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Should You Honor a Person’s Request Not to Pray for Him After He Dies?

Jimmy Akin

Jimmy Akin explains why we should always pray for the souls of the deceased, even if they requested otherwise before death, and why we shouldn’t fear any retaliation if we don’t honor such a request.

Transcript:

Host: And Natalie in Germany is watching on Facebook Live, and she typed in the following question: “If someone in life has requested that none should pray for their soul after death, should that request be honored? Could an angry soul retaliate?”

Jimmy: Okay, um, the answer is: such a request should not be honored, because God wants us to reach out to Him in love for other people, for His fellow creatures; and even if someone in life did not want you to pray for them, that doesn’t mean—number one, that they don’t need your prayers. They may well. They may be in a state where, you know, they died hopefully in God’s friendship, but in need of some purification, and your prayers could be of assistance to them.

Also, if they’re in that situation, they’re gonna have a different perspective than they did in life. They’re gonna have a clearer vision and understanding of God at this point, and they will appreciate the prayer at that point. So both because they may need it, and because at this point if they need it they will want it, it’s good to go ahead and pray for them.

If someone died completely outside of God’s friendship, if they turned their back on him in a fundamental way—and that’s something we can never know in this life; even when someone dies not believing in God, we don’t know that they weren’t still open to Him on some fundamental level and could be with him in the afterlife, so we never give up on hoping for anyone’s salvation. But suppose that they did definitively exclude God fundamentally, and so they died outside of his friendship and, regrettably, are not with Him in the afterlife. Well, in that case, there is no basis in the Bible or in Catholic tradition for saying a soul in that condition can harm you, and so they wouldn’t be able to retaliate. Now, since we don’t have a lot of knowledge about souls in this condition, the Church doesn’t have a lot of teachings about this; but if this were a serious worry, it would have shown up and the Church would have a teaching on it.

So don’t worry about potential retaliation, just focus on loving other people and loving God.

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