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Author Topic: Reluctant to shorten my purgatory  (Read 2600 times)

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Re: Reluctant to shorten my purgatory
« Reply #20 on: October 04, 2018, 08:48:17 PM »
There is no time in Purgatory, and we shouldn’t look at is as a place of punishment. It’s primarily a place of purification. Pope Benedict XVI gives the best explanation of Purgatory I’ve read

"Some recent theologians are of the opinion that the fire which both burns and saves is Christ himself, the Judge and Saviour. The encounter with him is the decisive act of judgement. Before his gaze all falsehood melts away. This encounter with him, as it burns us, transforms and frees us, allowing us to become truly ourselves. All that we build during our lives can prove to be mere straw, pure bluster, and it collapses. Yet in the pain of this encounter, when the impurity and sickness of our lives become evident to us, there lies salvation. His gaze, the touch of his heart heals us through an undeniably painful transformation “as through fire”. But it is a blessed pain, in which the holy power of his love sears through us like a flame, enabling us to become totally ourselves and thus totally of God. In this way the inter-relation between justice and grace also becomes clear: the way we live our lives is not immaterial, but our defilement does not stain us for ever if we have at least continued to reach out towards Christ, towards truth and towards love. Indeed, it has already been burned away through Christ’s Passion. At the moment of judgement we experience and we absorb the overwhelming power of his love over all the evil in the world and in ourselves. The pain of love becomes our salvation and our joy. It is clear that we cannot calculate the “duration” of this transforming burning in terms of the chronological measurements of this world. The transforming “moment” of this encounter eludes earthly time-reckoning—it is the heart’s time, it is the time of “passage” to communion with God in the Body of Christ[39]. The judgement of God is hope, both because it is justice and because it is grace. If it were merely grace, making all earthly things cease to matter, God would still owe us an answer to the question about justice—the crucial question that we ask of history and of God. If it were merely justice, in the end it could bring only fear to us all. The incarnation of God in Christ has so closely linked the two together—judgement and grace—that justice is firmly established: we all work out our salvation “with fear and trembling” (Phil 2:12). Nevertheless grace allows us all to hope, and to go trustfully to meet the Judge whom we know as our “advocate”, or parakletos (cf. 1 Jn 2:1"

Offline Stubborn

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Re: Reluctant to shorten my purgatory
« Reply #21 on: October 05, 2018, 06:49:22 AM »
There is no time in Purgatory, and we shouldn’t look at is as a place of punishment. It’s primarily a place of purification. Pope Benedict XVI gives the best explanation of Purgatory I’ve read
There *is* time in purgatory, we receive indulgences for the souls in purgatory for certain acts made here on earth, these indulgences lessen the time in purgatory by certain amount of days. Also, it has always been piously believed by all the faithful that all souls in purgatory will be released into heaven at the end of time.  

The souls in purgatory are the Church Suffering because it is a place of punishment. It is a place of purification by fire, God sends us there as a punishment for our sins and to be purified by fire. The souls in purgatory suffer, which is why we call them the "suffering" souls in purgatory. 

Forget the NO and their opinions from "recent (modernist) theologians", they are wrong - and that quote you provided is probably the worst explanation of purgatory ever written. Novus Ordo right through.


Re: Reluctant to shorten my purgatory
« Reply #22 on: October 05, 2018, 06:07:34 PM »
There *is* time in purgatory, we receive indulgences for the souls in purgatory for certain acts made here on earth, these indulgences lessen the time in purgatory by certain amount of days. Also, it has always been piously believed by all the faithful that all souls in purgatory will be released into heaven at the end of time.  

The souls in purgatory are the Church Suffering because it is a place of punishment. It is a place of purification by fire, God sends us there as a punishment for our sins and to be purified by fire. The souls in purgatory suffer, which is why we call them the "suffering" souls in purgatory.  

Forget the NO and their opinions from "recent (modernist) theologians", they are wrong - and that quote you provided is probably the worst explanation of purgatory ever written. Novus Ordo right through.
The only things we are required to believe about Purgatory are what Trent says. Trent is very clear that we can not know the nature of Purgatory, and it exhorts priests not to make it into something it isn’t. . Your simplistic thinking on Purgatory is what caused wackos like Luther to be successful. Church officials were scamming the poor by scaring them with wacky notions of Purgatory.  Purgatory is a very speculative subject. We know very little about it. I myself prefer the Patristic and Eastern(Catholic) writing on Purgatory to the Medieval notion.

Offline Stubborn

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Re: Reluctant to shorten my purgatory
« Reply #23 on: October 06, 2018, 05:05:56 AM »
The only things we are required to believe about Purgatory are what Trent says. Trent is very clear that we can not know the nature of Purgatory, and it exhorts priests not to make it into something it isn’t. . Your simplistic thinking on Purgatory is what caused wackos like Luther to be successful. Church officials were scamming the poor by scaring them with wacky notions of Purgatory.  Purgatory is a very speculative subject. We know very little about it. I myself prefer the Patristic and Eastern(Catholic) writing on Purgatory to the Medieval notion.
This post of yours is Novus Ordo thinking. There is nothing speculative about it, purgatory is, as St. Thomas says, just like hell, except  it's fires are temporary, not eternal. I mean, fire is fire. The Novus Ordo try to play it off as "we really don't know", but fire is fire, it is only some "wacky notion" to non-Catholics.

Here is Trent's Catechism on the subject. Note that it's teaching is founded on Scripture and Apostolic Tradition, not the modernist opinions of some 'recent' heretical theologians:

What We Do Pray For
....We also beg of God that we be not cut off by a sudden death; that we provoke not His anger against us; that we
be not condemned to suffer the punishments reserved for the wicked; that we be not sentenced to endure the fire
of purgatory, from which we piously and devoutly implore that others may be liberated.


Different Abodes Called Hell
These abodes are not all of the same nature, for among them is that most loathsome and dark prison in which
the souls of the damned are tormented with the unclean spirits in eternal and inextinguishable fire. This place is
called gehenna, the bottomless pit, and is hell strictly so-called.

Among them is also the fire of purgatory, in which the souls of just men are cleansed by a temporary
punishment, in order to be admitted into their eternal country, into which nothing defiled entereth. The truth of
this doctrine, founded, as holy Councils declare,' on Scripture, and confirmed by Apostolic tradition, demands
exposition from the pastor, all the more diligent and frequent, because we live in times when men endure not
sound doctrine....