A special friendship with the Holy Souls

“The holy souls in purgatory. Out of charity, out of justice, and out of excusable selfishness — they have such power with God! – remember them often in your sacrifices and in your prayers.

May you be able to say when you speak of them, ‘My good friends the souls in purgatory.’” (The Way 571).

A friend in need is a friend indeed

What makes a friend a friend? Friendship comes about “when we so love another as to will what is good for him” (St Thomas Aquinas). One wants good things for one’s friend as one does for oneself. In his Confessions, St Augustine says that “someone well called his friend ‘half my soul’”. 

St Josemaría’s relationship with the holy souls was living, personal and also reciprocal. He wanted the very best for them – nothing less than heaven. At the same time he was fully convinced that his “good friends” in purgatory were actively supporting him and that is why he often asked for their help.

The Supplication of Souls

St Thomas More also shows a relationship of mutual friendship with those undergoing the final purification in his striking treatise entitled The Supplication of Souls.

More’s text is a response to a small anonymous tract which was spread among court circles in early 1529 entitled A Supplication for Beggars. Its author was Simon Fish, living in Antwerp. In this pamphlet, in which he appealed strongly to Henry VIII, Fish contended that all the problems of contemporary England had their origin in one source: the greed and corruption of the English clergy, including their insistence on being paid to pray for the dead.

St Thomas More’s Supplication of Souls, an impassioned and hastily written text is ten times longer than Fish’s pamphlet. (See St Thomas More, The Four Last Things. The Supplication of Souls. A Dialogue on Conscience, rendered in modern English by M. Gottshcalk, Scepter, New York 2002. The Supplication of Souls is one of the three works of More contained in this book.) More’s Supplication adopts the genre of a dialogue in which the holy souls themselves address the readers in an impassioned appeal. Thus the Supplication opens with an address “to all good Christian people”: “In the most piteous way we continually cry out and call upon your devout charity and most tender pity for help, comfort and relief”. This approach succeeds in engaging the reader personally from the start.

The souls in Purgatory are not an anonymous crowd. Rather, they impress on us that “we are your late acquaintances, relatives, spouses, companions, playmates, and friends – and now your humble and out-of-touch and half-forgotten supplicants”. They appeal to the love shown in life: “Our wives there, remember your husbands here. Our children there, remember your parents here. Our parents there, remember your children here. Our husbands there, remember you wives here.”

A comprehensive defence of Purgatory

The Supplication is composed of two parts of similar length. In the first, the souls describe and refute the claims of the Supplication for Beggars. Fish had claimed that the clergy were the cause of all the poverty in the realm. He argued that friars, by begging throughout the kingdom were making “an annual income of 43,333 pounds, 6 shillings, 8 pennies sterling … far over half the money in the realm”. In order to stop people from paying Mass stipends to the clergy, he tries to convince them that Purgatory does not exist. 

The souls set out to show and answer the main errors of Fish’s work, without claiming they can address them all since they are too numerous. They do answer various contentions: The number of beggars has not in fact increased, nor are they dying of hunger. They show his calculation of the clergy’s income is impossible and argue that the misdeeds of some clergy should not be imputed to all of them. 

The second part of More’s Supplication is a systematic argumentation in favour of the existence of Purgatory adducing numerous sources of evidence, including Scripture, sacred Tradition, Liturgy, Church teaching, as well as arguments from reason. In this context too, the souls repeatedly state that Fish’s denial of Purgatory springs from the influence of Luther’s thought. The effectiveness of More’s answer to The Supplication for Beggars may be reflected in the fact that Fish died in communion with the Church.

Suffrages: helping our friends in the Church suffering

While The Supplication of Souls is a vigorous defence of Purgatory, the immediate concern of the holy souls is that the living might cease to pray and offer helps or “suffrages” for them. “We are more beggars than your beggars are”, they tell us. At the same time they encourage the living to give alms to the needy on earth since that is also a suffrage which may be offered for the souls in Purgatory.

The efficacy of prayer for the faithful departed is shown to be rooted in the communion of the Church. The souls sketch a theology of the Mystical Body of Christ: “No sensible person will doubt that the prayer of any member of Christendom can profit anyone that it is offered for who is in need and is a member of the same”. The efficacy of prayer for the dead can be understood by considering prayer for the living, since “to what end serve the prayers that everyone prays for others? Why did St Paul pray for all Christians and ask them all to pray for him too, and for each other, that they might be saved?” 

If the living members of the Church support each other through prayer, all the more so can the faithful departed benefit from the solidarity of their brothers and sisters on earth: “There is no one still living who is more truly a member of Christ’s Mystical Body, which is his Church, than we are, nor is there anyone still living who is more in need of help than we are. For with respect to certainty of salvation, we are comrades with the angels, while with respect to need of relief we are still comrades with you”.

The ways in which the living can aid the dead are many and varied – “pilgrimages, almsgivings and prayer” but the souls repeatedly recommend the primacy of “the sacred oblation of that holy Sacrament offered for them in the Mass”. Here they are echoing the perennial faith and praxis of the Church testified from the very beginning from the “great antiquity of the liturgy of the Church”. 

Belief in Purgatory benefits the living

The Supplication of Souls is not purely self-interested. On the contrary, the souls are motivated primarily by their concern for the faithful on earth. The affection with which they address their readers is striking. The text is an urgent appeal to the living for their support, but the souls repeatedly stress that they are motivated in the first place by love for their brothers and sisters on earth. 

From the start, the holy souls state that although Fish’s “unfortunate book does for our part affect us very directly, we yet, in warning the world of his venomous writing, are motivated much more by the dear love and charity that we have for you than by concern for our own relief”. For even if those on earth ceased believing in Purgatory and thus stopped offering prayers for them, God would never forget them and in his mercy would take them out of Purgatory in due course. However the loss of belief in Purgatory could harm the souls of the living. In defending the existence of Purgatory the souls tell us that they are upholding, “that one point which, though it specially pertains to ourselves, yet much more specially pertains to you” since lack of belief in it is “to our great harm and much more your own”.

Moreover the acts of charity offered by the living for the dead redound to the benefit of both. The faithful on earth lose nothing at all by being generous with the faithful departed. On the contrary, the love they offer redounds to their own benefit. This shows that love is indeed without limit (cf. 1 Cor 13). The souls illustrate this point with a metaphor: 

 “For just as when you light a candle for someone else, you have no less light for yourself, and when you blow on a fire to warm someone else, you also warm yourself with it, so, good friends, surely the good that you send here before you both greatly refreshes us and still is wholly preserved here for you, with our prayers added to it for your further advantage”.