prayers for dead

Purgatory and the Judgment

November 2, 2017 in Mount Calvary Church No Comments Tags: Judgment, prayers for dead, Purgatory, shame

In the All Saints Tide edition of the Mount Calvary Magazine in 1935, the rector reflected upon purgatory:

“People do not go to heaven when they die. Heaven is a special sphere of which the chief characteristic is the unveiled presence of God and only those souls who have been entirely cleansed from all stain of sin and so developed in spiritual capacity that they can bear the sight of God.”

“The mere physical fact of death does not change does not change a sinner into a saint. We die sinners and death is a door to a better life where temptation is removed and the ravages of sin are healed. When that work of purgation—cleansing—is completed, then the sinner has become a saint.”

Of our beloved dead:

“what does death do to them? It brings them before their Judge and they see themselves as He sees them; they feel their sins as never before and penitence takes full instead of partial possession of them; they claim no merits but claim only to the redeeming love of their Saviour. They want us who are left here to pray for them, especially to share in offering the Holy Sacrifice which continues to all souls the power of the Cross.”

It is a braider topic, but in the later Middles Ages Christians began to have a Cartesian sense of time and space, possibly because of the ubiquity of clocks and the recovery of perspective. They lost the awareness that both time and space will be (are) transfigured in the New Creation, and that the One Sacrifice of Calvary in 33 AD can also be present on the altar, and the Lamb standing as one slain in heaven is also present on the altar.

Judgment has two meanings: a person has good judgment if he sees things clearly and accurately and acts appropriately; but judgment also means a punishment.

The motto of the Dominicans is Veritas, Truth, and truth is the correspondence of the mind with reality. God sees everything accurately; we do not; in fact we engage in infinite self-deception.

At our judgment, God shows us the truth of our life: that we are not the persons he had planned for us to be, and they wee have really messed up (I’d like to use a stronger verb) our lives. But the blood of Jesus, if we accept it, washes all this away and restores the divine image in us.

We see everything that God has done for us, and how ungrateful we have been. That burning shame is the fire of purgatory.

Is it a punishment? Well, yes, but not an arbitrary one. It is intrinsic to our repentance and purgation.

He wrote of those who have prayed for the dead and themselves have died with no family or friends to pray for them:

“it grieves us to realize that some of those who in other years have been most loving in asking such prayers have gone to join those for whom they have prayed, leaving no one behind to go on remembering the family.”

Let s pray for all the members of Mount Calvary who have died, especially those who have been forgotten and have no one to pray for them.

As the prayer of Fatima in the rosary says “O my Jesus, save us from hell; lead all souls to heaven, especially those in most need of Thy mercy.”

The Worst of Sinners

April 8, 2013 in clergy sex abuse scandal 33 Comments Tags: Cardinal Groer, prayers for dead, sexual abuse

Too many Christians have the idea that all you need to do to be saved is be basically good or at least well-intentioned. They have a week grasp on the holiness of God and the infinite distance between divine holiness and natural man at his best.

As a corollary to this attitude, there are acceptable and non-acceptable sins. Acceptable sins are the sins that normal middle class people commit, such as fornication and adultery. More expansive people extend it to underclass sins, such as murder.

But almost everyone draws the line at genocide and child abuse.

What people have a hard time grasping (and I include myself) is that Christ came to die for sinners, including the worst of sinners.

Catholics pray for the living and the dead. Purgatory is a specifically western Catholic doctrine, but Protestants with whom I have discussed it say that the equivalent Protestant doctrine is standing before the judgment seat of God after death, and seeing the full truth of one’s life and of God’s attitude to it.

After the attacks pf 9/11. I couldn’t bring myself to pray for the attackers, although they needed prayers more than anyone else. I prayed for all the dead. When I did the Camino, each day prayed for the victims of sexual abuse and for the abusers – and that was a hard prayer to make.

As part of their prayers for the dead, Catholics have masses said for the deceased. The mass is not meant to honor the deceased (as idea that has taken hold at funeral masses) but to pray for them as they come before the judgment seat of God.

In Franco’s Spain (and perhaps today) masses are said for the repose of the soul of Adolf Hitler – and if anyone needs prayer, he does. A mass is being offered for the terrible abuser, Cardinal Groër. He had homoerotic contact with almost very student he can in contact with, perhaps a thousand , perhaps more. His case has devastated the church in Austria, and still causes trouble:

VIENNA – Reacting to criticism, an Austrian bishop says he has changed his mind and will not attend a memorial Mass for a cardinal accused of molesting young boys.

Agidius Zsifkovics, the bishop of Eisenstadt, was to participate in Monday’s Mass marking the 10th anniversary of the death of Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer. But Zsifkovics says he decided not to “after numerous encounters and discussions over the past days.”

Groer stepped down as archbishop of Vienna in 1995 after former theological students accused him of sexual abuse.

After Zsifkovics initially said he would attend the service, a statement on the website of “Those Affected by Churchly Abuse” late last month accused him of planning to honour a man who left “a trail of spiritual destruction.”

I don’t know what was the intention of Bishop Zsifkovics; but masses are said – or at least should be said – not to honor the deceased but to pray for him, a sinner. And the worst sinners need the most prayers.