Pray for the souls in Purgatory

 Deacon Kevin Gingras

Oct 26th, 2025

30th Sunday in Ordinary Time

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/111625.cfm

Malachi 3:19-20a  Psalm 98:5-6, 7-8, 9

2 Thessalonians 3:7-12    Luke 21:5-19

Today, I wanted to walk up and down the sidewalk outside the church, carrying a sandwich board that read: “Repent for the end is near!” but I thought better of that.  Today’s homily does have that fire and brimstone feel to it:

See that you not be deceived, for many will come in my name, saying, 'I am he,' and 'The time has come.' Do not follow them! When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified, for such things must happen first… Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be powerful earthquakes, famines, and plagues from place to place… they will seize and persecute you,

Scary stuff, right?  This teaching is what probably got the Thessalonians to think Jesus was coming back and really soon.  So soon, some of them had just stopped working to wait.  St. Paul had to set them straight in his letter.  We don’t know the time or the hour; we just know some day the time will come, and we will get to our particular judgment.  This occurs at the moment of death, where each individual is judged based on the life they led according to God’s rules.  Our death is merely an end to our life here on Earth.

Gandalf the wizard from Tolkien’s book The Return of the King said about death:

End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take.

Jesus, in today’s Gospel, gives us hope when he tells us:

Not a hair on your head will be destroyed. By your perseverance, you will secure your lives.

And that is certainly good news, isn’t it! I recently started setting up for a baptism by placing the Easter candle front and center before the altar, and then the baptismal font just in front of that.  This is how our life in the church begins, by our baptism.  When our journey on earth has ended, the candle is in the same spot, and it is our casket that is in front.  The casket is sprinkled with holy water to remind us of our beginning.

Ok, back to our particular judgment that happens right at our death.  Three destinations await - Heaven for those who die fully in God’s grace, Purgatory for those who die in God’s love, but we still need some purification before we can be with God for eternity, and third is Hell for those who have died with mortal sin still on their souls and have rejected God’s love.

CCC 1030:

“All who die in God’s grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation; but after death they undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven.”

Why bring all this up now?  Because November is the month to remember all the souls in Purgatory.  We begin with All Saints’ Day (those who have died and are now in Heaven) and then have All Souls’ Day (those who have died and are in Purgatory).  The Church encourages us to pray for the dead, visit cemeteries, and attend Masses to pray for the dead.

A while back, there was a woman I knew very well who knew she was dying.  I asked her how she was doing, and she replied that she was fine.  I told her not to lie, I asked how she is really doing, and what I can do to help her.  Her response surprised me.  She said that when she dies, she wants me to make sure that people don’t saintify her - in other words, correct people who say she is in Heaven now.  She made me promise that I would tell those people to instead pray for her soul and not make that assumption.  Our prayers can help those who have gone before us attain Heaven.  In Purgatory, souls cannot pray for themselves.  When you lose a family member or somebody close to you, you now have a job to do!  That job is to pray for them, to help their souls get to Heaven from Purgatory!  Especially in November, but also in all other months.  Your prayer for a loved one today could be exactly what they need to attain entry into Heaven!

St. Gertrude’s had a great prayer for this:

Eternal Father, I offer Thee the Most Precious Blood of Thy Divine Son, Jesus, in union with the Masses said throughout the world today, for all the Holy Souls in Purgatory, for sinners everywhere, for sinners in the universal church, those in my own home and within my family. Amen.

This week I’ll end with two saint quotes, it’s that important!

Saint Padre Pio says

"We must empty Purgatory with our prayers."

And Saint John Paul II

“Praying for the souls in purgatory is the highest act of supernatural charity”

Tend the Garden of Your Soul

July 19, 2020 - 16th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year A

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/071920.cfm

“Mary, Mary quite contrary how does your garden grow?” is how the nursery rhyme goes, not Kevin Kevin - well, I wouldn’t even know how to rhyme that! I am a terrible gardener and that’s because it takes work that I just don’t enjoy. Tilling the soil, weeding, planting, weeding, watering, and more weeding!  The Gospels have been all about gardening lately and it’s something that’s a bit tougher for me to relate to.

We heard the parable of the sower last week and this week we hear about an enemy planting weeds in our garden.  Now that is something I CAN get to grow -  weeds!  I can also get grass to grow very nicely where that doesn't belong - like in my driveway!

The weeds in this parable are what our enemy Satan plants and the specific weed that Jesus was referring to is called “darnel”, a poisonous weed that looks just like wheat when it first starts off.  If the workers try to pull out the weeds then they will mistakenly get some of the wheat too.  Harvest time is the proper time for judgment and we must leave that to God and not become judges ourselves.  God will be the one who judges who are the weeds to be burned up and who are the wheat to be saved.

Now how do we make sure we are not weeds?  We must take heed of the first reading from Wisdom that tells us:

“For neither is there any god besides you who have the care of all, that you need show you have not unjustly condemned.”

The word god in this verse is lowercase, not the one true God, the Father.  We shouldn’t be following the stars and reading our horoscopes nor allowing money and jobs and other things to be our lowercase gods in our lives.  

Instead, we must understand that God the Father is the only one who is in charge of everything including every human’s judgment.  Let God do His thing, let Him alone be the judge. This gives us much more time to spend tending our own spiritual garden which is something we should never be lazy about.  I don’t like to spend time weeding and caring for a real garden so I don’t do that, but I certainly care enough not to let my spiritual garden get choked by the weeds of sin or wither and die due to a lack of spiritual care.

