Let us continue our query of what causes anguish for those in purgatory, starting with losses or lost opportunities and then the wounds inflicted by others.

Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.”[1] In this vein, the daughter of an elderly gentleman told me that her retired father at night in his dreams raised his voice angrily about his career being blocked. I submit that his death didn’t end his anger but continued into purgatory. There are those who die, like the elderly gentlemen with nightmares about his career, feeling resentments: “I was in pain and You didn’t take me!” Or, I was enjoying life and You took me from it! Or, I died because there were not yet antibiotics! Or, I died before there were heart transplants![2] I earlier mentioned the fictional George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. He had aspired to traveling, attending college, and being employed in town planning. His life did not meet these aspirations.

There are those who die feeling regrets, feeling inadequate. “If I had been a little faster in speed, faster in the brain, more attractive, more talented, I might have…” Or, why didn’t I make first string in my favorite sport in high school? Or, I was first string in high school, but why didn’t I make the team in college? Or, I was in college but didn’t make a professional team? Or, I was on a professional team but had a career-ending injury? Recall Marlon Brando in the 1954 film On the Waterfront, saying in anguish: “I coulda been a contender!” Or, the converse can occur. Some may regret that they had so much success it made sinning “easier”: “If only I could have been more normal. Because I had so much talent, beauty, athletic ability, money, I got too much attention and couldn’t live a normal life… and I sinned over and over again.”

There are so many other ways people can feel inadequate. Why did I not succeed as a son or daughter, a spouse, a parent, a friend? Why did I not succeed at my career? Why did I not have enough money to get a better education? I wish to God that I had done better. Why did I never find a true love to marry? Or, I found a true love to marry, but we couldn’t have children? Or, why did I have a spouse who was not true, or abused me? Or, my spouse and I were great parents, but the children did not turn out well.

When in purgatory, you’ll remember when you lost your job, or were mistreated by your boss or your co-workers. Or maybe you lost your health and had a chronic illness or a debilitating injury. Or you lived your life without eyesight or hearing or without a limb. A short two-word phrase like “chronic illness” or “debilitating injury” or “without eyesight” summarizes a life — yours or that of a loved one — that involves physical pain, mental suffering, visits to doctors, and surgeries, for decades.

These memories and feelings don’t end in the instant of death. A long-time director of a social service agency that cares for children and adults with mental disabilities has many times told parents and benefactors that, if she were to get to heaven, she would demand of God, “Why?” I submit that she won’t wait to ask it in heaven. She has asked it on earth and she’ll ask it in purgatory. “Why, God? Why are some people born with severe mental disabilities?” Let me add that some people with mental disabilities are aware of their inadequacy. How painful is it for them to be so aware![3]

And I saved for you until this point this crushing thought: What if you come to the realization in purgatory that some of your loved ones did not make it to purgatory and will not make it to heaven? What infinite sorrow do you experience at this eternal loss? Is it not enough to take the joy out of your heart, to take the joy out of heaven when you get there?

“Other-Inflicted” Wounds

Some of the losses and lost opportunities we experienced on earth would fall under the category of “other-inflicted” wounds. In such instances, we were not sinners but were sinned against. Recall that, in the Our Father, we pray for forgiveness for our sins in the same measure that we forgive those who sinned against us. A recently published book, Nathan W. O’Halloran’s Paradise in Purgatory: The Eschatological Healing of Victims in the Catholic Tradition (2024), argues that our concept of purgatory must include “space” for victims of other-inflicted sins (as opposed to the traditional focus on self-inflicted sins).

St. Augustine begins Book III of his City of God with a list of other-inflicted harms: “I must now treat of those ills which are the only disasters which our adversaries dread;[4] such things as…war, spoliation, captivity, massacre and the like…innumerable disasters, often of incredible gravity.”[5] Then, in Book XXII, he writes the following about additional “evils belong[ing] to man in his wickedness”:

This present life of ours (if a state full of such grievous misery can be called a life) is evidence that all mortal descendants of the first man [Adam] came under condemnation…The love of futile and harmful satisfactions, with fears, frenzied joys, quarrels, disputes, wars, treacheries, hatreds, enmities, deceits, flattery, fraud, theft, rapine, perfidy, pride, ambition, envy, murder, parricide, cruelty, savagery, villainy, lust, promiscuity, indecency, unchastity, fornication, adultery, incest, unnatural vice in men and women (disgusting acts too filthy to be named), sacrilege, collusion, false witness, unjust judgement, violence, robbery, and all other such evils which do not immediately come to mind, although they never ease to beset this life of man…[6]

Under this heading, I think of the faces of those Koreans who, separated 60 years by the Korean DMZ, have been photographed during their reunions.[7]

Tears Over “Current Events”

If God allows us, in purgatory, to “see” what is happening on earth, we will see all manner of bad things, and good things, in the lives of our loved ones and others. We assume that souls in purgatory can “see” us, or at least learn of our situation, when we pray to them.[8] Seeing sins committed by, or against, our loved ones, and others, only adds to our anguish in purgatory.

Part 5 will continue with the balm given us by our love, the Holy Spirit.

[A link to Part 3 is here.]

[1] Walden and Other Writings (1992).

[2] On World Heart Day, Catholic senator Ted Kennedy declared on the floor of the Senate: “the fact is that no one should have to die [from cardiovascular disease]. Even one death is too many.” April 7, 1972, p. S11783, col. 1.

[3] See this letter.

[4] That is, they don’t dread the loss of heaven.

[5] Henry Bettenson, trans.; 1967, Bk I, ch. 1, p. 89.

[6] Ibid., Bk XXII, ch. 22, p. 1065.

[7] You can find many online.

[8] Father Kenneth Doyle asks, “If the souls of our loved ones are still in purgatory, we can surely pray for them — but can they pray for us?” (Rev. Kenneth Doyle, “Question Corner,” Arlington [Virginia] Catholic Herald, Aug. 12, 2021). And here theologians have differed. St. Thomas Aquinas believed that the souls in purgatory were not yet in a position to intervene on our behalf. St. Robert Bellarmine, on the other hand, felt that these souls were already secure in their eventual salvation and therefore were in a favorable position to beg divine help for those of us still in earth. Father Jerry J. Pokorsky also speculated that the souls in purgatory can see current events as well as their pasts (“The Last Judgment Network,” thecatholicthing.org, Nov. 11, 2018).