Ask a Priest

Q: I would like to know if purgatory is a place. Can we see each other in purgatory?

Don Gerstenkorn
Saint James Catholic Church
Diocese of Wichita, Kansas



A: The “Catholic Catechism” does not describe purgatory as a place, but as a state of the soul. In the description of the progress of a soul, the Catechism describes the process of purification or cleansing (which is what purgation means) due to the effects of sin in a person’s life. 

Of course, we use the metaphor of place because it gives us a way to talk about a soul or the sense of “going somewhere after we die.” This is something we do spontaneously and easily. For example, we might tell a friend that an acquaintance who has suffered a bout of depression was “in a bad place” for a while. We all understand what we mean. Our friend’s suffering caused her normal course of life to be interrupted. But we all know the “bad place she was in” wasn’t a place at all, but an experience. The metaphor is apt and straightforward, as long as we remember it is a word picture, not a geography lesson.

The true insight of purgation is that it is the experience of encountering the illimitable love and complete forgiveness of God. It is not a punishment meted out because we’ve been bad, as if God had to get his final licks in before we entered eternal bliss.

Purgation is the pain of a limited creature, deformed by sin and fear, finding out he is loved and forgiven. For example, most of us have to wait until we’re old to find out how much our parents loved us and sacrificed for us. It can be painful to look back and register how selfish and foolish we were as we faced our parents’ love and forbearance. That pain is purgatory. It is the consequence of being loved. 

Will we know one another “in purgatory?” We are all part of the community of the saved. We do not suffer alone and we do not go to heaven alone. In fact, we pray for those who have died in the midst of their suffering, just as we pray for those who suffer while they are living. Both that their suffering might be alleviated and their suffering might be mitigated by being shared. 

Finally, purgation is not a punishment for sin, as if God sat down and calculated a precise schedule for repayment of the rotten things we have done. Purgation is the consequence of what it costs us to be forgiven. Also, the state of purgatory is the state of pure joy. Purgation is what it means to enter heaven. It is simply what it means for a sinner to go to heaven.

Father Donald Wolf
Sacred Heart Catholic Church at the Blessed Stanley Rother Shrine