Who can actually get into heaven? Why purgatory?

[Melissa]

Personally I don’t like the analogy of purgatory being for “paying off every last debt”. Purgatory is not debtor’s prison.

Consider the word. Purge-atory.
What does it mean to purge? What do we seek to be purged of in order to attain heaven?

We wish to be purged of imperfections - we seek to be made perfect in Love. We can undergo purgation here - or in the next life.

Just some thoughts

Peace
James

I agree–an analogy that I have used … if Heaven is a mansion, and a great feast is laid in the dining room–everyone who goes through Purgatory and directly to Heaven will end up at that dining room table for the feast. Some people come through the front door (martyrs, other heroically virtuous saints). They’re already ready to come sit down at the table.

Others have to go through the “mud room” and clean up a little before coming inside. There’s mud on the boots, and such. They can smell the feast, they’re so close it hurts not to be there already, but the clean up has to take place first.

 

[JRKH]

Thanks, AO!
…
Right: purgatory is about cleansing.
…
Again, cleansing.
…
Yet, we need to see what, in context, the Church says about temporal punishment: "every sin, even venial, entails an unhealthy attachment to creatures, which must be purified either here on earth, or after death in the state called Purgatory. This purification frees one from what is called the “temporal punishment” of sin. " (CCC, 1472)

So, purgatory doesn’t punish, but its cleansing frees us from the ‘temporal punishment due to sin’!
…
Here, I think, is where my internal alarms go off. If you want to call the cleansing of purgatory ‘punitive’, then that’s ok, I guess – there’s certainly a tradition of characterizing it that way (although that’s not at all the way that the Church currently describes it to us. Are you really saying that the metaphors of ‘punishment’ that the Church used 400 or 600 years ago are more accurate than the teachings of the catechism today?). However, you’re linking the notion of ‘punishment’ to the notion of “God’s Justice.” Clearly, God’s justice is satisfied through absolution (“These two punishments [eternal and temporal] must not be conceived of as a kind of vengeance inflicted by God”, CCC 1472), and so, there is no satisfaction due through an appeal to justice, but rather, through an appeal to the goodness of God, who gives us the grace necessary to attain to heaven: “when the day comes, serenely facing death, the Christian must strive to accept this temporal punishment of sin as a grace” (CCC, 1473).

Blessings,

G.

Something I would like to add here…We must remember that those who undergo purgation must do so willingly - whether it be in this life or the next. We can, like Jesus, pray that the “cup” pass us by, but we must willingly accept that which the Lord asks of us.

Purgatory is offered to us as a mercy - a perfecting. It is not required of us as something “punitive” to satisfy some idea of “justice”.

Peace
James

 

[opusAquinas]

Get yourself an indulgence. It was big business in Luther’s day and it is even now.

 

[opusAquinas]

My post has been deleted because it was deemed “offensive.”
OK.
I shall write in plain fact: you can receive an indulgence and you will not have to spend any time in purgatory.

 

[opusAquinas]

If you can get an indulgence to get yourself out of spending time in purgatory then ergo! your indulgence means what? an automatic cleansing without suffering???

So you don’t have to suffer the so called cleansing just get an indulgence.

Find a Canon lawyer.

 

[opusAquinas]

I agree–an analogy that I have used … if Heaven is a mansion, and a great feast is laid in the dining room–everyone who goes through Purgatory and directly to Heaven will end up at that dining room table for the feast. Some people come through the front door (martyrs, other heroically virtuous saints). They’re already ready to come sit down at the table.

Others have to go through the “mud room” and clean up a little before coming inside. There’s mud on the boots, and such. They can smell the feast, they’re so close it hurts not to be there already, but the clean up has to take place first.

If you can get an indulgence to get yourself out of spending time in purgatory then ergo! your indulgence means what? an automatic cleansing without suffering???

So you don’t have to suffer the so called cleansing just get an indulgence.

Find a Canon lawyer.