St. Perpetua’s Purgatory

Awaiting her execution in jail, Vibia Perpetua, a young mother and spiritual leader of a group of Christians in Carthage, had a vision while in prayer. She saw her brother Dinocrates, who died of cancer at age seven. In a dark place with several others, he was “burning hot and thirsty, his face dirty and complexion pale.” The tumor that caused his death marked his face.

Narrating her own story, Perpetua writes, “Immediately, I knew I was worthy and that I must pray for him. So I began to pray profusely concerning him and I wailed to the Lord.” Recalling his horrific death that “was repulsive to all observers,” she repeats, “therefore, I prayed on his behalf.”

Perpetua, noting a huge gulf between them, next saw Dinocrates stretching in vain to drink from a pool whose rim was above his head. Then she woke up. She continues, “I knew my brother was suffering. But I was confident that I would aid his suffering. So I was praying for him every day until we were transferred to the military jail…. And I prayed for him day and night, wailing and crying that he might be given to me.”

On a subsequent day, as her execution was drawing near, Perpetua had another vision. She saw the same place as before, except now Dinocrates was clean, well-dressed, and refreshed; a scar marked the spot where the tumor had been. The rim of that same pool now reached his navel; Dinocrates was drinking freely from it with a golden cup. “Satisfied, he approached to play with the water, rejoicing as infants would.”

Perpetua woke from her vision. “Then I understood that he had been freed from punishment.”

Her narrative then moves elsewhere, but the implication is clear: Perpetua’s fervent prayers catalyzed Dinocrates’ transition from suffering to paradise.

Perpetua describes perfectly what the Church would later articulate as Purgatory: a place of suffering before entering heaven, which souls may approach after the living have offered prayers for their deliverance. Martyred in 203, Perpetua’s narrative long predates all speculative theology about Purgatory. It echoes 2 Maccabees 12:41-45, where Judas Maccabeus and his army, having discovered their fallen Jewish brethren had concealed idols under their tunics, “turned to prayer, beseeching that the sin which had been committed might be wholly blotted out.”

Perpetua’s vision is not considered divine revelation, of course. There are two ways to think of it. One could be a vision ex nihilo; Perpetua could be speaking for God, introducing the Church to Purgatory, and the need to pray for the dead for the first time. Another contends that her vision reflects already existing beliefs and practices of the first Christians. That is, Perpetua and her contemporaries already prayed for the dead and believed their prayers were efficacious; the vision confirms, rather than introduces, a practice already in place. Given what we know about Christians praying for the dead from the very beginning, the latter reading is likely the correct one.

In this light, we can better see Protestantism for what it was: a disruption, a break, a severing of millennia-old Christian practice. The disturbance Martin Luther created in 1517 fermented for a generation before charting a new course. Luther’s 95 Theses express a firm belief in Purgatory. By the time he died in 1546, he called, in his lectures on Genesis, Purgatory—along with the sacrifice of the Mass—an abomination.

John Calvin (1509-1564) went further: “[P]urgatory is constructed out of many blasphemies and is daily propped up with new ones.”

Could Calvin have counted Perpetua’s visions among his perceived blasphemies? What about the Christians carving exhortations in the catacomb walls to pray for the dead buried there? Were they blaspheming? If these first Christians got Purgatory wrong, what else could they have gotten wrong?

Against the extra-Biblical principle of Sola Scriptura that Protestants use to challenge Purgatory and the practice of praying for the dead, Vatican II’s Dei Verbum captures the interplay between the witness of Scripture and the witness of the first Christians known as Tradition:

[T]he Apostles, handing on what they themselves had received, warn the faithful to hold fast to the traditions which they have learned either by word of mouth or by letter (see 2 Thess. 2:15), and to fight in defense of the faith handed on once and for all (see Jude 1:3). Now what was handed on by the Apostles includes everything which contributes toward the holiness of life and increase in faith of the peoples of God; and so the Church, in her teaching, life and worship, perpetuates and hands on to all generations all that she herself is, all that she believes. This tradition which comes from the Apostles develops in the Church with the help of the Holy Spirit. For there is a growth in the understanding of the realities and the words which have been handed down. (8)

Scripture and Tradition are united in the Church, where Tradition illuminates Scripture and Scripture measures Tradition. As Joseph Ratzinger put it in Church, Ecumenism, Politics: New Endeavors in Ecclesiology, Tradition “means above all that the Church, living in the form of apostolic succession with the Petrine office at its center, is the place in which the Bible is lived and interpreted in a binding way.”

In Ratzinger’s view, the practice of St. Perpetua and the first Christians of praying for the dead’s repose would interpret 2 Maccabees and the other fleeting New Testament references that point to a cleansing beyond the grave (Matt 12:32, 1 Cor 3:12). They were not blaspheming. They were living the faith that they received from the apostles, and that faith, in the words of Dei Verbum, “develops in the Church with the help of the Holy Spirit.” Purgatory is nothing other than a development of an understanding of how we each play a role in the once and for all redemption wrought by Christ’s salvific death. The sensus fidelium, keenly aware that the dead need the help of our prayers, has Purgatory right and the Reformers, departing from Tradition and from the Church, have it wrong.

In this month dedicated to the holy souls in Purgatory, let us invoke St. Perpetua’s intercession in praying for our loved ones who need help to complete their journey home to God. May they move from boiling torment to refreshment and may the cancer of sin be expunged so they can rejoice before almighty God.