Living Catholic with Father Don Wolf

Forgiveness Burns Brightest At Heaven’s Gate | November 2, 2025

• Archdiocese of Oklahoma City

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In this episode, Monsignor Don Wolf explores All Souls Day through the lens of communion across time and the hope of purgatory as purifying love. A hospital story, Scripture, and the saints help illustrate why praying for the dead is not empty sentiment but solidarity in Christ.

• one Church that includes the living and the dead
• universality of grace from Adam to the apostles and to us
• communion with saints and ordinary faithful across centuries
• why prayer for the dead matters and how it helps
• purgatory as the experience of cleansing love, not a place
• forgiveness in Christ and the truth of our lives held together
• time and presence rethought in light of eternity
• practical invitation to remember and pray for specific souls

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Father Don Wolf is a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Living Catholic also broadcasts on Oklahoma Catholic Radio several times per week, with new episodes airing every Sunday.

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This is Living Catholic with Father Don Wolf. This show deals with living the Catholic faith in our times, discovering God's presence in our lives, and finding hope in his word. And now your host, Father Don Wolf.

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Welcome, Oklahoma, to Living Catholic. I'm in Senior Don Wolf, pastor of Sacred Heart Parish and rector of the shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother. We approach now All Souls Day, which is celebrated on November the 2nd. It's the opportunity to pray for those who have gone before us. It's a great gift. It's fortunate we can pay good attention to this act of service and grace. Over the church's history, praying for those who have gone before us in death has been a notable practice. It's not hard to discern its origins. It comes from the most profound understanding of what it means to belong in the church, which is that we remain members of the body of Christ even after we die. The life of the church is more extensive than simply those who, in the words of G.K. Chesterton, just happen to be walking around. All of those who've been baptized and have entered the life of grace are a part of the church, and they remain so even after the curtain of life has rung down. As part of the living church, all those who were with us from the beginning remain within the scope of our concern. They've passed away from us in our lives. They continue with us as part of the church, as part of the hope we share in Christ. Because the church is much larger than we think, and our connections are much more profound than we notice. There's a posture that became popular a couple of years ago that captures this notion of inclusivity in a striking way. It presents a view from just over the shoulder of Jesus on the cross, looking out over the people gathered around the foot of the cross. The people there are from all over the world. They are examples from all races and cultures, notable for their dress and ethnicity. It's just as we would expect, especially we Catholics, for whom the Church is universal in doctrine and prayer and practice. But the gathering at the foot of the cross also includes people from all times and ages, knights in their armor, Romans in their togas, soldiers carrying muskets, and even cavemen dressed in furs. All of them are gathered around the cross of Jesus because he died for them all and is the source of salvation for everyone. As poster art, it's well done. It captures the eye and the imagination. Being the church is to be connected across boundaries and frontiers, but also across eons and centuries. The church is a big place. According to our doctrine, we are not the church simply by way of memory. The members of the church are not here simply by calling them to mind as we think of the pictures of those who've gone before us. It's much more inclusive and more powerful than simply thinking the right thoughts or calling particular faces to mind. Those who have died remain in the church we're part of in every way. They've passed beyond the boundaries of life and death, but they remain connected to us to the life of Christ that we share with them. In an intense and direct way, they belong to the same church we belong to. As Catholics, the church we're part of is the same church as that of the apostles. When James and John preached the resurrection of Christ from the tomb on Easter Sunday morning, gathering the people of Jerusalem to them and their witness of the risen Jesus, they were preaching from within the same church that we belong to right now. When the missionaries left Syria and went to the ends of the earth to preach and to build monasteries in Ireland, they were building the same church as we're part of today. Isaac Jogues and John D. Brebuff, preaching in the woods of the northeast of North America, were proclaiming the same gift of forgiveness and the identical grace of belonging we proclaim and live now. The church is one. To be Catholic is to be something bigger than geography. It is the church everywhere, including across all the years passing since Pentecost. In fact, according to St. Augustine, it's even larger than that. Going back to the imagery of the poster, the cavemen are included in the redemption at the foot of the cross. From the most primitive forms of religious experience, the awareness of the presence of God and the initiative of the Spirit were growing. Those who never knew Christ were redeemed in the gift of Christ as they sought to know and to serve God, even though it may have been in darkness and uncertainty. They belong in the church too. As St. Augustine said, I belong to the Church of Adam, and so do we all. The human striving for God and this sincere desire to know and achieve the good written into our souls writes everyone who sought him onto the roles of the church. As the Eucharistic prayer says, remember all those whose faith is known to you alone. Catholics are everywhere across the centuries, just as we are everywhere across the space of the globe, which makes for another important aspect of our relationship with those who have gone before us. We are not removed by time. They are not removed by time from us. This is another way to say we are in constant communion with them.

