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Are we already in Heaven, Purgatory or Hell, so that death only lifts the veil?

Defined dogma Common teaching

What the Church holds

In the strong form, no.

  • Defined dogma Death "puts an end to human life as the time open to either accepting or rejecting the divine grace" (CCC 1021).
  • Judgement and its outcome come "at the very moment of [one's] death" (CCC 1022). The purified then see God "after the purification … before the general judgment" (Benedictus Deus).
  • Common teaching Purgatory, John Paul II taught, is not a prolonging of earthly life, "almost as if after death one were given another possibility to change one's destiny" (General Audience, 4 August 1999).
  • It is "this final purification of the elect" (CCC 1031). The purification can begin "here on earth" (CCC 1472), but whatever is left is finished after death.

What the saints and mystics report

Private revelation A qualified form of the idea runs right through them:

  • Judgement as unveiling. Faustina "saw the complete condition of my soul as God sees it" (FAU-03); the Manuscript's soul sees its whole life in a light that pronounces its sentence (UMP-R1); the Visions' soul goes to Purgatory of its own accord (VIS-01); Catherine's soul "plunges" (CGE-R1).
  • Continuity. Catherine lives her purgatory in the body (CGE-01). Emmerich is told, "The poor souls are always in the state in which thou now art" (EMM-07). Faustina understands how closely "life on earth, in purgatory and in heaven" are bound together (§594; FAU-08).
  • Against the strong form. Simma insists Purgatory is "a condition" and "most definitely also a place" (SIM-R3). Merit ends at death, and Purgatory's sufferings "earn no merit" (UMP-R7).

The defensible version is this: we are already becoming what we will be seen to be. Death removes the veil, and the soul goes, by its own nature, where it already belongs. What remains unfinished is finished there, by God's mercy and our prayers.

Accounts that bear on this

Read: The Witnesses’ Map of PurgatoryRead: Death and the Particular JudgementTheme A: Death and the particular judgement9 accounts on this question

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