One way to water our spiritual garden is to pray. If we don’t know how to pray ask the Holy Spirit for help as Paul tells the Romans in the second reading:

”The Spirit too comes to the aid of our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit itself intercedes with inexpressible groanings.”

Pray often and always.  Rosaries, novenas, prayers of petition and intercession, and don’t forget prayers of praise and thanksgiving, too!

Once we have the garden watered we have to watch for the weeds of sin.  Go to confession regularly.  This will get the weeds of sin when they are small and can’t take over the garden of our soul too much. Remember what the first reading from Wisdom said:

“...and you gave your children good ground for hope that you would permit repentance for their sins.”

We should fertilize our garden through Mass, the Eucharist, and Scripture.  For some, it’s hard to get to daily Mass but we can still do the daily Mass readings on our own.  Another good source of fertilizer is reading Catholic books or the Bible.  Right now I’m reading “The Sacraments We Celebrate,” by Peter J. Vaghi, a Catholic Priest.  Even when it comes to things we might think we understand fully it’s ok to realize that isn’t true by picking up a good book and learning some more!

If you don’t know where to begin, just ask. Ask Fr. Rich, or any priest or any deacon or anybody you know studies the faith.  The key is to water, weed, and fertilize your spiritual garden always, it is a never-ending job until we all reach eternal life with God!

As Saint Catherine of Siena once said:

“Ponder the fact that God has made you a gardener, to root out vice and plant virtue.”

Care for your Soul

Nov 17, 2019, Thirty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/111719.cfm

In our first reading today Malachi is not talking about Thanksgiving in a couple of weeks when he says:

Lo, the day is coming, blazing like an oven and that day will set them on fire.

Our ovens will indeed be blazing but hopefully, the day isn’t coming when your turkeys will be set on fire!  

The second reading is what I want to post on my fridge for my older children to see as Paul writes:

we instructed you that if anyone was unwilling to work, neither should that one eat

In reality, Paul wasn’t trying to get his kids to rake the lawn or do the dishes in his letter to the Thessalonians, instead, he was talking about those among them who stopped working.  Some Thessalonians were so certain that the end times were imminent that they decided they should stop working to wait for Christ’s return. It makes me wonder if the blazing wrath that Malachi discusses will come to those who decide to do nothing until the Lord of Hosts returns.  To be that lazy is foolishness, for Christ himself told us we know not the hour of His return. If we sit around and do nothing we become like the wicked lazy servant from the parable of the talents who, out of fear of his master buried the money entrusted to him in the ground and gained nothing more with it.  The instruction from Paul to those Thessalonians is clear:

Such people we instruct and urge in the Lord Jesus Christ to work quietly and to eat their own food.

These words can seem to conflict when we hear the Gospel.  We have not been lazy when it comes to fixing up our church here at Holy Family Parish.  We have done a lot of work to make it look like something new. It looks fantastic and people are always talking about how nice it is now and then today we hear the words of Jesus in Luke:

"All that you see here--the days will come when there will not be left a stone upon another stone that will not be thrown down."

Say what?  Should we have bothered with all that fuss?  After all, there will be a day that comes that this church will no longer be here.  Let’s all pray that it is hundreds of years from now but it will happen. Do Jesus’ words make this building irrelevant?

No, this building is important to all of us and how we worship, VERY important.  I think today I want to focus on how Jesus’ words are not all about the building where they worshiped, but instead, His words should get them to focus on the state of their faith in Jesus Christ and how their perseverance in times of trouble will secure their lives.  Today in time this also holds true. This church is important, I’m not trying to say it has no purpose. It is where we gather together, where we laugh together, where we cry together and most importantly where we hold our sacred Liturgy together. Those are very important roles, however, what is more significant, what is totally indestructible and will live forever, is our soul.  We have done well to take care of this building that houses our worship but do we do as well taking care of our souls?  

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 366 has to say this about the human soul:

The Church teaches that every spiritual soul is created immediately by God - it is not "produced" by the parents - and also that it is immortal: it does not perish when it separates from the body at death, and it will be reunited with the body at the final Resurrection

Some of us, myself excluded, go to the gym, work out, eat right, try to get at least 8 hours of sleep a night (ok, I’ve nailed the sleeping part of this), we try to take care of our bodies as we should. It’s important!  Just read the first letter to the Corinthians chapter 6:

Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you have been purchased at a price. Therefore, glorify God in your body.  

So we should care for our bodies but our souls need care as well more than our bodies and more than this church building as those will pass away but our souls are eternal!

Now I could make a bad joke here that I change my oil and rotate the tires and wash and wax my Kia Soul, my car, often enough but I’ll spare you from that.  Instead here is a list of things Jesus said in the Gospels about things we can do to keep our soul healthy.

• Matthew 6:24 - Don’t love money more than God.
• Matthew 14:31 - Avoid doubt.
• Matthew 18:8 - Take sin seriously, VERY seriously.
• Matthew 22:39 - Love others and yourself too.
• Matthew 5:44 - Even love your enemies.
• Matthew 6:33 - Seek God first.
• John 12:25 - Follow and serve Jesus.
• Mark 8:36 - Don’t gain the whole world and lose your soul.
• John 14:6 - Jesus is the way.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, there are other things we can do, and things we should avoid to grow closer to Christ and strengthen our souls.  The way we need to think as we are doing or saying something is “will this bring me closer to Christ or are we walking away from Him instead. We all need to be like Peter:

Jesus then said to the Twelve, “Do you also want to leave?” Simon Peter answered him, “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.”