1/2/2024 0 Comments Catholic limbo vs purgatory![]() ![]() ![]() I was an adopted child, so I spent the first four months of my life in an orphanage. Our discussion of purgatory often would lead to considering another more theologically challenging aspect of the afterlife that had to do with the circumstances of my birth. The prospect of going there after death was a real possibility that evoked feelings of both fear and hope for life beyond the grave. But me,” my dad would say, “I’m probably going to have to spend some time in purgatory”-referring to that intermediate place of “purgation” between earthly life and heavenly glory. Given our intellectual propensities-or pretensions-it was a fairly regular practice for my father and me to have after-dinner discussions about theological questions such as the existence of God, the authenticity of papal authority, and the efficacy of Catholic sacraments.ĭuring these father-and-son religious conversations, which, more often than not, would culminate in thinking through Catholic understandings of the afterlife, my father would often say to me, in a way both professorial and paternal, “You know, Mathew, your mother is a saint-she’s going straight to heaven. Our family never fully integrated itself into the devotional rhythms that, in the 1960s and 1970s, still characterized what might be described as “ethnic Catholic life.” My father was a college art professor and a Catholic convert, and I never saw him reciting a rosary, though tears would often fill his eyes when he discussed the mosaics of the Church of San Vitale in Ravenna or baroque church altars of Bernini. The exception to this was my grandmother who was a Catholic of a more traditional kind and would often say the rosary by my bedside as I went to sleep. I grew up in a Roman Catholic family, and we fancied ourselves to be Catholics of an intellectual sort. Schmalz, a Roman Catholic scholar, is a professor of religion at the College of Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |