Alonzo L. Gaskill - Life Beyond the Grave: Christian Interfaith Perspectives

We gratefully acknowledge BYU Religious Education for sponsoring the Beyond the Grave conference and for each of the presenters for their remarkable contributions. We express appreciation to the Religious Studies Center team for their assistance: publications directors Thomas A. Wayment and Scott C. Esplin; publications coordinator Joany O. Pinegar; editors R. Devan Jensen, Emily Cook, Sharai McGill, and Petra Javadi-Evans; production supervisor Brent R. Nordgren; and designer Emily V. Strong.

Chapter 1

Purgatory, Limbo, and Catholic Views of the Afterlife

Mathew N. Schmalz

Mathew N. Schmalz, a Roman Catholic scholar, is a professor of religion at the College of Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

I. Father/Son Discussions

I grew up in a Roman Catholic family, and we fancied ourselves to be Catholics of an intellectual sort. The exception to this was my grandmother who was a Catholic of a more traditional kind and would often say the rosary by my bedside as I went to sleep. Our family never fully integrated itself into the devotional rhythms that, in the 1960s and 1970s, still characterized what might be described as ethnic Catholic life. My father was a college art professor and a Catholic convert, and I never saw him reciting a rosary, though tears would often fill his eyes when he discussed the mosaics of the Church of San Vitale in Ravenna or baroque church altars of Bernini. Given our intellectual propensitiesor pretensionsit was a fairly regular practice for my father and me to have after-dinner discussions about theological questions such as the existence of God, the authenticity of papal authority, and the efficacy of Catholic sacraments.

During these father-and-son religious conversations, which, more often than not, would culminate in thinking through Catholic understandings of the afterlife, my father would often say to me, in a way both professorial and paternal, You know, Mathew, your mother is a saintshes going straight to heaven. But me, my dad would say, Im probably going to have to spend some time in purgatoryreferring to that intermediate place of purgation between earthly life and heavenly glory. The prospect of going there after death was a real possibility that evoked feelings of both fear and hope for life beyond the grave.

Our discussion of purgatory often would lead to considering another more theologically challenging aspect of the afterlife that had to do with the circumstances of my birth. I was an adopted child, so I spent the first four months of my life in an orphanage. I knew very little about my birth parents, but one thing I did know is that my birth mother had me baptized. My father, commenting again in a way both professorial and paternal, said, Wasnt it thoughtful that your birth mother had you baptized? What if you had died before we had adopted you? You might have gone to limbo. Limbo was that place for infants who had never sinned but also never received the sacrament of baptism. I often imagined limbo as a warm, temperate place where it was always twilight: its inhabitants floated, surrounded by otherworldly ether.

Orthodox Christians do not accept the existence of purgatory, and limbo has also remained an exclusively Catholic concept. Taken together, however, purgatory and limbo often serve as evidence of the distinctiveness of Catholic doctrines concerning the afterlife: rigorously reasoned within a sophisticated and substantive tradition of theological inquiry in the view of some; idiosyncratic and unscriptural in the opinion of others. Dante positioned limbo at the uppermost level of hell; it is where virtuous pagans and unbaptized infants go. Dante likened purgatory to a mountain that is climbed in the process of human spiritual growth: at its summit, the gates of paradise open.