Time and Intensity

"Amen I say to thee, thou shalt not go out from thence till thou repay the last farthing." — Matthew 5:26

"How long?" is the first question most Catholics ask about Purgatory, and it is the one most likely to be answered with a number. The saints' accounts are full of numbers: a quarter of an hour, sixteen days, seven years per mortal sin, a hundred years, until the end of the world. The Church gives none. This chapter sets out why. It also sets out what the Church does teach, about the reality of the pain, about its end, and about the power of the living to shorten it.

What the Church teaches: that it ends

Defined dogma Purgatory is, by its nature, a passage and not a destination. It is the "final purification of the elect" (CCC 1031). Every soul in it has died in God's grace and will see Him. As the Lantern's FAQ puts it, "The only question is when — not whether."

Common teaching Purgatory ends, at the latest, with the General Judgement. St Augustine: "Temporary punishments are suffered by some in this life only, by others after death, by others both now and then; but all of them before that last and strictest judgment" (City of God XXI.13, as cited in the Catholic Encyclopedia, "Purgatory", 1911).

Common teaching Length differs from soul to soul. St Thomas, as in IV-A: "the length corresponds to the firmness with which sin has taken root". Severity, by contrast, corresponds to the amount of guilt, "hence it may happen that one may be delayed longer who is tormented less, and vice versa" (Supplement, Appendix I, q. 2, a. 6).

Open question Whether "duration" there means anything like duration here. The councils speak of purification, not of calendars. Pope Benedict XVI says it directly:

"It is clear that we cannot calculate the 'duration' of this transforming burning in terms of the chronological measurements of this world. The transforming 'moment' of this encounter eludes earthly time-reckoning — it is the heart's time, it is the time of 'passage' to communion with God in the Body of Christ." (Spe Salvi 47)

The Directory's warning against "spacio-temporal categories" applied to the dead (§258) bears on time even more than on place.

What the Church teaches: that it is real, and how much it hurts

Defined dogma The souls are purified "by purgatorial pains" (Lyons II, Florence). The suffering is real.

Common teaching The Fathers and the Schoolmen distinguish two pains:

• the pain of loss, the delay of the vision of God;
• the pain of sense.

They hold that both exceed anything on earth. St Augustine says the purgatorial fire will be "more severe than anything a man can suffer in this life". St Gregory says its pain is "more intolerable than any one can suffer in this life" (both as cited in the Catholic Encyclopedia). St Thomas gives the reason in terms of love:

"The least pain of Purgatory surpasses the greatest pain of this life. For the more a thing is desired the more painful is its absence. And since after this life the holy souls desire the Sovereign Good with the most intense longing ... it follows that they grieve exceedingly for their delay." (Supplement, Appendix I, q. 2, a. 1)

Open question Whether there is a real fire. At the Council of Florence, Cardinal Bessarion argued against a real purgatorial fire, "and the Greeks were assured that the Roman Church had never issued any dogmatic decree on this subject" (Catholic Encyclopedia). In the West, belief in a real fire is common, but it is not defined. Pope Benedict records that "some recent theologians are of the opinion that the fire which both burns and saves is Christ himself, the Judge and Saviour", whose gaze "as it burns us, transforms and frees us" (Spe Salvi 47).

Common teaching Pain and joy together. The souls are certain of Heaven, and they want nothing but to be made fit for it. This is why St Catherine of Genoa, while describing a pain "like that of hell" (CGE-R3), can also speak, in the Lantern's rendering, of a "happiness that increases day by day" as the rust of sin is burned away (see VIII). The Lantern's own summary holds both: "comparable in intensity to the fire of Hell, differing not in heat, but in duration and in hope."

A note on "days" and "years" of indulgence

Until 1967, partial indulgences were listed as "300 days", "seven years" and so on. Many people took these figures to mean time off in Purgatory. They never did. The figures belonged to the Church's discipline of penance on earth, from which indulgences grew: Indulgentiarum Doctrina recalls how bishops allowed canonical penances "to be replaced by other possibly easier works". The Lantern calls the system one that "had caused much misunderstanding". Paul VI abolished it: "A partial indulgence will henceforth be designated only with the words 'partial indulgence' without any determination of days or years" (Indulgentiarum Doctrina, Norm 4). Neither the councils nor the Catechism give any figure for how long a soul spends in Purgatory.

What the saints and mystics report

[private revelation] Durations, roughly from the shortest to the longest. Every figure is what one visionary reported, in words that visionary chose.

[private revelation] Time as it is felt. Several witnesses say time there is not measured as it is here.

• A sick religious chooses three days of Purgatory over a year of illness, and after one hour believes years have passed (MED-22; one version says a day).
• A dead religious, found to have spent three days in Purgatory, thought it longer than three thousand years (EMO-100).
• St Catherine of Genoa: one moment there outweighs a lifetime here (CGE-R3).