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Thomas Aquinas died in the year 1274. He was a member of the church striving to live the life of grace with all of the gifts and talents he'd been given. Being a part of the church today, he's in communion with us and with our struggles to live the life of Christ in the here and now. Saint Damien, who spent his life with the lepers of Molechi and died in the late 1880s, was the great embodiment of the missionary impulse of the 19th century. His example is alive to us in the world of the 21st century. And not only them, but all the people with whom they spent their lives, they are one with us in the body of Christ. It's the same with all of those who have been touched by Christ across the ages and years. We are one with them. Our awareness of those who have gone before us is not just for those whom we happen to remember either. These men and women who were in our lives, they have a deeper and more readily available place in our hearts, but they're merely the ones easiest to call to mind. All the church, all the souls who have passed through the gates of life and into the field of death in Christ, are equally and fully members of the church we commemorate and celebrate. Because we are connected to them, we pray for them as their journey to the fullness of life is completed. This is the source of confusion for many, especially in our age, because of the starkness and poverty of our religious imagination. For many, to pray for those who die is a waste of time. In the minds of many, death is simply the gateway to the Elysian fields of all goodness and bliss, with scarcely a thought of the meaning of life or the truth of judgment. In short, we've inherited a religious vocabulary in which any mention of purgatory is blanked out, which is too bad, since the doctrine of purgatory is eternally hopeful as well as incessantly joyful. When we remove it from our way of thinking, the world becomes a darker place. I had an experience in which the paradox and complications of life became evident. Several years ago I was called to Veterans Hospital early one morning to anoint an old man who had been hovering on the point of death for several hours. As I arrived and said the prayers of the dying, he did, in fact, die. As the nurses attended to his body, one of the family whispered that she wanted to talk to me. As the rest of the family walked down the hallway to their cars, we stepped around the corner and stood at the entrance to one of the empty rooms. She was sincere. She said in a constrained but steady voice, My dad did some terrible things in his life, but he wasn't a terrible man. What he did affected all of us. He made our lives a lot more difficult than they had to be. Will he be able to go to heaven? What will God think? Those were good questions. What do we do with the truth of imperfection and sin in the lives of those we know? Not just in those whose lives have been notably awry, but with the sin and evil present in our own lives. What about us? What will God do? Jesus has opened the gates of heaven to all who seek him. Saint Paul was clear about this in all his writings. There is nothing to stand between us and God's love. In his own words, neither tribulation nor distress, nor persecution, nor famine, nor nakedness, nor peril, nor the sword can separate us from the love of Christ. He goes on to say that neither death nor life, nor angels, principalities, nor things to come, nor things present, nor powers, nor heights, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will separate us from the love of God. That's a comprehensive lift of what we need not be afraid of. In short, the love of Christ has been poured out for all of us. Although the first definition of what it means to be a human being is that we are captured by sin, God has chosen to set us free. While we're all affected by our sinful ways and our choices for evil, the goodness of God has been given to us. The gift of Jesus is to set us free from capture so that our lives can be something other than slavery to the impulses and currents running through our days. This is what it means to come to the cross of Christ. He died for our sins so that our sins can be forgiven. In answer to the troubling question from the concerned daughter at the hospital, the answer is Christ has died for our sins and we are forgiven. Forgiven. This is the offer from God's own initiative and the overwhelming grace of the divine embrace of humanity. The old man who died and all of the truths of his life, good and bad, was forgiven. But that doesn't quite answer the question his daughter had. We know what God will do with the truth of her father, but what will her father do with the truth of forgiveness? And what will we do? How are we to respond to the troubling truths of his life? He perpetrated evil, his life was a broken mess of impulses and temptations and decisions, and he left his family broken because of them. Does the evil he did evaporate in the face of forgiveness? Do the broken shards of life simply lay scattered about with no consequence? And what happens in the face of evil for the one who perpetrates that evil? One of the most difficult parts of dealing with the hurts of life is to know that they often go unnoticed and unaddressed, especially by the one who causes them. It's not uncommon for the person who's done the most damage to be completely unaware of the damage he's responsible for. There's no one more blind than the one who doesn't know he's blind. Often it is just so with those who sin against us. This is reflected