Nobody Lists the Porch as a Room

Why the Reformation struck the wrong target, what the Church has actually always taught, and why — three levels, an antechamber and all — there are still only four last things.

1Locate the scandal correctly

The sixteenth century had a real scandal, and it was not Purgatory. It was the marketing of indulgences — preachers hawking remission for the dead as if God kept a till. The Church herself condemned it. The same Council of Trent that defined the doctrine of Purgatory decreed, in the same closing session of 1563, that every “evil gain” attached to indulgences be abolished.¹ The Reformers’ error was to cure a headache by removing the head. Offended by what men were selling, they denied what the Church had always been doing: praying for her dead.

And they knew it. The editor of Fr Schouppe’s classic notes that the reformers “rejected the Church’s teaching on Purgatory, though, as Calvin admitted, it had always been a common belief”.² Luther himself still assumed Purgatory in the Ninety-Five Theses of 1517; he did not formally renounce it until 1530.³ A doctrine does not become false in 1530 because its indulgence-preachers were greedy in 1517.

2The case in five moves

(i) Scripture

The oldest text is a Jewish one. Judas Machabeus has sacrifice offered for his fallen soldiers, and the sacred author concludes: “It is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from sins” (2 Mach 12:46). John Salza states the standing of the book plainly: “All Christians held the book of Maccabees as inspired”.⁴ They held it so until the Reformers removed it — which makes Purgatory the only doctrine in Christian history refuted by shortening the Bible.

The New Testament supplies what Machabees assumes. There are sins forgiven “in the world to come” (Matt 12:32); a prison one leaves only after paying “the last farthing” (Matt 5:26); a man saved, “yet so as by fire” (1 Cor 3:15); and a City into which, as St John says, nothing defiled shall enter (Apoc 21:27).⁵ None of these texts names Purgatory. Together they leave no room for anything else: a forgiveness after death that is neither Heaven nor Hell.

(ii) The practice before the word

The Church prayed for the dead for a thousand years before she settled on a name for where they were. The catacombs testify first: “We recognize the very words of that prayer for the departed in inscriptions in the catacombs of the first centuries, the cemeteries of the early Roman Christians”.⁶ The earliest literary witnesses are “in the Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicity and in the writings of Tertullian”⁷ — Perpetua, in the year 203, praying her dead brother Dinocrates out of his thirst. St Monica, dying at Ostia, asked one thing of her son Augustine: “be mindful of me at the altar of the Lord”.⁸ And the practice is older than the Church: “Today, Orthodox Jews are often seen praying for the dead at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem”.⁹ The Reformers asked Christians to believe that the Church had misunderstood her own funerals for fifteen centuries.

(iii) Three councils — before and after

The Church defined Purgatory three times, and two of the three definitions were made in dialogue with the Christian East, centuries before Luther. The Second Council of Lyons (1274) taught that souls dying “truly repentant in charity before they have made satisfaction by worthy fruits of penance for sins committed and omitted, their souls are cleansed after death by purgatorial or purifying punishments”.¹⁰ The Council of Florence (1439), again with the Greeks: “their souls are purified after death by expiatory pains”.¹¹ Then Trent (1563), with the Reformers in view: “the Catholic Church, instructed by the Holy Spirit, in conformity with the sacred writings and the ancient tradition of the Fathers in sacred councils, and very recently in this ecumenical Synod, has taught that there is a purgatory” — and that the souls there are helped by the prayers of the faithful, above all by the Sacrifice of the altar.¹² This is not a doctrine invented to sell certificates. It is a doctrine the Latins and Greeks agreed on when they could agree on little else.

(iv) The logic the Reformers could not escape

Trent’s canon is precise. Let him be anathema who says that after justification “the guilt is so remitted and the penalty of eternal punishment so blotted out that no penalty of temporal punishment remains to be discharged either in this world or in the world to come”.¹³ Two debts, not one. Christ alone removes the eternal debt of sin; the temporal consequences of forgiven sin — the disorder it leaves in us — are healed by penance here or by purification hereafter.

