Continue exploring death with the assistance of H.E. Monsignor Raffaello Martinelli, Apostolic Administrator of the Diocese of Frascati.
You can read the first part of the text on our blog.

How can the condition of human beings after death be described?

“Imaginary and arbitrary representations must be avoided, since instead of helping, they deepen the difficulties of the Christian faith. Nevertheless, the images used by Sacred Scripture deserve respect. Their profound meaning must be sought, avoiding the risk of overly attenuating them and thereby emptying the realities they express of their substance” (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Letter on Certain Questions Regarding Eschatology).

What happens after death?

The soul, separated from the body, is judged by God in relation to the faith and deeds accomplished. This is the particular judgment, by which each person receives immediate retribution for their earthly life. 

This retribution consists in entering:
• or the eternal joy of Paradise:
– immediately after death;
– or after suitable purification (Purgatory);
• or eternal damnation in Hell.

What is Paradise?

Paradise is the state of complete and definitive happiness. This happiness consists in seeing God “as he is” (1 John 3:2), “face to face” (1 Corinthians 13:12). God will then be known and loved as humanity's greatest and supreme happiness, the ultimate goal and full realization of humanity's deepest aspirations. Paradise, therefore, consists in living the Trinitarian life: being, for all eternity, with God, through Christ, in the Holy Spirit.
This mystery of the beatific vision, of blessed communion with God and with all those who are in Christ, surpasses every possibility of understanding and description. It cannot be located, just as God cannot be located. Sacred Scripture speaks to us of it through certain images: life, light, peace, a wedding banquet, the Father's house, the heavenly Jerusalem…
“Paradise is not a fairytale place, nor an enchanted garden. Paradise is an embrace with God, infinite Love, and we enter it thanks to Jesus, who died on the cross for us. Where Jesus is, there is mercy and happiness; without Him there is cold and darkness” (Pope Francis, General Audience, October 25, 2017).

What is Purgatory?

Purgatory is the purification of those who die in God's grace and are therefore already assured of being able to enter Paradise, but need further purification in order to attain the holiness necessary to enter into the joy of Paradise.

How can we help with this purification?

God purifies, through the merits of Christ, who died and rose again, those who are in Purgatory, also thanks to the cooperation that we can offer them.

We, who are still pilgrims here on earth, can in fact help our deceased, who are in Purgatory:
• through our prayers of suffrage, especially by participating in the celebration of Holy Mass and also having Holy Masses celebrated for them. Indeed, there is no prayer that surpasses Holy Mass, which is an unsurpassable and irreplaceable gift from God, including for helping our deceased;
• through works of penance and charity;
• through Indulgences, which are the remission, granted by God, of the temporal punishment for sins whose guilt has already been forgiven. Every Christian, a pilgrim here on earth, can obtain such Indulgences through the intervention of the Church, if properly disposed and under certain conditions, and can apply them to the deceased, so that they may be relieved of the temporal punishments due for their sins.

What is Hell?

• Hell is the eternal damnation of those who, by their own free choice, die in mortal sin without repenting of it and without accepting God’s merciful love. Jesus expresses this reality through several images: Gehenna, unquenchable fire, a blazing furnace… These images describe the state of extreme suffering and eternal damnation that afflicts those who are in Hell.
• The principal punishment of Hell consists in eternal separation from God: in Him alone, in fact, can human beings have the life and happiness for which they were created and to which they aspire.

• God predestines no one to go to Hell. On the contrary, as a good Father, He wants everyone to be saved and to reach His home: Heaven. That is why He sent His Son, who died and rose again. He does not want “anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance” (2 Pet 3:9). For this reason, during their earthly life, He calls each and every person, both gently and, sometimes, even forcefully (as every good father does with his own child). Nevertheless, having created human beings free and responsible, God respects each person’s decisions, especially at the crucial moment of death. Therefore, it is the person themselves who, in complete freedom, autonomy, and responsibility, voluntarily excludes themselves from Heaven and from communion with God if, until the moment of their death, they persist in mortal sin, rejecting God’s merciful love, and thus condemn themselves to Hell.

What is the Last, universal Judgment?

It is the Judgment that God will pronounce at the end of time, at the end of the world, when Christ «will come in glory with all his angels […]. And all the nations will be assembled before him, and he will separate one from another […]. And these will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life» (Mt 25:31-46).

With this Judgment:
• all human bodies will rise again. Every body, transformed from corruptible and mortal into incorruptible and eternal, will be reunited with its soul, sharing with it the condition of Paradise or Hell: the condition it has had since the moment of the body's death.
• Among all the saints in Heaven, there will be a fraternal communion «extremely delightful, because each person will possess all the goods of all the other Blessed. Each will love the other as himself and therefore rejoice in the other's good as in his own. Thus, the joy of one alone will be all the greater the greater the joy of all the other blessed» (Saint Thomas Aquinas, Conference on the Creed).
• There will be «new heavens and a new earth» (2 Pt 3:13). The present universe, freed from all bondage, will be a new universe, in which «there will be no more death, nor mourning, nor crying, nor pain, because the former things have passed away» (Rev 21:4).
• God's plan to «recapitulate all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth» (Eph 1:10) will be fully and definitively accomplished. God will be «all in all» (1 Cor 15:28).

When will the Last Judgment take place?

Only God knows the day and hour of this definitive event. We know only that it will happen «on the last day» (Jn 6:39), at the end of this world.

Tomorrow we will publish more interesting content about death by His Excellency Monsignor Raffaello Martinelli on the blog. Keep following us!