Scott Hahn's trouble with Purgatory I can understand mostly because the latter is literally painful. If we're not careful it can steal the joy in being forgiven, so I am sympathetic to Hahn's account since it's got to be hard for a non-cradle Catholic on something like that (and it's almost a catch-22 - those appreciative of being purified are those in least need of it):
The Pope was a doctrine that was very difficult for me and so was Mary. Both of those were dealt with in terms of historical evidence and Biblical evidence and basically, I was done. Purgatory was different. I came to a conclusion that sufficient evidence exists for an intermediate state between heaven and hell on the basis of the Bible and ancient Jewish practices of praying for the dead and evidences in the early Christian Church that I will review this morning. But there was still a very big emotional block. Very big...
I want to share with you my own intellectual, spiritual pilgrimage on this particular point because, as I said, I didn't just have intellectual problems, I had emotional problems, psychological difficulties with this teaching. One thing I did, though, was to ask the Lord to open my mind.____
Christ has accomplished our redemption. It's over and done with. He has finished it. But then He sends the Holy Spirit to apply it, and the application of redemption is just as essential.
Caryll Houselander in Essential Writings as selected by Wendy Wright, writes of suffering:
Suffering is the means by which Christ chose to redeem sin; logically so, since it is the direct result of sin. For this reason Christ and suffering are inseparable for so long as there remains one jot of unredeemed sin, one sinner on earth.
It is not for the love of suffering that Christ chooses it in his saints, in whom he lives on, but for the love of men, because it is their redeeming and his communion with them...
In man Christ does suffer more, and he will suffer more until the end of time; and in the saints, simply because they love men as Christ loves them and with his love of them, it is "a joy, and a bliss, an endless liking" [Julian of Norwich] to suffer too.
..."He who grows in love rows in grief": these words of a saint (St. Catherine of Sienna) are a tremendous understatement, for he who grows in Christ's love opens his heart not only to grief but to all the suffering and terror and sorrow and pain of the whole world.
Christ has given suffering a sacramental quality, and like any sacrament its effectiveness for good or ill depends upon the man who receives it. Man can receive suffering sacrilegiously, he can resent it and do all in his puny power to resist it; he can desecrate it, and desecrated suffering is destructive. It corrodes the man who has inflicted it on himself and turns him sour; in the end it destroys him. In the measure that we accept the suffering God allows to come to us individually, we accept the power of God's redeeming love, which we can use to heal mankind as well as to be healed by it ourselves...The saint's desire for suffering is not the expression of a morbid mind, but the love of Christ for the world.
Since Christ embrac'd the Crosse it selfe, dare I
His image, th' image of his Crosse deny?
--Donne
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