This will surprise some Protestants: Catholics agree with them about merit. “Catholics agree with Protestants that there is nothing we can do by our own actions to deserve eternal life. We cannot rid ourselves of the title “unclean” by our own efforts.”¹⁴ “As Augustine says, when God grants us merits He is simply crowning His own gifts”.¹⁵ Purgatory is therefore not an insult to the finished work of Christ. It is that work finishing us.

The alternative is worse than it sounds. Fr Martin Jugie put the question: “If the menace of purgatorial pains hardly suffices to inspire in us a horror of sin in general, and of venial sin in particular, what would be the case if the gates of Heaven were, so to speak, half-opened immediately after death to those who lead a lazy and lukewarm life”?¹⁶ A Heaven with a half-open door is a God less serious about holiness than any parent is about manners.

(v) The Reformers’ own tell

Jugie also observed what happened next: “those heretics who have striven to cast out the doctrine of Purgatory — certain dissident Orientals of medieval and modern times, with the Protestants of the sixteenth century — have lost no time in reaccepting it, at the peril of a flagrant contradiction.”¹⁷ Protestant theology has been quietly re-inventing “intermediate states” and “post-mortem growth” ever since. Salza says why: “The human heart also demonstrates that there is a purgatory. Who doesn’t remember his deceased loved ones in his prayers?”¹⁸ Everybody prays at the graveside. Only one Church has a reason to.

3What the Church actually teaches — and what she does not

Strip away the pictures and the teaching is small, clear and old. Even Fr Schouppe — who filled four hundred pages with the saints’ visions — concedes that only two truths are defined: that Purgatory exists, and that the souls there are helped by our suffrages; its location, the nature of its pains, their duration and the manner in which our help reaches the souls are questions the Church has never decided.¹⁹

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, as the Holy See’s Directory on Popular Piety quotes it: “The Church gives the name Purgatory to this final purification of the elect, which is entirely different from the punishment of the damned. The Church formulated her doctrine of faith on Purgatory especially at the Councils of Florence and Trent”.²⁰ The helps are ranked by the Church herself: the suffrages “consist, primarily, in the celebration of the holy sacrifice of the Eucharist”, then “in other pious exercises, such as prayers for the dead, alms deeds, works of mercy”, and finally “the application of indulgences to the souls of the faithful departed”.²¹

As for the indulgence that started the trouble, here is what it is: “the remission before God of the temporal punishment due sins already forgiven as far as their guilt is concerned”.²² Not forgiveness. Not a licence. Not for sale. Paul VI even retired the arithmetic the Reformers mocked: “A partial indulgence will henceforth be designated only with the words “partial indulgence” without any determination of days or years”,²³ and abolished the old special privileges so that suffrages could be applied to the dead “to the widest possible extent at any Sacrifice of the Mass whatsoever”.²⁴ Florence, for the sake of the Greeks, left even the fire undefined. The doctrine was always narrower than its critics’ caricature — and narrower than its devotees’ pictures.

4What the saints have seen: three levels and an antechamber

Those pictures deserve a word, because they are what most people mean by Purgatory, and because — rightly read — they confirm the thesis of this article rather than complicating it.

Nearly every mystic who claims to have seen Purgatory describes it as layered, and the layering tends to come in threes. Maria Simma, the Austrian peasant woman visited for decades by the souls, said simply: “There are three main levels in Purgatory”.²⁵ A nineteenth-century French religious, recording the locutions of a dead sister, was told of a great Purgatory with several stages: “In the lowest and most painful, like a temporary hell, are the sinners who have committed terrible crimes during life and whose death surprised them in that state. It was almost a miracle that they were saved”.²⁶ Above it a second Purgatory for lesser debts; and above that a Purgatory of desire — “the Threshold” — where there is no fire at all, only the longing for God.²⁷ A Portuguese layman whose visions were published with his bishop’s permission in 1994 describes the same three — a great purgatory, a middle purgatory, and at the summit what he calls the antechamber of heaven: “In the antechamber of heaven, there is no pain other than this, but . . . what intensity!” — the pain of love — and “There they remain for a greater or lesser time, but never as long as in the great purgatory or middle purgatory, for the intensity of their yearning for love in the antechamber of heaven constitutes a rapid and final purification.”²⁸

