[Footnote 5: Council of Trent, Sess. xxv. Decret. de Purgatorio, p. 204.]
[Footnote 6: Beata Maria semper virgine intercedente.]
The tendency to commune with the dead, and to pray for them, is strong and universal. It survives whatever systems or whatever creeds men may invent for its suppression. Samuel Johnson is professedly a staunch Protestant, bristling with prejudices, but a delicate moral sense enters the rugged manhood of his nature. Instinctively he seeks to commune with his departed wife, after the manner dear to the Catholic heart, but forbidden to the Protestant. He keeps the anniversary of her death. He composes a prayer for the repose of her soul, beseeching God "to grant her whatever is best in her present state, and finally to receive her to eternal happiness." [1]
[Footnote 1: Boswell's Johnson, vol. 1, p. 100. Croker's Ed. There is pathos in this entry, remembering the man: "Mar. 28, 1753. I kept this day as the anniversary of my Tetty's death, with prayer and tears in the morning. In the evening I prayed for her conditionally, if it were lawful." Ibid. p. 97.]
IV
Of the nature and intensity of the sufferings of souls undergoing this purgation, we on earth can form but the faintest conception. Not so Mary. She sees things as they are. She sees the great love animating those I holy souls. She sees their eager desire to be united to God, the sole centre and object of their being. She sees and appreciates the struggle going on in them between that intense desire—that great yearning—that groping after perfect union—that unfilled and unsatiated vagueness arising from their privation of the only fulness that could replenish them, on the one hand, and on the other, the sense of their unfitness, keen, strong, deep, intense, overwhelming them and driving them back to the flames of pain and soul-hunger and soul-thirst until they shall have satisfied God's justice to the last farthing, and even the slightest stain has been cleansed, and they stand forth in the light of God's sanctity, whole and spotless. She sees the terrible struggle; and her motherly heart goes out in tender pity to these her children, washed and ransomed by the Blood of her Divine Son, and she is well disposed to extend to them the aid of her powerful intercession. She is fitly called the Mother of Mercy. Her merciful heart goes out to these, the favored ones of her Son, all the more lovingly and tenderly because they are unable to help themselves.
V.
But whilst Mary looks upon those souls with an eye of tender mercy and sweet compassion, and whilst Jesus is prepared to admit them to the beatific vision as soon as they become thoroughly purified, still the assuaging of their pains and the abridging of their time of purgation depend in a great measure upon the graces and the merits that are applied to them by us, their brethren upon earth. According to the earnestness of the prayers we say for them, and the measure of the good works we do for them, will the intercession of Mary and all the saints be efficacious with Jesus in their behalf. It is unspeakably consoling to the living and the dead to know that the members of the Church militant upon earth have it within their power to aid and relieve the members of the Church suffering. It is therefore really and indeed a holy and a wholesome thought for us of the one to pray for those of the other. It is more: it is an imperative duty we owe the faithful departed. They are our brethren in Christ, bought at the same price, nurtured by the same graces, living by the same faith, and sanctified by the same spirit. Many of them may have been near and dear to us in this life; and of these, many again may now suffer because of us; whether it was that we led them directly into wrong-doing, or whether it was that, in their loving kindness for us, they connived at, permitted, aided or abetted us, in what their consciences had whispered them not to be right. In each and every case it is our bounden duty to do all in our power to assuage sufferings to which we may have been accessory. In heart-rending accents do they cry out to us: "Have pity on me, have pity on me, at least ye my friends!" [1] And as we would have others do by us under like circumstances, so should we not turn a deaf ear to their petition.
[Footnote 1: Job, xix. 21.]