purgatory, the condition, process, or place of purification or temporary punishment in which, according to medieval Christian and Roman Catholic belief, the souls of those who die in a state of grace are made ready for heaven.
The Catholic Church gives the name "purgatory" to what it calls the after-death purification of "all who die in God's grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified.”
The idea of Purgatory as a physical place (like heaven and hell) became a formal Roman Catholic teaching in the late 11th century. Medieval theologians concluded that the purgatorial punishments consisted of material fire.
Purgatory : After years of neglect, some Protestants now believe it exists; many Catholics don't. For others, it's not a place--it's a state of mind.
A Spanish theologian from the late Middle Ages once argued that the average Christian spends 1000 to 2000 years in purgatory (according to Stephen Greenblatt's Hamlet in Purgatory). But there's no official take on the average sentence.
Catholics do not pray to Mary as if she were God. Prayer to Mary is memory of the great mysteries of our faith (Incarnation, Redemption through Christ in the rosary), praise to God for the wonderful things he has done in and through one of his creatures (Hail Mary) and intercession (second half of the Hail Mary).
The most prominent modern historian of the idea of Purgatory, Jacques Le Goff, dates the term purgatorium to around 1170; and in 1215 the Church began to set out the actual length of time in Purgatory required of souls.
The Roman Catholic Church teaches that there is a place where sins are punished and a soul is purified before it can go to Heaven. This is called Purgatory .
Most Roman Catholic priests and hierarchy will now say that no child could ever be condemned for the sins committed by our ancestors and that they no longer believe that limbo for children exists.
At the shores of Purgatory, Dante and Virgil meet Cato, a pagan who was placed by God as the general guardian of the approach to the mountain (his symbolic significance has been much debated).
A lapsed Catholic is a Catholic who is non-practicing. Such a person may still identify as a Catholic, and remains one according to canon law.
Limbo is the nether region where, according to Roman Catholic tradition, unbaptized babies go after death.
While Jesus told Nicodemus, “Amen, Amen, I say to you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit” (John 3:5), he did not set baptism as a hindrance to salvation but just the opposite. We so often judge things by human standards, but God is not restrained by our standards.
Crossing yourself or someone else is an act of sanctification, a physical reminder that you/they are set apart as holy for Christ. Because it is often done at the mention of the Trinity (“Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”), the sign of the cross is also a physical reminder of belief in the Triune God.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (the official teaching of the Church) teaches that worship (or adoration) is meant for God alone. Catholics as well as the Orthodox and some older Protestant groups venerate Mary and the Saints. Mary is venerated because she is full of God's own life and love, his Grace (Luke 1:28).
A Roman Catholic is a Catholic who is a member of the Roman rite. There are many Catholics in the East who are not Roman Catholics, such as Maronite Catholics, Ukrainian Catholics, and Chaldean Catholics.
The Bible clearly teaches that the moment a person turns from his sin and trusts in Jesus to be forgiven of his sin, he is saved (Acts 2:37-41). He has passed from spiritual death to spiritual life (John 5:24) and has been declared not guilty in God's court of law (Rom 3:21-26).
We enter heaven immediately upon our death, or our souls sleep until the second coming of Christ and the accompanying resurrection.
According to official Catholic doctrine, in order for a person to be saved, it's quite a tedious task. It involves steps such as actual grace, faith, good works, baptism, participation in the sacraments, penance, indulgences, and keeping the commandments.
Yes, although the Catholic party must first obtain a “dispensation” from her bishop. The Church teaches that the marriage of a Catholic to someone who is not a baptized Christian is impeded (blocked) by “disparity of cult”—that is, the difference in their religious backgrounds.
In the theology of the Catholic Church, original sin is the absence of original holiness and justice into which humans are born, distinct from the actual sins that a person commits.
Several nontrinitarian religious groups also oppose infant baptism, including Oneness Pentecostals, Christadelphians, Jehovah's Witnesses, United Church of God, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Anglican theology and ecclesiology has thus come to be typically expressed in three distinct, yet sometimes overlapping manifestations: Anglo-Catholicism (often called "high church"), Evangelical Anglicanism (often called "low church"), and Latitudinarianism ("broad church"), whose beliefs and practices fall somewhere ...