Last Sunday at the Novus Ordo Mass in Italian the priest only spoke about God’s Mercy. While at the Tridentine Rite Mass in Rome, the homily was on the mercy of God but also balanced with the Justice of God.
God is merciful for those who ask for mercy. Those Catholics (and non Catholics) who die with mortal sin on their soul are on the way to Hell.
It is God’s Justice that must send them to Hell, even if it is a single mortal sin.
The only means of wiping out mortal sin from our soul, before we go to the Judge, as soon as we die, is asking for God’s Mercy in the Sacrament of Confession. This is the only way to receive God’s Mercy.
We may make an Act of Contrition but we can never be sure that we have Perfect Contrition.
So it is only through absolution in the Confessional that we can get rid of mortal sin staining the soul.
‘We have just considered the rigors of Divine Justice in the other life; they are terrific, and it is impossible to think of them without trembling. Tat fire, enkindled by Divine Justice, those excruciating pains, compared to which all the penances of the saint, all the sufferings of the martyrs put together, are as nothing, who is there that thinks he will be able to look upon them and not shudder from very fear?
This fear is salutary and conformable to the spirit of Jesus Christ. Our Divine Master desires that we should fear, and that we should fear not only Hel, but also Purgatory, which is a sort of mitigated Hell. It is to inspire us with this holy fear that He shows us the dungeons of the Supreme Judge, whence we shall not depart until we have paid the last farthing(Matt 10:28)-p.163 Purgatory Explained by the Lives and Legends of the saints by F.X Schouppe S.J (1986 Tan Books).
Here is an experience from Purgatory similar to that in Hell.
Blessed Margaret Mary, we read in her Life being one day before the Blessed Sacrament, suddenly saw before her a man totally enveloped in fire, the intense heat of which seemed about to consume herself. The wretched state in which she saw this poor soul caused her to shed tears. He was a Benedictine Religious of the monastery of Cluny, to whom she had formerly confessed and who had done good to her soul by ordering her to receive Holy Communion. In reward for this service, God had permitted him to address himself to her, that he might find some alleviation in his sufferings.
The poor departed asked that all she should do and suffer for the space of three months might be applied to him. This she promised, after having obtained permission. Then he told her that the principal cause of his intense suffering was for having sought his own interests before the glory of God and the good of souls, by attaching too much importance to his reputation. The second was his want of charity towards his brethren. The third, the natural affection, for creatures to whom, through weaknes, he had yielded, and to which he had given expression in his spiritual intercourse with them, “this being,” he added, “ very displeasing to God”.p.155-156.
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