Older witnesses paint the lower levels; the newer ones the upper. St Faustina, led by her guardian angel, saw “a misty place full of fire in which there was a great crowd of suffering souls. They were praying fervently, but to no avail, for themselves; only we can come to their aid”, and when she asked their greatest suffering “They answered me in one voice that their greatest torment was longing for God.”²⁹ Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich saw “a place near the earth” where resigned souls stood “in different depths, different degrees of abandonment; some up to the neck, some to the breast”.³⁰ And St Catherine of Genoa, who saw no regions at all, gives the principle behind every level: a soul that saw the least imperfection in itself would rather cast itself into a thousand hells than appear so before God, and counts Purgatory a mercy.³¹

Now the two things to hold together. First, none of this is doctrine. The Church has defined no levels, no fire, no geography, no durations; the Holy See’s Directory on Popular Piety lists “the application of spacio-temporal categories to the dead” among the things to be avoided.³² These are the pictures of saints — some canonised, some not — and the later ones had read the earlier. Second, read as pictures, they say exactly what the councils say. The lowest level is full of the saved, snatched from the fire at the last instant; the pain at every level is proportioned to the debt; and the top of Purgatory is already lit by Heaven — a threshold, an antechamber, a porch. That is not a fifth kingdom. It is the vestibule of the fourth.

5Still only four last things

Catholic catechesis has always counted four last things — death, judgment, heaven, hell — and Purgatory has never been a fifth. Everyone in Purgatory has already died, already been judged, already been saved, and will certainly leave. It is not a destination but the last mile of one road. The Church Suffering is part of the Church, not a third kingdom beside Heaven and Hell. Purgatory is Heaven’s antechamber — and nobody lists the porch as a room.

And yes — believe it or not — there is judgment. Scripture says so: it is appointed unto men once to die, and after this the judgment (Heb 9:27); we must all be manifested before the judgment seat of Christ (2 Cor 5:10); the Son of Man will separate the sheep from the goats (Matt 25:31–46).³³ The Magisterium says so: Benedict XII defined in 1336 that souls are judged and go to their reward or punishment at death, and the Catechism teaches the particular judgment “at the very moment of death.”³⁴ This comes up less often than it should at funerals, where the departed is routinely canonised by the eulogist before the flowers wilt. Fr Faber called it the cruel flattery of relatives who insist that everyone dear to them died the death of a saint³⁵ — cruel, because a soul everyone assumes is in Heaven is a soul nobody prays for. The judgment is not God being difficult. In the saints’ own accounts it is the soul seeing clearly: “It finds itself in such a bewildering light that in the twinkling of an eye it sees its whole life spread out, and at this sight, it sees what it deserves, and this same light pronounces its sentence.”³⁶

6The scandal, reversed

The Reformation left the Christian dead without prayers — the one thing that, in every account from Perpetua to Faustina, the dead ask for. The real scandal would be a Heaven with a half-open door for the lukewarm, or a Church that stopped praying for her dead. The abuse was corrected by the Church that was abused. The doctrine was kept by the Church that received it — from the Machabees, from the catacombs, from Monica at the altar — and it remains the only coherent answer to the question every bereaved person asks: what can I do for them now?

The Catholic answer has not changed in two thousand years. Pray. And have the Mass offered.

→ See also: Purgatory — Doctrine · The Holy Souls of the Church Suffering · The Holy Mass Explained