In this month of November the Church invites us more insistently to pray and offer suffrages for the faithful departed in Purgatory. With these brothers of ours, who "have also been participants in the fragility proper to every human being, we feel the duty which is at the same time a necessity of the heart to offer them the loving help of our prayer, so that any eventual residue of human weakness, which might still delay their happy encounter with God, may be definitively erased.
1 Nothing tainted or abominable or false can enter heaven except what is written in the book of life. The soul that has been defiled by venial sins and faults cannot enter God's dwelling place: to reach eternal beatitude one must be cleansed of all guilt. Heaven has no doors, writes Saint Catherine of Genoa, and anyone who wishes to enter can do it, because God is all mercy and remains with open arms to admit them in His glory. But the being of God is so pure that if a soul notices in itself the least trace of imperfection, and at the same time sees that the Purgatory has been ordered to delete such stains, it enters it and considers it a great mercy to be allowed to clean them in this way. The greatest suffering of those souls is that of having sinned against the divine goodness and not having purified the soul in this life3. Purgatory is not a minor hell, but the antechamber of Heaven, where the soul is cleansed and enlightened.
And if the soul has not atoned on earth, there is much to clean there: venial sins, which delay so much the union with God; lack of love and delicacy with the Lord; also the inclination to sin, acquired in the first fall and increased by our personal sins Besides, all sins and faults already forgiven in Confession leave in the soul an unsatisfied debt, a broken balance, which demands to be repaired in this life or in the next. And it is possible that the dispositions of sins already forgiven remain rooted in the soul at the hour of death, if they were not eliminated by a constant and generous purification in this life. At death, the soul perceives them with absolute clarity, and will have, by the desire of being with God, an immense yearning to get rid of these bad dispositions. At that moment, Purgatory is the unique opportunity to achieve it.
In this place of purification, the soul experiences a very intense pain and suffering: a fire "more painful than anything that a man can suffer in this life".4 But also there is much joy, because he knows that, in short, he has won the battle and is expecting, more or less soon, the encounter with God.
The soul that has to go to Purgatory is like an adventurer on the edge of the desert. The sun burns, the heat is suffocating, and he has little water; he can see in the distance, beyond the great desert, the mountain where his treasure is, the mountain where fresh breezes blow and where he can rest eternally. And he sets out, ready to walk that long distance, where the suffocating heat makes him fall again and again.
The difference between the two is that, unlike the adventurer, he knows for sure that he will reach the mountain that awaits him in the distance: however stifling they may be, the sun and the sand will not be able to separate him from God.
Here on Earth, we can help much these souls to pass more quickly through that long desert that separates them from God. And also, by atoning for our faults and sins, we will make our passage through that place of purification shorter. If, with the help of grace, we are generous in the practice of penance, in the offering of pain and in love for the sacrament of forgiveness, we can go directly to Heaven. This is what the saints did. And they invite us to imitate them.
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