I have always wondered whether there is time as we know it in purgatory. Has the church said anything about this?
There has to be some sort of time in purgatory because souls are not there forever, as they are in heaven and hell.
The numerous souls in purgatory who have appeared to people on earth bear this out, since they sometimes say how long they have been in purgatory. But exactly how this time is experienced in purgatory itself we cannot really know until we get there.
Referring to the fire which burns away the effects of sin in purgatory, Pope Benedict XVI says in his encyclical Spe salvi, Saved by Hope, (2007): “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” (SS, n. 47).
As is to be expected, the church has never pronounced on the question of for how long souls are in purgatory or on how they experience time there.
There are numerous accounts of souls in purgatory appearing on earth which shed light on this, but since they are private revelations, we are not required to believe them. Nonetheless, they can be helpful in answering your question.
The account we saw earlier of the man who died in France in July, 1870, and appeared numerous times to his daughter, a nun in Belgium, made reference to this. The man told his daughter in October: “If I shall have to remain in purgatory three months more it will seem an eternity.”
From this it seems that he had some idea of the passage of months, since he had been in purgatory for three months when he made the statement.
On 30 November he said: “It seems an eternity to me since I arrived in purgatory. At present my greatest torment is the intense longing to behold God and to enjoy his possession.” Here he expresses the idea that even a short time can seem like an eternity when there is an intense longing to be with God.
As regards for how long, measured by earth time, souls are in purgatory, this same account mentions several cases. The man himself, who had died “like a saint” in the judgment of his children, was in purgatory from 17 July to 25 December, a relatively short time.
He told another nun in the convent that her father, who had neglected his religious duties for a long time and had died without the sacraments, would be in purgatory for 20 years. He also told her that her sister, who had died 16 years before at the age of eight, had been released from purgatory a short time before and was now in heaven.
In another account, related in an unpublished manuscript on purgatory, a nun in purgatory who had died in 1871 began appearing to another nun from her convent in 1874 and she was still appearing in 1890. She said that thousands of souls enter purgatory each day and that “most of them remain 30 to 40 years, some for longer periods, others for shorter. I tell you this in terms of earthly calculations because here it is quite different… I have been here eight years and it seems to me like ten thousand.”
An explanation of this unusual experience comes from another soul in purgatory, who commented in an apparition: “You cannot understand this, but here in purgatory the time and the intensity of one’s pains form a single thing. Our greatest suffering is our nostalgia for God. The more we wait for someone we love, the more slowly the time passes, and the greater is our suffering in this waiting” (Visions of Purgatory, p. 152).
People often ask about Our Lady’s statement at Fatima that a 12-year-old local girl would be in purgatory until the end of the world. It is difficult to explain how this could be, if indeed Our Lady was reported accurately.
It could very well be, however, that the girl would have been there for a very long time if no one prayed for her, but with the many people who have prayed for her since then, her time was considerably shortened.