Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmitz, and you're listening to the Catechism in a Year podcast,

where we encounter God's plan of sheer goodness for us, revealed in scripture and passed it down

through the tradition of the Catholic faith. The Catechism in a year is brought to you by

Ascension. In 365 days, we'll read through the Catechism of the Catholic Church discovering our identity and God's family as we journey together toward our heavenly home. It is Day 140. We're reading paragraphs 1030 to 1037. As always, I'm using the Ascension edition of the Catechism, which includes the Foundations of Faith approach. But you can follow along with any recent version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. You can also download your own catechism in your reading plan by visiting ascensionpress.com slash CIY. And you can also click follow or subscribe in your podcast app for daily notifications. Just a one quick note. Thank you for all of those who have supported the production of this podcast with prayers and your financial gifts. Couldn't do this without you at all. So thank you so much. We made it here today, 140, which is just incredible. We're talking today about two big topics,

right, both purgatory or the final purification, as well as hell. Now, it's interesting that

purgatory has three paragraphs and hell has, I think, five paragraphs. And so it's remarkable because they're kind of

big topics. But we're going to hear about this. We're going to hear that in paragraph 1030,

all who die in God's grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured

of their eternal salvation, but after death, they undergo purification so as to achieve the holiness

necessary tend to the joy of heaven.

In paragraph 1030, there is a quick definition, essentially, of what we believe, that you died in God's grace and died in God's friendship, but still are imperfectly purified.

There are attachments, things we're holding on to that can't come with us into heaven or even just

our hearts aren't big enough for heaven or even like this, our love isn't true enough

for heaven. And we'll talk about that in a sec. So there's a process and the process is

purification. And so the church gives the name purgatory to that final purification of the

elect, which is entirely different from the punishment of the damned. That's going to be really, really important. Now, that's based on sacred scripture. And this might be one of those big days for some people like, okay, finally we're going to hear about purgatory. Yeah, we're going to hear three paragraphs. But we are going to hear some of the places that the data for purgatory comes to us through sacred scripture. That's things like 1 Corinthians chapter 3, verse 15. That's 1 Peter chapter 1, verse 7, where it talks about that there's a final purification. There's a cleansing fire talked about in 1st Corinthians 315 in 1st Peter 1 7. There's also 2nd Maccabees chapter 12, which talks about how it is a good and noble thing to pray for the

dead so we're talking about that today we're also talking about hell and the reality of course we can

choose hell in paragraph 1033 it says we cannot be united with God unless we freely choose to love him

but we cannot love God if we sin gravely against him, against our neighbor, or against

ourselves. And that's just the reality, right? We get what we've chosen. As we keep saying the last few

days, that Jesus Christ has made it possible for us to actually choose heaven by his grace.

And yet, if I don't choose that, if I, if I don't choose, freely choose to love God

...