Is there any truth about purgatory? Does it actually exist? These are the questions that bother the mind of ordinary Catholics who are not yet enlightened concerning the thought. The Catholic Christian would tell us that it does exist. However as ordinary as our being humans persist on reasoning, what the church have said is not enough. We are bound to challenge beliefs before accepting them. We need rational and logical answers, not mere statements.
What do we mean by purgatory in the first place? It is a noun or a name that pertains to a state of being or a place wherein the souls of the people who have died would be tested purified in able to eliminate the marks of “venial sins”.
Additionally, the church profess that this is needed in able for one to enter the heavens and dwell with the God and his angles. Also, Catholicism further believes that the purification was needed in able to make the soul “holy”.
Consequently some of the most powerful arguments in favor of the existence of purgatory were the ancients’ inscription on epitaphs of tombs and catacombs that withhold prayers for the salvation of the soul, the scriptures of the Church Fathers, the ceremonies done in the past the also addresses giving prayers for the salvation of the souls in the purgatory and the declaration of the Councils in Trent and Florence. Accordingly, purgatory is not hell or heaven and is not a judgment if one will go to heaven or hell.
It is merely a stage wherein those who are bound to go to the heavens have to undertake in order for them to be qualified to enter the heaven. Although the souls who are in hell experience pain that is much more excruciating than any of the pain ever experience on earth, it is just a temporary instance; it is not the same as the never ending suffering that a mortal sinner would experience in hell. Is It Merely An Invention? However it may puzzle some of the believers and non-believers alike for there was no mention of the word “purgatory” in any text found in the bible.
Does this imply or reflect that the term along with the concept behind it was just invented by the Catholic Church, if yes, why? Well, several anti-Christians and some of the other denomination of Christianity have argued against the existence of purgatory, most argued that it was just a technique or a bogus made by the Catholic Church in able to generate its own source of income and resources. In fact, the word does not really exist in the Bible. However, as argued by Catholic Answers found in their Website at www.
catholic. com, purgatory was sublimely implied in the different passages in the bible. The Proofs The words purgatory, trinity and incarnation were nowhere to be found in the bible, but were implied in the several writings Such as in Matt. 12:32 wherein Christ has proclaim that “there will be those who were not forgiven, during the current time or for the years to come”, suggesting the possibility that anyone that there are those who “can be unchained from the marks of their sins after death”.
As Paul have also told us in another book in the bible, “that upon judgment, what we have done in our life would be tried. Those who fails the test would go through purification through fire” (1 Cor. 3:15). The suffrage that one will undergo through purification by means of fire could not be the sufferings in hell since accordingly; there was no one who would be saved in hell.
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