected in actions.

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    1. No one has ever argued for justification by works.

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  6. Marathon weekend here in NYC and had 4 glasses of mimosa. A second read is a must. Purgatory is flashing on my eyes so my thoughts floated to atonement. Power nap and a read.
    BTW, I wonder why Fr. Calvin Robinson is living in Michigan.

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