Traditional Catholic Teaching -Lesson 19

Lesson 19 - Death and After

The Sacrament of Extreme Unction

It is appointed for men once to die and after this the judgment. (Heb. 9: 27)

All our life is a preparation for that moment when we leave it and go before God to hear the verdict that will decide the life that we are going to live forever after we have left this world. The most certain thing in life is that one day we must die. The most uncertain thing is when we shall die. There is no orderly queue. Sometimes we are expecting a person to die who is seriously ill and yet that person recovers and somebody else we know who was in perfectly good health dies quite unexpectedly.

It is natural to he afraid of death. But by God's help every man can face death with confidence and peace of mind.

What do we know about life after death? Is there in fact any life after death? We are certain that there is life after death on the word of God. God confirms what our unaided intelligence dimly yet strongly surmises.

The Soul Cannot Die

Our own reason and intelligence can give us good grounds for believing that when the body dies something in us lives on. Man is not just body, he is also spirit. He has a soul. The body is a material thing. When the life goes out of it, as we say, it falls into its separate parts. It drops to dust.

But there is something in us that is not a material thing, that cannot come apart, that cannot corrupt. How do we know?

You stand by the body of a friend who has died and you may be struck most of all by the fact of death. Everything seems finished. And yet if you think it over the conviction deepens that death is not the end.

You find a letter that your friend had written to you during his life. He had used paper and ink to capture his thoughts. But his thoughts were more than just paper and ink.

During his life he had spoken to you. His thoughts had been a sound in the air. But they were more than just a sound. Nor were they just a twist of a membrane in his head. They were more than just material things. There was something in him which paper and ink, sound, flesh and blood, even a brain could only roughly capture and express.

He had spoken, for example, of Justice, of Truth. But Justice and Truth are not material things. A material thing can be weighed, has a colour, a shape, can be measured. Even the material force that we call energy, such a thing as electricity, can be measured.

But who can measure Justice or Truth? These are ideas, spiritual things. You cannot say, "How long is justice?" "How wide is truth?" These things have no parts and so they cannot come apart. They cannot corrupt.

Now if a man can have spiritual ideas then there is something in him that is not material. And that something we call his soul. When the body dies the soul lives on.

Pagan Belief in Life After Death

That conviction is not just sentiment. It is sound reasoning. It is a conviction that has been shared by the vast majority of mankind. Wherever we find traces of human beings — burial grounds, graves thousands of years old, we find, too, evidence of belief in survival after death.

The ancient pagans like the ancient Jews, God's chosen people, had the same conviction. But survival is very little. There is life beyond the horizon of death. But what kind of life? And that is where reasoning power begins to fail. So the pagan took little comfort from his belief in immortality.

"We, when we go down there among the dead, what are we? A handful of dust and a shadow," wrote the pagan poet.

The Bible

Even in the Bible in the Old Testament you will find phrases which show that the ancient Jews only learnt very slowly that life after death is more than just survival. You will find phrases like this:

Better a living dog than a dead lion... The dead know nothing more. They have said goodbye to this world and all its busy doings under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 9.)

But as the ages rolled on God gave more and more light. So if you take up the Book of Wisdom you can read these lovely words:

The souls of the just are in God's hands and no torment in death itself has power to reach them. Dead? Fools think so, think their end loss, their leaving us annihilation; but all is well with them. The world sees nothing but the pains they endure. They themselves have eyes only for what is immortal. So light their suffering, so great the gain they win. God all the while did but test them, and testing them found them worthy of Him . . . Trust Him if thou wilt, true thou shalt find Him; faith waits for Him calmly and lovingly. Who claims His gift, who shall attain peace, if not they His chosen servants? (Wisdom 3.)

When Our Lord came on earth He made it certain for us.

I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he is dead, will live on, and whoever has life and has faith in Me, to all eternity cannot die. (John 11: 25 – 26)

On another occasion He quoted from the words of the Old Testament:

Then at last, He said, the just will shine out clear as the sun in their Father's Kingdom. (Matt. 8.)

Their Father's Kingdom is Heaven. That is the home we are made for. What does it mean?

Heaven — What is It?

Heaven is to see, love and enjoy God forever in a state of perfect happiness.

Eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man what things God hath prepared for them that love him, (1 Cor.2: 9.)

St. Paul puts it this way:

We see now through a glass in a dark manner but then face to face. Now I know in part; but then I shall know even as I am known. (1 Cor. 8: 12.)

St. John writes:

Dearly beloved, we are now the sons of God and it hath not yet appeared what we shall be. We know that when He shall appear we shall be like to Him for we shall see Him as He is. (1 John 3: 2.)

