As Catholics, we stake our lives on the reality of the Catholic religion. We spend our time praying, receiving the sacraments, and serving the Church of Christ, all because we believe they are real. If they’re not, we surely are the most pitiable of all men (1 Cor 15:19).
At our Baptism, we bet our lives on these unseen realities: the Lord Jesus, grace, heaven. Faith tells us they’re real, but there’s no possibility of definitive proof. We have to trust God’s word. And despite occasional crises of faith, my guess is that many practicing Catholics aren’t often tempted by a wholesale rejection of the Gospel. The danger isn’t so much that we deny the existence of spiritual things. The much more subtle (and common) temptation is to underestimate just how real a difference they make. We readily admit that God exists and wants us in heaven with him, but when it comes to the concrete steps that lead to heaven, we doubt whether they actually make any difference.
A comparison to daily life is helpful, since no one doubts the reality of concrete everyday matters. Take taxes. Taxes are real—everyone knows it. I pay my registration fee, or the government fines me. That’s real. So is parenting. The four year old has the stomach bug and needs a long night of caretaking, and now you’ve got a full day of work on two hours of sleep. Very real—nobody would deny it.
But when it comes to the Faith, it’s easy to claim that we don’t know “how it all works.” It’s not a question of whether the Sacraments are real, or whether Mass is real worship; it’s a question of whether they’re real enough to be truly necessary. We can’t see visible effects, so we doubt whether they’re making any real difference.
“The kids have a baseball tournament Sunday, and it only ends at 4:30, and I’m exhausted. Sunday evening Mass? Nah, God knows how tired I am, and he knows I love him.God works in mysterious ways, after all. Won’t he just work everything out either way, especially if I have good intentions, if I’m really trying?”
The truth is, God doesn’t just wave his hands and “work everything out.” He doesn’t need to, because he has already established specific means of “working everything out,” and we know what they are: Mass, the sacraments, prayer, works of charity. These means are real, and they effect real, saving changes in those who use them. Yes, Jesus died to save everyone, but he doesn’t save you in some vague, general way. He saves you by the specific means he established for applying the grace of his Passion to you. God doesn’t hand-wave and wipe away. He changes by instruments of graced power.
The real-life reality of our Faith has a special application at the beginning of November. It’s easy to doubt whether prayers for the dead really do all that much. God is merciful, after all—doesn’t he want everyone in heaven? Why would he let sin get in the way?
Of course it’s true that God is merciful. The thing we forget is that God has mercy on people through specific instruments, in a way that accords with divine justice too. Saint Thomas has words about purgatory that are striking because of just how real they take the Faith to be. Thomas writes, “those who deny Purgatory speak against the justice of God.”
Those are strong words—why so extreme?
It’s because Thomas actually takes it all seriously. We may believe in divine justice in a general way, but when we consider a friend who has died, do we simply shrug and say, “Oh, God works it out. He’s merciful”? Is this true, or are we just kidding ourselves because we don’t want to face the reality of our Faith? Are we just scared of what the real answer is?
The truth, as someone as open to the truth as St. Thomas can see, is that God’s justice is real, not vaguely, but absolutely, all the way down to every good deed and to every sin too. God doesn’t just wave his hands and call the real unreal and the unreal real without changing anything. Rather, God acts in the real world in real ways. In justice, God requires real recompense for real deeds. And in the case of purgatory, God requires real satisfaction for every single real sin. As Thomas says, any claim to the contrary is to deny the reality of divine justice—it’s to live in a false world of our own imagining or our own ignorance.
Scary thoughts, I know. But they’re also good and beautiful thoughts, because it’s only when we realize just how real they are that we can begin to appreciate, in all its realness, the great, gratuitous salvation that Jesus Christ won for us on the Cross. If it ain’t broke, you can’t fix it. Only when we see the reality of sin and justice can we rightly approach the throne of mercy with real humility, real gratitude, real love. The one who realizes he has been forgiven much, loves much. And only then will we love enough, care enough, to give up the assumption that the Lord will just wave his hands and say “don’t worry about it.” Instead, we will begin to pray, begging him to bathe departed souls in the blood of Christ, to satisfy real divine justice by the even greater reality of divine mercy.
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Image: Purgatory, 14th century woodcut
