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| "Am Allerseelentag" (On All Souls' Day), 1839, by Ferdinand G. Waldmüller (1793-1865), Austrian painter and writer. Location: Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. |
When he was Cardinal Ratzinger, our Pope Emeritus wrote these remarkably insightful and helpful words about 'Purgatory' as 'an encounter with the love of Christ' :
"Purgatory is not, as Tertullian thought, some kind of supra-worldly concentration camp where one is forced to undergo punishments in a more or less arbitrary fashion.
Rather it is the inwardly necessary process of transformation in which a person becomes capable of Christ, capable of God [i.e., capable of full unity with Christ and God] and thus capable of unity with the whole communion of saints.
Simply to look at people with any degree of realism at all is to grasp the necessity of such a process. It does not replace grace by works, but allows the former to achieve its full victory precisely as grace. What actually saves is the full assent of faith.
But in most of us, that basic option is buried under a great deal of wood, hay and straw. Only with difficulty can it peer out from behind the latticework of an egoism we are powerless to pull down with our own hands.
Man is the recipient of the divine mercy, yet this does not exonerate him from the need to be transformed. Encounter with the Lord is this transformation. It is the fire that burns away our dross and re-forms us to be vessels of eternal joy."
H.E. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life
Page 229
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