To understand heaven we must try and understand those words: "We shall see Him as He is"— "then face to face." Sometimes people say; "How can anybody be happy forever?" One writer said: "I think three hundred years is as long as I should like to put up with. The Christians offer me an eternity of frustration".

He misses the point. This life here on earth is 40, 50, 70 years of frustration. But heaven is fulfilment. It is not something to be reckoned in years. It is one moment seized and kept.

A Simple Comparison

Here is a simple comparison, A soldier is reported missing in the war. His family is plunged in grief. For four years there is silence. Hope struggles on against despair. And then one day the war ends and news comes that the father is found and is arriving home in a few days time.

Imagine the waiting, the longing to see him. Four years of frustration about to be resolved. The day comes, the hours tick by and then suddenly there he is. His wife and children cling to him, tears and smiles mingling. All that long time leading up to this. All resolved in this one moment brimful of happiness. If only time could stand still.

Suppose time did stand still. Suppose the happiness would never fade, never cloy, would remain just at that peak. That is what happens in heaven. But it is no merely natural happiness. It is perfect happiness because at last we are united to God. That is heaven. We see God at last and are united to Him directly.

All our life here on earth is more or less frustration. We can never be fully satisfied here. The appetites grow dim and jaded. Even love can grow cold or common place. Because we are made for God — there is a thirst that only the infinite can slake, a gulf in our hearts that only God can fill, God fills that gulf in heaven.

Heaven is the eternal possession of God, timeless ecstasy, And in companionship with God we shall have, too, the companionship of our friends, those we have known and loved here on earth if they, too, have saved their souls.

The Resurrection of the Body

Christ promises us yet more. We are spirit. But we are body also. At death the soul, the spirit, goes at once to Heaven, to Purgatory or to Hell. At the last day the body will be re-united to the soul.

This is the will of Him Who sent me that all those who believe in the Son when they see Him should enjoy eternal life; 1 am to raise them up at the last day. (John 6: 40.)

Again:

The time is coming when all those who are in the graves will hear His voice and will come out of them, those whose actions have been good rising to new life and those whose doings have been evil rising to meet their sentence. (John 5: 29.)

St. Paul calls this risen body a spiritual body. It is still, of course, material otherwise it would not be a body. But by the power of God the material body will be given some spiritual qualities. It will no longer be subject to pain or weariness.

St. Paul says:

What is sown corruptible rises incorruptible. (I Cor. 15.)

And St. John:

He shall wipe away every tear from their eyes and there will be no more death or mourning or cries of distress, no more sorrow. Those old things have passed away. (Apocalypse 21.)

To see what it will be like read the Gospels and see what Christ's body was like when He rose from the dead. It was a real body. But raised above the material conditions of the world we know. So our bodies will be freed. Freed from the restrictions and limitations that their material nature now imposes on them.

We know this because Christ, head of the human race, led the way:

As all have died with Adam so with Christ all will be brought to life. But each must rise in his own rank; Christ is the first fruits and after Him follow those who belong to him, those who have put their trust in His return…His reign as we know must continue until He has put all His enemies under His feet, and the last of those enemies to be dispossessed is death. (I Cor. 15.)

Judgment

But we do not go to heaven automatically. Whether we win heaven or lose it depends on the life we have led.

After death the judgment. (Hebrews 9.)

We call the judgment immediately after death the Particular Judgment. At the last day will come the Final Judgment when every man's life will be revealed to the whole world and at last the whole plan of God's providence will be made clear.

When the Son of Man shall come in His majesty and all the angels With Him He shall say to them that shall be on His right hand. Come ye blessed of My Father, possess you the kingdom prepared for you... Then he shall say to them also that shall be on His left hand: Depart from Me you cursed into everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels. (Matt. 25.)

Hell

We have already spoken of Hell in the lesson on Sin (Lesson 12). It is enough to repeat here that Hell is real and that Hell is everlasting and that Our Lord continually warns His hearers that if they do not choose to love and serve God, and die in that state of mind, then they have themselves chosen eternal misery.

God made us to be happy with Him forever in Heaven. If we choose against Him we have rejected the one thing that can make us eternally happy and we are therefore doomed to eternal unhappiness.

Hell is a mystery just as Heaven is a mystery. But it is quite certain because we have the word of Christ for it.

Purgatory

It is Catholic teaching that there is a third state after death. Not everlasting like heaven and hell but temporary. We call it Purgatory, which means the place of cleaning. It is a place where souls suffer for a time after death on account of their sins.

