It’s that time of year again. You know—when you go to the cemetery and clean up the gravesites belonging to your family and place some flowers there. You have Masses said for them in your parish and you take your kids along to show them why it’s important to pray for the family dead.
What’s that? You don’t do any of that? Goodness me. What kind of Catholic do you call yourself?
Belief in the existence of purgatory—that we pray for the dead so that their sins will be forgiven in a form of purification after death—is a very Catholic belief. It’s also been part of the church since its inception, but sadly, because of abuse and financial corruption, it got tangled up in the Reformation.
The belief in purgatory is one of the things that sets us apart from many other Christians.
The faithful departed form the biggest part of the church in time and space. There are way more of them than there are of us.
But Australian Catholics’ belief in the existence of purgatory seems to have really tapered off. Back in 2022, we asked a sample of around 2,300 Australian Catholics if they believed in purgatory. Just 63 per cent of them answered “yes.”
Of the Sunday Mass-goers, only 76 per cent believed in purgatory. And yet, practically everyone believed in heaven. Of course they did. Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.
The older our survey participants were, the less likely they were to believe in purgatory. This is a puzzle to me, because with death approaching, surely self-interest should kick in.
We’re not alone in Australia. A 2019 UK study found that only 46 per cent of Catholics believed in purgatory. And a 2022 US study found that while only 65 per cent believed in purgatory, 77 per cent believed in hell.
Wow. Surely that’s the wrong way around. Why is it easier to believe in everlasting punishment than in mercy?
The Holy Souls are an important part of any family —or at least, they should be. Prayer for family members who have died, attendance at funerals, and cemetery visits are all vital elements of a child’s Catholic faith formation. This seems to have been lacking in recent years, which is why belief in purgatory has declined so much.
Australian mainstream culture is not good at dealing with death. Most funeral companies advertise with images of sympathetic looks and solitary flowers. You rarely see a coffin, even in the background. People no longer die at home; we mostly die in hospitals.
Children are kept away from seeing the deceased and from funerals because it’s “scary.”
Increasingly, Catholics aren’t even buried from a church, according to a priest friend of mine. “The funerals I do perform are predominantly for the very old — people in their 80s and 90s: my grandparents’ generation,” he said.
“The funerals of younger people — my parents’ generation and my own — are predominantly conducted in funeral parlours, officiated by funeral directors.”
But for those buried from a church, a typical Catholic funeral in Australia tends to canonise the departed. It makes it clear that God should be thanking his lucky stars that this person is now with him in heaven.
We do fewer and fewer Requiem Masses and more and more “celebrations of life.” It’s considered almost insulting to suggest that we might need to pray and have Masses said for the deceased person.
And yet many people who die, although Catholic and doubtless doing their best, have left a very addled legacy behind them. There are relatives and friends at the funeral who know only too well what the person was really like. These people deserve some closure.
Regular prayer for the dead—asking God to forgive the sins the dead have committed against the living —is also very healing for those left behind.
Some families have stopped the whole purgatory thing because they don’t want to have to explain to their children that Nanna might not be in heaven yet.
To be blunt; if you don’t teach your children to pray for their deceased grandparents and others, they’re much less likely to pray for your soul when you die.
And if they don’t, then who will?
It’s time to revive a solid catechesis and practice of prayers for the faithful departed at family level. This should radiate out to the parish.
The more we normalise prayer and Masses for the dead in our parishes, the more other people there will remember what purgatory is about and start doing the same.