Fr. Z's Blog

From a reader…

QUAERITUR:

On a recent podcast a priest said that asking a specific person in Purgatory to pray for you/us is necromancy. Thoughts?

My first reaction is that Father seems not to understand the difference between conjuring spirits and the unity of the Mystical Body of the Church.

“Necromancy” is from two Greek words: nekrós, dead and manteía, divination.   It is the attempt to communicate with the spirits of the dead by evocation, that is by summoning.  It is gravely sinful to do this.  Beyond superstition it opens one up to attacks by demons.   Invoking the intercession of a Poor Soul in Purgatory is nothing like summoning the spirits of the dead for reasons of communication.

In the Old Testament we read how abhorrent necromancy is to God (Deut 1:11-12) and that it is punishable by death (Lev 20:27 and cf. I Sam 28:9).  Saul found out the hard way with the witch of Endor.

There are the exceptional cases of “Purgatorians” who are enabled by God to appear to the living or to communicate things in some way. That is not necromancy, which involves the summoning of spirits which are certainly demons.

Let’s go deeper.

While it is clear that we can pray for the Poor Souls, the question is raised, “Can the poor souls pray for us?”  And, “Is asking a Poor Soul to intercede for us either harmful or, if not harmful, just a waste of time?”

I’m not trying to dodge this when I say “I don’t know for sure.”  But we can draw some conclusions.

This is a question on which great writers are divided and about which there is no official Church doctrine to which we must submit.

The Catholic Encyclopedia is helpful on this.  Always a good place to start.

The majority of writers – some great names among them – hold that the Poor Souls are not capable of praying for us because, as St. Robert Bellarmine in his De Purgatorio held, they lack any knowledge of our circumstances and of our possible requests.  They are not given the infused knowledge of the Blessed Souls in Heaven.  They are “poor” in that respect.

On the other hand, the great theologian Suarez in De Poenitentia thought that, though the Poor Souls don’t know specifically what we need or what we request, they know in general what people need and how much we depend on God’s grace.

St. Thomas Aquinas, whose teaching carries great weight (although we must remember that his teachings are not co-termimous with the teachings of the Church), says in STh II-II that the Poor Souls cannot pray actively because they are in a passive state.

On the other hand, St. Alphonsus Liguori in The Great Means of Salvation says that the Church does not invoke their intercession because they don’t know our prayers from us, but we can piously believe that God makes our prayers known to them.

St. Alphonsus cites the great mystic St. Catherine of Bologna who obtained favors from God through prayers to the Poor Souls.  Thus, St. Alphosus (HERE):

Again, it is disputed whether there is any use in recommending one’s self to the souls in purgatory. Some say that the souls in that state cannot pray for us; and these rely on the authority of St. Thomas, who says that those souls, while they are being purified by pain, are inferior to us, and therefore ‘are not in a state to pray for us, but rather require cur prayers.’ But many other Doctors, as Bellarmine, Sylvius, Cardinal Gotti, Lessius, Medina and others affirm with great probability, that we should piously believe that God manifests our prayer to those holy souls in order that they may pray for us; and that so the charitable interchange of mutual prayer may be kept up between them and us. Nor do St. Thomas’ words present much difficulty; for, as Sylvius and Gotti say, it is one thing not to be in a state to pray, another not to be able to pray. It is true that those souls are not in a state to pray, because, as St. Thomas says, while suffering they are inferior to us, and rather require our prayers; nevertheless, in this state they are well able to pray, as they are friends of God. If a father keeps a son whom he tenderly loves in confinement for some fault; if the son then is not in a state to pray for himself, is that any reason why he cannot pray for others? and may he not expect to obtain what he asks, knowing, as he does, his father’s affection for him? So the souls in purgatory, being beloved by God, and confirmed in grace, have absolutely no impediment to prevent them from praying for us. Still the Church does not invoke them, or implore their intercession, because ordinarily they have no cognizance of our prayers. But we may piously believe that God makes our prayers known to them; and then they, full of charity as they are, most assuredly do not omit to pray for us. St. Catharine of Bologna, whenever she desired any favor, had recourse to the souls in purgatory, and was immediately heard. She even testified that by the intercession of the souls in purgatory she had obtained many graces which she had not been able to obtain by the intercession of the saints.