This is one of the tenderest and most consoling of Catholic doctrines. A person dies a friend of God and yet having a certain debt of punishment to pay for sins committed in the past. Which of us could claim to die absolutely pure of sin? We do not know exactly what the sufferings of the souls in Purgatory consist in. What is certain is that they are friends of God, that they love God and that they are happy to be in Purgatory so that they may go to God pure of sin and so be ready and fit to enter His presence and to enjoy Him.

We on earth can help them by our prayers.

It is a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead that they may be loosed from sins. (2 Machabees 7: 46.)

And it has been the custom of Christians ever since the earliest days to pray in this way for their friends. A prayer we often say is:

"Eternal rest give unto them O Lord and let perpetual light shine upon them. May they rest in peace. Amen."

The Last Sacraments

How does the Church help us to prepare for death? If you look – in the obituary columns of the newspaper you will often see after name of a Catholic who has died:

Fortified by the rites of Holy Mother Church.

These rites we sometimes call the Last Sacraments. When a person is gravely ill Catholics send for the priest. The priest hears the sick man's confession and gives him Holy Communion. (We call this Holy Communion Holy Viaticum, which means food for a journey.)

Then the priest administers the Sacrament of Extreme Unction which means the last anointing. You find it mentioned in the fifth chapter of St. James's Epistle:

Is anyone sick among you? Let him bring in the priests of the church and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord, And the prayer of faith shall save the sick man and the Lord shall raise him up and if he be in sins they shall be forgiven him. (James 5.)

Oil signifies strength and in this sacrament the anointing with oil is given a special power by God to give the strength which is needed for our last moments. When we approach the solemn moment of death we shall need special strength and grace to keep us firm in faith, in hope and love of God.

Not infrequently this Sacrament even restores a person to health. Doctors, nurses and priests could tell of many instances. Certainly non-Catholics are often astonished to find what peace of mind this Sacrament gives to the sick.

But the most important effect of the Sacrament is, of course, the grace of God, the special grace which is needed for our last moments.

What the priest does is to make the sign of the cross with the holy oil (it is blessed by the bishop on Holy Thursday) on the eyes, ears, nostrils, lips, hands and feet of the dying person saying:

"By this holy anointing and by His most loving mercy may the Lord forgive thee whatever thou hast committed by sight, by hearing, etc."

The Last Blessing

After this the priest gives a special blessing and if the sick person is truly sorry for sin, has confessed his sins and received Holy Communion, then the blessing takes effect at the moment of death and wipes out all the punishment still due to sin. So that we may have every hope that the person who dies with the Last Sacraments goes straight to heaven.

We cannot be certain in any individual case because the effect of the Sacraments and the blessing will vary to some extent according to the dispositions, the good will of the person receiving them. But we may have good hope that a person who has done his best to repent of his sins and to love God may receive the full effect of the last rites

A Happy Death

This death of a good Catholic is a masterpiece. A Catholic who has lived his life in the love of God has learnt to accept death and any sufferings that may accompany it in union with the death and sufferings of Our Lord. You will hear a good Catholic on his death-bed saying from time to time:

All for Thee, O Jesus

and bearing even the most bitter suffering with patience and peace of mind.

What we should do is to prepare for death by a good life and then face it with confidence. Man is the only creature who knows he will die. The Faith helps us to die like a man and like a son of God.

Here is a prayer for a happy death:

O my God, I accept of death as a homage and adoration which I owe to Thy Divine Majesty, and as a punishment justly due to my sins, in union with the death of my dear Redeemer and as the only means of coming to Thee my beginning and last end.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I give you my heart and my soul.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, assist me in my last agony.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, may I breathe forth my soul in peace with you. Amen.

Note — Cremation

Cremation is forbidden for Catholics except in cases of extreme necessity such as a plague, when it may be impossible to bury all the dead.

This is not a matter of doctrine but of Catholic practice. In the earliest days the Christians buried their dead, following the Jewish tradition as opposed to the Pagan practice of burning the dead.

When Cremation was revived in the nineteenth century it was done as a deliberate attempt to attack a Christian practice. This is not usually in the minds of those who advocate Cremation today. Nevertheless the Church keeps her traditional practice because it is repugnant to Christian sentiment violently and positively to destroy the body which had been the "Temple of the Holy Spirit".

The author is indebted to the B.B.C, for permission to use some parts of a broadcast made by him in 1952.

End of Lesson 19

Supplement A

Appendix: "Understanding Purgatory"

Supplement B: "My Kingdom Is Not of This World:

Lesson 19: Further Reading

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