by Rae D. Stabosz

In February 1990, a Catholic student at the University of Delaware named Rae Stabosz answered a simple question — "what is Purgatory?" — with an answer unlike any catechism. She offered a personal story: a moment of belated grief for harm she had caused her younger sister years before, a grief so total it broke through in hours of weeping. She said: that is purgatory. Not a doctrine. A description. This post from soc.religion.christian is one of the earliest and most vivid experiential accounts of Catholic theological concepts in the Usenet archive.

I'm going to try an explanation, rather than a history of the idea, of Purgatory. There are only a couple of Biblical references that Catholics draw on for this. One is in Maccabees (I don't have it right at hand) where it is mentioned that it is good to pray for the dead. One is in St. Paul, I believe. As I understand it, the early Church did pray for its dead, and the somewhat baroque notions of Purgatory that evolved in the High Middle Ages took that tradition as the basis for a weird bartering scheme ("as soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from Purgatory springs.")

As I understand Purgatory now, it relates somewhat directly to the questions posed earlier here about "can a terrible sinner repent at the last moment of life and be saved?" The answer to that is obviously yes, as most people pointed out. But, existentially, what happens in one's life when one goes from sin to grace? Part of the process involves knowledge of the real harm that one's sin has done, to oneself and to others. Sometimes that knowledge is horrible. This is true even when the sinful action was not fully known to be sinful — and, in Catholic theology, a sinful act must be known to be sinful in order for there to be guilt. But in and of themselves, objectively sinful acts do harm in the world.

Concrete (and painful) example. When I was much younger, and my sister was younger still, I helped her get birth control pills. This was while she was still in high school. I thought that because she was "in love" with her young man, this was a good act on my part. (This was before I became an adult Catholic — or, rather, while I was "between" the times of practicing my faith.) The results were disastrous. She became sexually active, the "romance" died as a direct result of the sexual acts, she was hurt terribly. And my act was a contributing factor.

It wasn't until much later, when I was back practicing my faith, and thinking back to the years I had spent away from God, that I realized the full import of what I had done. The very real harm I had caused. When I realized this, I was completely grief-stricken. I cried and cried for hours one afternoon, so sorry for how I had entered her life in such a harmful way. Later I did what I could to make it up, and I still do not consider that she is over the effects of my act.

That experience I believe to be the experience of Purgatory. One doesn't just "jump" into salvation and heaven, as if the act of salvation changes one instantly into a loving person. One learns to love, and part of that process is learning the effects of not loving. So Purgatory is the experience of, after death, when we are no longer bound by time and space, experiencing the sometimes painful growth that all us sinners go through as we grow in love towards God.

I personally want to do all my purgatory on earth. I aspire to be a saint — in the Catholic sense: not just someone who attains salvation, as Paul uses the word "saints" in his epistles, but someone in whom God can break through for good in this world "as with the saints of old." St. Rae — my friends around the U. of D. know I hope to be canonized Patron Saint of Sex. God knows we need one in these times…

Colophon

Written by Rae D. Stabosz ([address removed]), University of Delaware. Posted to soc.religion.christian, 9 February 1990, in response to a question asking for an explanation of Purgatory. Original Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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