All Soul’s Day Meditation
Fr. Robert Imbelli provides this gem from the man formerly known as Joseph Ratzinger:
“The Body of Christ” means that all human beings are one organism, the destiny of the whole the proper destiny of each. True enough, the decisive outcome of each person’s life is settled in death, at the close of their earthly activity. Thus everyone is judged and reaches his or her definitive destiny after death. But their final place in the whole can be determined only when the total organism is complete, when the passio and actio of history have come to their end. And so the gathering together of the whole will be an act that leaves no person unaffected. Only at that juncture can the definitive general judgment take place, judging each one in terms of the whole and giving him or her that just place which they can receive only in conjunction with all the rest.
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A beautiful expression of the communal nature of our faith…
This fellow sounds like a pretty good theologian. What was his name again?
On a more serious note, his Eschatology is one of his best works, even if it doesn’t get a tonne of press. I highly recommend reading it next to Miroslav Volf’s Exclusion and Embrace. As far as I can tell, if Catholics and Protestants would each read those two books, we wouldn’t have any more debates about purgatory.