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Purgatory: History and Development within the Catholic Church

This paper will discuss the concept and doctrines of purgatory according to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. It will consider their development during the medieval and Tridentine periods, and finally consider their recent modifications and developments since the Second Vatican Council.

The general concept of purgatory is of a spiritual state, intermediate between heaven and hell, or salvation and damnation, in which the souls of the faithful undergo purification in order to be utterly holy and thus fit to enter directly into the presence of God. Although this concept has been part of Christian doctrine from very early on, it has undergone great evolution and development over the centuries, beginning as a literal and simplistic concept of a place where the otherwise holy have their minor imperfections removed, and lately having become a far more sophisticated and abstract concept, having to do with such issues as the nature of sin itself and the nature of the afterlife.

The scriptural basis for the concept of Purgatory lies collectively in various passages that speak about or refer to a purification of the dead or of purificatory sacrifices offered on behalf of the dead. However, these passages are probably not the origin of the concept, as will be seen; rather, they were probably interpreted in terms of the concept of purgatory once it had come into existence for liturgical reasons.

The change in the practical beliefs and practices of ordinary Roman Catholics since the Second Vatican Council reflects the changes in the concept of purgatory fairly directly. In the Tridentine theology embodied in Roman Catholic practices in the 1950s, according to the experiences of older Roman Catholics, there was a direct and simple relationship between death and the sacrament of confession.

St. Thomas Aquinas had divided all sins into two categories, mortal and venial. Both kinds created a stain upon oneÆs immortal soul...

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Purgatory: History and Development within the Catholic Church. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 11:42, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1709292.html