COMMENTARY: The pope talks about purgatory: Are we there already?

c. 1999 Religion News Service (Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin’s Press.) UNDATED _ In wonderful pastoral commentaries, Pope John Paul II has recently explained to general audiences something they are […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin’s Press.)

UNDATED _ In wonderful pastoral commentaries, Pope John Paul II has recently explained to general audiences something they are very interested in: What happens in the next life?


He said heaven is not”a place in the clouds, but a living and personal relationship with the Holy Trinity.”A philosopher who has always emphasized the human person, it is telling that the pope should describe heaven in terms that we can all understand.

Eternity plunges you not into a New Age chorale, but into a”personal relationship.”Human beings can understand that for it is in human relationships, in being husbands, wives, parents, friends, and lovers, that people touch and cause the door of life to swing open for them.

Heaven will not be strange to human beings, as the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin said a week before his own death. He spoke of knowing what his parents’ little town in Italy would be like before his first visit there. Heaven will be that familiar; it could never be a surprise for persons who have loved and been loved by others.

We won’t be surprised by purgatory either. The pope tells us that before”we enter God’s kingdom, every trace of sin within us must be eliminated. … That is what takes place in purgatory.” Purgatory must then be connected with time, that most common of mysteries, the discipline of which we experience every day. As Joseph Campbell has written,”Where there is time, there is sadness.”So, if sin and imperfection are to be leached out of us, it must lie outside eternity, governed as it is by the inexorable regulations of time and its inventory of aging, loss, separation, misunderstanding, illness, loneliness, and death. Seven stringent conditions as antidotes, perhaps, for the seven capital sins.

Purgatory may, then, overlap our lives, to be found in almost every day in which the least and greatest of us experiences one or the other of these limitations.

If you sit back, as my wife and I did recently at a lengthy rain delay at Cubs Park in Chicago, you may observe the homely exactions of purgatory all around.

Theologians tell us that, after death, there is a”particular judgment”for each of us. They also tell us this is not something to place only at”the end”of life. As the Rev. Richard McBrien has written,”Our particular judgment will be the visible manifestation of the judgment of acquittal already rendered in Jesus Christ.” Come back to the ball park to see the cleansing of imperfection under way in the human condition. For the day of our death will find us, as the day of our birth does, with all the other men and women, strangers mostly, who share this day as their entrance to eternity.


We will find ourselves, then, in a crowd of people, very like that at the ball game. We form an awkward community only because we have tickets for the same game at the same hour.

We are united in our interest in baseball, the only contest from which the limitations of time are withheld, a fit setting for settling our time-heavy purgatorial accounts.

Watch this accidental aggregate, so homely, so human, much as at that particular judgment, wandering about, examining their tickets, trying to find their seats. They are courteous, friendly, accommodating to each other: no, your seat is in the next section; yes, here is your place right here; when do you think the game will begin?

Each bears the story of their lives. Watch the young, innocent, eager, longing for life as they long to catch a home run ball during the game. A young boy, stricken with a fatal illness, wearing a Cubs uniform, throws a strike as the first ball, courtesy of the Make A Wish Foundation, and striding, a little man indeed, despite his limp, off the field. Never having committed any of his own, is he dying for our sins?

The older faces are as rich in lines as in the woes they have suffered. Beneath their clothes on withered limbs some bear the serial numbers tattooed on them in Nazi camps 60 years ago. Do you suppose they have not been as purged of their imperfections as the young couple with their small child just setting out, a holy family, unaware of the slaughter of the innocents or the Calvary ahead?

Purgatory is real enough and the theologians seem to leave space for its work being accomplished before death. Who could not look carefully at all of us with our minor vanities and our large illusions and doubt we are purging and being purged of our sins every day?


DEA END KENNEDY

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