Quotes about Purgatory

The myth of purgatory is an allegory, a projection, from the present on to the future. This is why purgatory appeals to the imagination. It is our story. It is where we are now. If we are Christians, if we believe in the risen Jesus as Lord, if we are baptized members of his body, then we are passing right now through the sufferings which form the gateway to life.

True, the doctrine of purgatory was not so popular outside Roman circles in the nineteenth century. But "penal substitution," which had been emphasized partly in order to ward off that idea, then found a new home in the Western piety that focused not on God's kingdom coming on earth as in heaven, but on my sin, my heavenly (that is, nonworldly) salvation, and of course my Savior.

Earthly life is full of soporifics, anaesthetics, pain-dullers. In fact, compared with Purgatory our whole life on earth will appear to have been life only half awake. In Purgatory we will be fully awake, fully sensitive, and fully cognizant of the evil of all of our sins. Our clear knowledge of God's brightness and beauty will make our clear knowledge of our own darkness and ugliness more painful than any similar light that shows up our most terrible defects here on earth.

Expect the world to be Heaven, and it will feel like Hell. Expect it to be Purgatory, and it will feel like Heaven. The two most salient facts about Purgatory are pain and hope, suffering and meaning.

The Exodus also = salvation; Egypt = sin; Pharoah = Satan; Moses = Christ; the Jews = the Church; the Red Sea = death; the wilderness = Purgatory; the Old Law = the New Law; the gospel; the old Mount (Sinai) = the new mount from which Jesus preached His "sermon on the mount" (Mt 5-7); and the Promised Land = Heaven. The "=" is not mathematical but symbolic.

The purpose of Purgatory is to completely internalize, in your own individual soul, what Christ has completely accomplished in objective reality in His Passion. Nothing

The most serious religious objection to Purgatory, on the part of Protestants, is that the anticipation of the pains of Purgatory detracts from a happy death ("blessed are the dead who from now on die in the Lord"—Rev 14:13). But that is like saying that the pains of labor detract from the joy of childbirth. Deferred happiness is still happiness. In

Justification because of Christ alone (solus Christus) means that Jesus has done the necessary work of salvation utterly and completely, so that no merit on the part of man, no merit of the saints, no works of ours performed either here or later in purgatory, can add to his completed work.

If I were a Roman Catholic, I should turn a heretic, in sheer desperation, because I would rather go to heaven than go to purgatory.

Sacrifice without love is pain. Pain with love is sacrifice. Pain without love is misery. Love without pain is heaven. Love with pain is purgatory. Pain without love is hell.

Is this purgatory, and if it is, why is it so much like the first grade?

God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform, as Reenie used to say. Could it be that Myra is my designated guardian angel? Or is she instead a foretaste of Purgatory? And how do you tell the difference?