Jimmy Akin discusses whether someone who dies right after Confession will go straight to Heaven or still may have to pass through Purgatory.
Transcript:
Host: We’ll go now to Scott in Dover, Pennsylvania watching on YouTube, and by the way, hello to everybody watching on Facebook Live, YouTube Live, or Periscope, happy to have you with us. Scott, you’re on with Jimmy Akin, what’s your question?
Caller: Fantastic, thank you very much. A friend and I have been having a discussion/argument about the nature of Purgatory and its relationship to reconciliation. My friend believes that, if you would die directly following reconciliation, that you would go directly to Heaven and bypass Purgatory. It was my understanding that that isn’t how it would go; that rather–while God does forgive and forget our sins–we still have some consequences that need to be paid for and purged in Purgatory in order for us to be perfect. I was wondering what the true answer on that would be?
Jimmy: The true answer is actually somewhere in the middle, but it’s closer to what you said than what your friend said. By the way, you used a little bit of language there that I probably ought to just put an asterisk on, where you said God forgives and forgets our sins. And sometimes people wonder, “Does God literally forget our sins?” And the answer is no, He doesn’t literally forget our sins. He’s omniscient, He knows everything, He still knows you did it. So He doesn’t literally forget our sins; I don’t mention that for your sake, Scott, but because I know some people wonder about that, because they sometimes ask about that.
But God does forgive our sins, and when that happens in Reconciliation, what He does for sure is remit, or get rid of, the eternal consequences of our sin. That’s the penalty of Hell, in other words. What He may or may not do is remit or get rid of the temporal consequences of our sins, such as the ones we might experience in Purgatory. So He can get rid of those, but he hasn’t promised to get rid of those, and so consequently there’s not a single answer for: “If someone has just been reconciled in confession, they walk out of the confessional and get hit by a bus before they can commit a sin, are they definitely going to go to Heaven or Purgatory directly?”
We don’t know, because we know they’re gonna go to Heaven eventually, because God got rid of the eternal penalty of their sin; but He may or may not have gotten rid of the temporal consequences. And if the getting smacked by a bus isn’t enough to deal with those temporal consequences, then there could be some clean up in Purgatory. But He’s God, and so He can do what He chooses, and therefore God could possibly have someone go straight to Heaven, but He could possibly have them cleaned up too, in Purgatory.
Caller: Okay, thank you very much.