so powerfully in the story of Saul, Saint Paul. He was on his way to Damascus to arrest those Jews who are following the preaching of the apostles of Jesus. Rabid to find them and haul them back to the court, to the temple court in Jerusalem, his passion was to stamp out their belief. Saul was so zealous in his conviction, he had helped to stone Stephen to death to stop his preaching and example. On the way to Damascus, a blinding light shone about him, striking him down by its intensity. He then heard a voice demanding, Saul, why do you persecute me? Who are you that I'm persecuting you? He responded. And the voice said, I am Jesus, the one you persecute. Saul stood up and found, because of the brightness of the light, that he was blind. But we who read the whole story, we know that he had been blind for a long time. This was merely the first moment he noticed. And so it is for so many of us. We have no idea how our passions and decisions and actions wound those they touch. Most often, we're blind to what we do. And the most common aspect of our lives, except for some great overwhelming intervention, is to remain so. As Jesus said of the Pharisees, blind you are and blind you remain, that about sums it up for most of us. If when we die, we are able to see ourselves and our lives in their totality, unmediated by the passage of time and the faulty memories and distractions that fill our days, then we will know ourselves and our sins to their depths for the first time. We will be aware of who we really are and what we're really like. That will be terrifying. After all, as we live our days and become more aware of how much we affect the lives of those around us, we continually find out how hurtful our lives can be. At death, when we stand before the fullness of God's love, bathed in these truths, what will we do? I can't think of anyone who could look at every detail of his life with every hard word and every tough decision woven into it and not quail at what it contains. But he will also stand before the truth of the great reconciling love poured out in Christ for our salvation. The word we hear from the mouth of the Father is forgiven. It's what we're promised and what we have incorporated into our lives. From the days we were baptized until the moment of our anointing in the last breaths of life, we've been entrusted with the prospect of God's fullest forgiveness of everything we have repented of. We are forgiven. But as we stand before the gift of God's goodness, we remain the people we are. We'll hear the words of forgiveness, but they will sound newly in our heart. They'll sound different than ever before, because we will have never heard their echoes in the length and hallways of our newly awakened lives. Having never known the depth of our sins before, so we will never have had the chance to know the fullest reach of the Lord's forgiving love before. Never knowing how much we needed it, we will never have experienced or even imagined how much could be offered to us. This is the experience of the forgiveness extended to us from the divine goodness as we come before God with all of the confusions of our flesh removed. God's word to our bare souls will be his assurance of forgiveness. But it's not easy to be forgiven. We all know it's not easy to hear the words and feel the freedom of being forgiven. Even Saint Paul ruminated throughout his life about his participation in the death of Stephen. He was forgiven, he gloried in the freedom he was granted in Christ, he proclaimed to everyone the promise of an entirely new life in Christ, but he still mourned that afternoon when he stood in the circle of those who stoned Stephen and left him dead. Stephen was stoned, and I approved of it, he said. In the Acts of the Apostles, the narrator describes that those who picked up the stones, because getting them and throwing them is hot and sweaty work, took off their coats and laid them at the feet of a young man named Paul. Forgiveness and being made new in Christ, Paul still regretted the death of this just man. Forgiven is the word we long to hear. It's also one of the words most difficult to hear. And thus is purgatory. In the catechism, it is not described as a place, but as an experience. Purgatory is being purged, cleansed of the reality of sin in our lives. It is the price we pay for the given for the forgiveness poured over us by the liberality of Jesus' wild gift of Himself for our salvation. Knowing how we are, how small and mean our lives have been, we have to live with the truth of God's forgiving love in our lives. To quote Flannery O'Connor and every mother and father and spouse who have ever lived, quote, love burns, unquote. Or to say it another way, to die is to enter into the fullest part of the journey toward the goodness of God. And it's not easy. Being enveloped by the fullest graces of the Lord is hard. It is as overwhelming and intimidating as anything can be. It's a purifying, shocking, painful process to know that we are loved and forgiven. Not only are we loved and forgiven, it has been given to us by the pain of the redemption, that is, Jesus' death on the cross. Our lives were bought, as it says in the book of Revelation, by the blood of the Lamb, the sacrifice of God's only Son. This hasn't happened by nothing and for nothing, but by the work of God through the life and death of Jesus. Encountering these truths face to face is difficult, which is why those who have died and who are facing these unfolding truths among themselves need our prayers. We know that when someone we love faces a tough time in