PARENTS and yayas use the idea of hell to keep their young charges in line. The Church, too, has been criticized for teaching the existence of hell, and of course, the modern, “enlightened” adult says, “there’s enough hellishness on earth in our lifetime, why worry about hell in the hereafter?” Obviously, if hell as an idea is dismissed, the idea of purgatory is considered even more absurd.
While the notion of purgatory is associated more particularly with the Latin rite of the Catholic Church, belief in purgatory has ancient roots, is well attested in early Christian writings and even non-Christians have some kind of belief in some kind of temporary place where a soul awaits its final disposition. Even pagans had some shadowy belief in such a place, as one might glean from some of the Greek epics. Judaism, Islam and the Church of the Latter Day Saints also believe in some kind of purgatory or place of purification. The Eastern Orthodox Church, however, while admitting of an intermediate state after death refrained from defining it, but combined it with a firm belief in the efficacy of prayer for the dead. On the other hand, Protestants and the Anglican church (with the exception of a small minority known as Anglo-Catholics) reject the “Romish doctrine concerning purgatory.”
The Catholic Church teaches that purgatory, which comes from the Latin purgare, is a condition of temporal punishment for those who, departing from this life in God’s grace and are not entirely free from venial sins, or have not fully paid the satisfaction due to their transgressions. This is one reason why the Catholic Church commemorates all souls on November 2. It invites all the faithful to pray and offer suffrages for the souls in purgatory, so that, in the words of Pope John Paul II, “whatever residue of human weakness still remaining in them to delay their happy encounter with God be definitively wiped out.”