Instructions for All Souls’ Day
by Leonard Goffine, 1871
What is All Souls’ Day?
It is the day set apart by the Catholic Church for the special devout commemoration of those of its members, who have departed this life in the grace and friendship of God, for whom we pray, that they may soon be released by God from the prison of purgatory.
What is purgatory?
Purgatory is that place in which the souls of the deceased faithful, who though dying in the grace of God, are yet burdened with some small sins not yet atoned for, suffer temporal punishment, and become purified from all sin. It is called the place of purification or purgatory, because in it those souls, which are not perfectly unsullied, are purified by fire as gold in the furnace. St. Paul writes to the Corinthians: And the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. If any man’s work abide which he had built thereupon, he shall receive a reward; if any man’s work burn, he shall suffer loss; but he himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire. (i. Cor.iii.23.) “And when St. Paul,” says St. Ambrose (Serm. 20. in Ps. cxviii.), “says, yet so as by fire, he shows that such a man indeed becomes happy, having suffered the punishment of fire, having been cleansed by the blessed fire, but not being, like the wicked, continually tormented in eternal fire.” St. Paul’s words, then, can only be understood to refer to the fire of purification, as the infallible Church has always explained them.
Are the heretics right in denying, that there is such a place of purification as purgatory?
By no means, for by such denial they oppose the holy Scriptures, tradition, and reason. The holy Scriptures teach, that there is a purgatory: it is related in the Second Book of the Machabees, that Judas Machabeus sent twelve thousand drachms of silver to Jerusalem, to be used in the temple to obtain prayers for those who fell in battle, for he believed it: a good and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from their sins. But for what dead shall we pray? Those in heaven do not require our prayers; to those in hell they are of no avail; we must then pray for those who are in the place of purification.