[private revelation] Intensity. On this the witnesses are unanimous and extreme.

• Earth's fires are "a refreshing breeze" by comparison (Ven. Stanislaus Chocosca, EMO-43).
• Earth's fire is "a shadow" beside it (the Manuscript, UMP-R7).
• The fire of the deepest Purgatory is "equal to hell except in the duration" (VIS-04), spiritual and "almost material" (VIS-23).
• "Ten years of a light Purgatory are easier than two days of the deepest" (Simma, SIM-40).
• Emmerich gives the one difference that matters: Hell has despair, Purgatory hope (EMM-R1).

How to weigh the numbers

The figures contradict each other, and sometimes themselves. The same witness gives both "half an hour" and "until the last day". The witnesses who give the most figures are also the ones who warn that figures are symbolic (SIM-R7) or merely "in terms of earthly calculations" (UMP-R3).

The numbers drift when stories are retold. The sick religious's hour becomes a day (MED-22). Padre Pio's dead novice needs "one more night" in one book and is still waiting "sixty years" after his death in another (MOD-27). A modern retelling of St Vincent Ferrer's sister turns "thirty days" into "the thirteenth day" (MED-76). A number that changes with the teller is not data.

What the numbers do teach is a proportion, not a timetable. Read together, they say four things:

• small faults are purified quickly;
• tepidity and refusals of grace take longer;
• those who were given more, priests and religious, are held to more (EMO-36, UMP-R2, EMM-10);
• intercession shortens everything. Thirty Masses turn centuries into thirty days (MED-76), and three hours of a victim soul's suffering spare another soul twenty years (SIM-35).

The first three are St Thomas's principle that length follows how deeply sin has taken root. The last is the defined doctrine of the suffrages, told as a story. The stories serve that doctrine. They do not add to it.

Trent has already decided how such figures are to be used. "Such things as are uncertain … let them not allow to be made public and treated of." A preacher who tells a congregation that a soul will spend forty years in Purgatory is stating as fact something the Church has never taught.

What it means for us

• It is never too late. Pope Benedict's answer to the question of time is the most consoling sentence in this chapter. "There is no need to convert earthly time into God's time: in the communion of souls simple terrestrial time is superseded. It is never too late to touch the heart of another, nor is it ever in vain" (Spe Salvi 48). A Mass offered for a grandparent who died forty years ago is not offered "too late".
• Keep praying, for years. The liturgy never assumes a soul has been released. The Church offers Mass for the dead at the funeral, "on the third, seventh, and thirtieth day following their deaths, as well as on their anniversaries" (Directory on Popular Piety §255). Follow her example. Do not stop praying because you suppose someone is surely in Heaven, and do not despair because you suppose they are far from it.
• Do not count; love. The Lantern's rule of charity says that the point "is not anxiety, calculation, or spiritual bookkeeping. It is love." That is the right note to end on. The holy souls do not need us to know how long. They need us to remember them.

Sources for this chapter

Scripture (Douay-Rheims): 1 Corinthians 3:11–15; Matthew 5:25–26.

Councils: Second Council of Lyons (1274), Profession of Faith of Michael Palaeologus; Council of Florence (1439), Laetentur Caeli; Council of Trent, Session XXV (1563), Decree concerning Purgatory, trans. J. Waterworth (1848), pp. 232–233 — https://history.hanover.edu/texts/trent/ct25.html

Magisterium and Holy See:

• Catechism of the Catholic Church §1031 (as quoted in the Directory, §251).
• John Paul II, General Audience, 4 August 1999 — https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/audiences/1999/documents/hf_jp-ii_aud_04081999.html
• Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi (2007), §§47–48 — https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20071130_spe-salvi.html
• Congregation for Divine Worship, Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy (2001), §§251, 255, 258 — https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ccdds/documents/rc_con_ccdds_doc_20020513_vers-direttorio_en.html
• Paul VI, Indulgentiarum Doctrina (1 January 1967), Norm 4 — https://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/apost_constitutions/documents/hf_p-vi_apc_01011967_indulgentiarum-doctrina.html

Doctors and theologians:

• St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Supplement, Appendix I, q. 2, aa. 1, 3, 6 (https://www.newadvent.org/summa/6002.htm) and Appendix II, a. 2 (https://www.newadvent.org/summa/7001.htm). The Supplement was completed after St Thomas's death from his commentary on the Sentences.
• E. Hanna, "Purgatory", Catholic Encyclopedia vol. 12 (1911), for Augustine, Gregory and Bessarion at Florence — https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12575a.htm
• Fr M. Jugie AA, The Truth about Purgatory, and Fr F. X. Schouppe SJ, as quoted in the source catalogue.

The accounts: the 21 books of Encounters with the Holy Souls, cited by account code. Page references are as given in the source catalogue and have not been independently verified against the books.