10. The Church does not exclude from her prayers any faithful deceased. The love of the Church for her children is universal. And in every Eucharist the Church prays for all without exception. Prayer is an expression of hope and trust in divine justice and mercy.
To pray for all is to hope that God, in the ways that only he knows, can lead many to himself. Even for those who, according to human criteria, could be condemned, because we should never forget that the criteria and thoughts of God do not always coincide with those of the human being (Is 55, 8).
This universal or catholic love of the Church, which is a mother, is manifested in her prayers for her deceased children, especially the day of a funeral and the day of all the deceased faithful (November 2).
At each Mass the Church prays “for our brothers who slept with the hope of the resurrection”, asking God to admit to contemplate the light of his face “to all the deceased”. Prayer for the known deceased is important, but all the other deceased are not forgotten. Prayers for the eternal rest of the deceased are not only pleasing to God, but can help them.
Our duty as Christians is to pray for those who have died waiting for the mercy of God to reach them . We should not deny our prayers to anyone, even for the soul of someone who, according to our logic, does not deserve our prayer or consider prayer for that soul to be useless.
And even in the supposed case that some person had been condemned, prayer is not time or effort lost, it will serve other souls . If we pray for a soul that has already left Purgatory or for someone who has been condemned, that prayer is not wasted, God knows to whom it could benefit. It is something similar to the principle of communicating vessels thanks to the communion of the saints: God transfuses and channels the prayers to the souls that need it most.
If they are in purgatory, we know that they will no longer go to hell. We can help those souls in purgatory as consolation and companionship in that place where purification is ‘suffered’; and we can do it with our prayers of suffrage, particularly by participating in Holy Mass and also by having Holy Mass celebrated for them, with works of dependence and charity, with Indulgences, sacrifices, etc.
In addition, prayer has another important effect that many ignore: retro prayer feeds. So if we pray for someone, at the same time we are helping ourselves because their spiritual effect makes us more sensitive to the mysteries of God and more willing to fulfill his will.
After the death of someone we can only influence their ‘temporary’ reality that we call purgatory in which there is the vast majority of faithful departed, although we never know with great detail how it is or how long ‘time’ lasts. It is only known that, this antechamber of heaven, is a ‘place’ of purification to be worthy to be in the presence of God to see face to face as it is (1Jn 3, 2).
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