New question…
“We can’t “do” anything to “make up” for our sins.”
Then what is the point of purgatory? Does it or does it not have to do with “paying back that dollar I stole”?
Jesus took our eternal punishment - He descended into Hell. However, being God, He could not remain in Hell - He rose again from the dead, ascended body and spirit into Heaven (and because He at this point now had a human nature and a human body, His human nature and human body blew the locks off the doors of Heaven - in a manner of speaking - and caused it to be possible for human beings to go to Heaven, which they couldn’t before) and is now seated at the right hand of the Father, as we are told in the
Apostles’ Creed.
The reason we go to Purgatory is not to be
punished, but to be
purified. Now, being purified is darned uncomfortable, and it is tempting to think of it as a “punishment” because of the fact that it is (let’s be honest)
very painful to let go of our petty jealousies, our bad habits, and our material attachments.
Penances that we do here on earth, including Indulgences, are also not “punishments” - these, too, are intended for our purification, and it’s good to do them even if we
haven’t committed any sins or needed to go to Confession recently, because they help us to grow in the spiritual life.
Getting back to my example about reading the Scriptures for a period of 30 minutes without interruption, I’m sure you can see how that would be spiritually beneficial even to someone who wasn’t doing it as a penance after going to Confession.
I think that to speak of “making up for sins” is a kind of beginner-level way of thinking of what it is that we are really doing when we are doing penances and gaining Indulgences, because really what the intent behind these things is, is to develop habits of virtue, which would then displace any tendencies or habits that we might have towards sin.
Do you remember the parable that Jesus told about the seven devils? Remember how the man got rid of his devil? (Maybe some kind of a bad habit, or a small sin.) But because he didn’t replace his “devil” with something else to take its place his “house” was empty, and so the same “devil” came back, with seven
more “devils” (that is, he became seven times the sinner that he had been before) - what this parable teaches us is that, if we are to get rid of a bad habit or a sin permanently, what we need to do is not only get rid of it, but
replace it with a virtue.
So, for example, someone who is trying to quit smoking not only has to stop putting cigarettes in his mouth - he has to put something else in his mouth instead of the cigarettes - maybe chew some gum, or drink a glass of water - or else he will always be struggling with the temptation to smoke.
The only way to make the temptation go away is to replace the bad habit with a good habit.
Penances are really just good habits that we need to develop - the habit of praying, the habit of reading the Bible, the habit of helping the poor, and so on.
penWindow(‘cr/602.htm’)
Consequently, St. Peter can formulate the apostolic faith in the divine plan of salvation in this way: "You were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your fathers. . . with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot. He was destined before the foundation of the world but was made manifest at the end of the times for your sake."402** Man’s sins, following on original sin, are punishable by death.403 By sending his own Son in the form of a slave, in the form of a fallen humanity, on account of sin, God “made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”**404