his life, our prayers are helpful to him. Knowing he does not face his challenges alone, that he has the support and the recognition of someone else, that he goes to this encounter with the backing of a whole community helps him. It is true in life, it is also true in death. Those who have died are undergoing the difficulties of purification and suffering. Our prayers are directed at what they need and to the hope that they can presume. This is what we celebrate on All Souls' Day. Purgation is also an experience of pure glory. That is, it is the occasion of suffering and reckoning, but it's in the context of God's saving glory. This suffering is only in the context of the embrace of grace and forgiveness. It leads only to the fullness of heaven. As C.S. Lewis described it once, if we were summoned to visit the king and had just come in from slopping the pigs, we would insist on stopping by our house to clean up first. The delay and the difficulty of scraping off the dirt and manure would simply be the preparation for entering the royal court. Purgatory is simply what it means for a soul to enter the endless glory of unconditional forgiveness and the delights of heaven. To be in purgatory is to be at heaven's gate. It is simply entering into God's unconstrained goodness. We do also have to adjust our thinking when it comes to how we measure the passage of time in these things. The dead are present to us continually, not just at once, or only near the time they have died. As we know, the church we belong to is the church of all time. Our membership is not limited or constrained by what century a person lived or died. In the same way, the measures of how many years have passed does not really touch souls. The purgative experience would be as painful and intense in the moment of death as it is as if it were for years. That is, when describing a spiritual experience, the measure of time and its passage don't really apply. Which means our response in prayer and concern is not limited by how many years it has been since someone passed away from us. They are still present to the church and still in need of our prayers. We join them in their journey wherever they are in it and wherever it has taken them. To pray for the dead is to trust that the journey continues. Think of a case in which someone died unexpectedly. If it had not been so, if he had had the chance to prepare for death, if he was laid up with a lengthy illness and knew of death approaching, he would have reviewed his life, asked for forgiveness, and done his best to repair the damage he had caused. Looking over his whole life, he'd cry over his missed opportunities and give thanks for the blessings he had received, and begin to embrace the gift of the world to come. But because death has arrived at an hour he did not expect, he doesn't have time to prepare. It doesn't mean he doesn't believe, or that Christ is not in his life, or that he has not conformed his life to God's will, but it does mean he has some things to take care of as he embraces the end of his life. And because these are hard, he needs our prayers. And so we're happy to pray for all of those who have gone before us. None of us can know the content of another's soul, but we all know there are those who might need our prayers, especially those who are in need much more than some others. These are the ones we most have to pray for. They are exactly the ones we should remember. The greatness of the church is most evident here. Even those who have died and begone before us, they are present to us and we are responsible to them. So let us be responsible members of the church. Let us pray for those who now face the awesome truth of God's love. We continue in communion with them as the one body of Christ. We are now on this side of the line, dividing the living and the dead. Eventually we'll be on the other side. We'll join those who stand before the face of God. In this day of awe and grace, we also will look to those who can stand beside us in imploring the grace and mercy of God upon our lives. It is what we owe one another. It's the grace of belonging to the church that is for everyone everywhere. Back in just a moment. Welcome back to our final segment, Faith in Verse. We have a poem today called All the Scientists. The serious scientists say with wide grins, no one really knew much of anything until we stepped out upon the stage to begin the final act in the final age. Before the discovery of the truth of nature, no one anywhere could say for sure what was the constituency of life or the reasons for water or steam or ice. There were silly fables and stories just so, hiding more than revealing the world's soul, keeping mankind off balance, always reeling, battered by senses, moved by mere feeling. But amid the numbers and formulae, do thinkers know the fullest truth the way, what the beating heart of the world whispers as the planet's world and the stars kissed her? I know it is foolish to say such things, for only measure of proofs can impinge on the poetry of silly images, to relieve our lives become sensitive. But there is more to anyone's living than what careful measures Heft is giving, and we all know the span of heaven above, all air and sun is empty without love. That's all the scientists. I hope you can join us in the weeks to come as we continue to explore what it means to be Living Catholic.

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Living Catholic is a production of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City for Oklahoma Catholic Radio. To learn more, visit okr.org.