PMV:
Also if you’ve read about Purgatory in *Catholicism for Dummies *it even says straight out that it is punishment for our sins, and from what I know priests helped make that book.
While “Catholicism for Dummies” is a well-intentioned book that deals a bit simplistically with Catholic teachings, it is hardly an authoritative teaching document.
The Cathechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) is available online at:
Catechism
and has been described by John Paul II: “I declare it to be a sure norm for teaching the faith and thus a valid and legitimate instrument for ecclesial communion.”
When the same claim is made for “Catholicism for Dummies”, I will hold it in the same esteem.
With that in mind, there are some useful insights in CFD:
“It may help to think of the purgatory in terms of a major operation to save a life. Say a doctor performs surgery on someone’s heart or brain and removes a cancerous tumor. The surgery achieves the main objective, but the wound needs to heal, and the incision needs to be cleaned and rebandaged. Purgatory is like that secondary part of recovery - the healing, cleaning, and bandaging.
The belief is that the evil of sin is revealed to the person so she can totally and absolutely reject even the most venial and smallest of sins.” — CFD p. 289
Your point regarding purgatory as punishment:
"Purgatory is more than the temporal punishment for sin. It’s also the cleansing from the attachment to sin. Purgatory purifies the soul before the soul’s grand entrance into heaven. " — CFD p. 289
The emphasis is clearly on the cleansing or purification of the individual, but it is hard to fault you too gravely for what might be considered a less than exact phrasing. It is a good idea to always reference the Catechism when questions arise.
“Often, after committing a sin, people later regret it and are remorseful. Catholics confess their sins and believe that God forgives them in the Sacrament of Penance. However, many times people still have pleasant memories of those sins. They’re sorry and regret doing them, but they have some enjoyable and pleasurable memories - some leftover attachment to the sins. Catholicism teaches that the souls in purgatory want to be in purgatory, because they know that they have some leftover attachment to sin that they want to be removed.” — CFD p. 290
You say: “Also if you’ve read about Purgatory in Catholicism for Dummies it even says straight out that it is punishment for our sins…”
Please understand that we don’t “want punishment”. We do and shall “want purification”.
One last comparison:
“Pretend that you went to an ear, nose, and throat doctor, and he said that you have allergies, and one of them is to dust mites. Now, dust mites can’t be seen, so people usually aren’t too concerned or worried about them until they see them under an electron microscope, which reveals how ugly and harmful these critters are. After you see them, you never look at dust the same way again, and you never want to get anywhere near those mites, because you have an idea how nasty they really are. Anyway, you can think of purgatory like a spiritual electron microscope that shows all that nasty sin - mortal and venial -revealing how dangerous and harmful any sin is to the soul. Purgatory allows people to recognize that even one small sin is repugnant and offensive to an all-loving and all-good God.” — CFD p. 290
While this is not an exhaustive set of quotations from Catholicism for Dummies, it should serve to illustrate that the emphasis is not on “punishment”, but upon the purgative aspect of purgatory.
More to come.
Peace in Christ…Salmon