The fact is, we are still in Communion with the Poor Souls as we are in Communion with the Saints in Heaven.  We all belong to the one Church, in unity of charity and, one might be allowed to think, prayer.

The fact is also that the Church doesn’t invoke intercession by the Poor Souls liturgically, though we constantly raise prayers to Heaven liturgically to intercede for the Poor Souls.

From that I conclude that we shouldn’t pray for the intercession by Poor Souls in a public or ritual way.  This seems to be part and parcel of why in the process for beatification there must not be public liturgical cult of the servant of God.

We are free to believe that the Poor Souls can intercede for us.  It doesn’t not harm us or them to ask the Poor Souls in a general way to pray for our needs on Earth.  It would not be wrong to ask for prayers and intercession provided the one we might have in mind is capable of doing so, as those in Heaven certainly are, and those in Purgatory perhaps could be.

We could make a reasonable assumption that someone has been admitted to the Beatific vision and pray to him for intercession, but in fact that soul is still in Purgatory.  Wasted prayer?  God knows what to do about it.  Sincere, devout prayer is not a waste of time.

Furthermore, the Poor Souls won’t be “Poor” forever.  We might say, “Please pray for me when you are in the Beatific Vision and you have infused knowledge of how and what to pray for.”

Drilling a little more, since we are Unreconstructed Ossified Manualists, we ask the manuals.

Ludwig Ott in Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma (p. 323) says that it is a sententia probabilis that the Poor Souls can intercede for us because of our unity in the Church.  Ott says that Pope Leo XIII in 1889 “ratified an indulgenced prayer in which the poor souls are appealed to in dangers of body and soul.”

Citing Thomas against invocation of Poor Souls, Ott also says,

“the Church has never frowned on the invocation of the Poor Souls –  a practice which is widespread among the Faithful and which has been advocated by many theologians”.

Tanquerey in his Manual of Dogmatic Theology says (1286):

b. the souls detained in purgatory can pray for us. This is the more common opinion.  On the one hand, out of charity they love us; on the other hand, because they are dear to God, nothing impedes their prayers from being heard.

Finally, I turn to the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

958 Communion with the dead. “In full consciousness of this communion of the whole Mystical Body of Jesus Christ, the Church in its pilgrim members, from the very earliest days of the Christian religion, has honored with great respect the memory of the dead; and ‘because it is a holy and a wholesome thought to pray for the dead that they may be loosed from their sins’ she offers her suffrages for them.” Our prayer for them is capable not only of helping them, but also of making their intercession for us effective.

And

962 “We believe in the communion of all the faithful of Christ, those who are pilgrims on earth, the dead who are being purified, and the blessed in heaven, all together forming one Church; and we believe that in this communion, the merciful love of God and his saints is always [attentive] to our prayers” (Paul VI, CPG § 30).

While the “dead who are being purified” are not yet in Heaven, they are nevertheless holy souls who are not quite ready for the bliss of Heaven due to the justice required in temporal punishment due to sin or some last attachments.

In my opinion, the Poor Souls do not have specific knowledge of our needs or prayers for intercession unless God gives it to them for some reason.  Again, there are also exceptional cases when “Purgatorians” are enabled by God to communicate things to us, primarily their need for prayers and warnings to shape up.  If that is the case, then God could also give them things to pray for.   Perhaps God might do this directly or perhaps through the agency of the Guardian Angels of the Poor Souls.  Their Angel Guardians do not abandon the Poor Souls, after all, and the angels would know what we need.

We can and should, by the way, invoke the help of our angels, not by names, which we cannot know, but in a general sense: “angel of my mother, who is sad”, “angel of Bill at work who seems to hate me, help us to work things out”.  We know only three names of angels from Scripture.  A document from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith instructs us not to invoke any angels by a name unless the three we know: Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael.

Evocation of spirits is superstitious and sinful.  Prayer to Poor Souls for intercession with God is not.