Between Death and Resurrection

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This is a short ChatGPT primer on Catholic orthodoxy.

Catholicism speaks with confidence about death, but with careful, and at times obscure, restraint about what comes next.

The soul, we are told, survives the body. It is judged. It enters either the presence of God, the purifying fires of mercy, or a state of final alienation. These teachings are firm. They are old. And they are, in a sense, bare-bones truths: clear enough to guide the faithful, spare enough to resist fantasy.

One thing, however, is ruled out firmly: the soul does not sleep.

The Church has never countenanced the idea - common among some Protestant sects and occasional mystics - that the dead lie in unconscious suspension, awaiting the Last Day. The phrase “soul sleep” is shorthand for what Catholic tradition has always refused: the thought that the dead are not yet awake to God.

Instead, Catholic orthodoxy affirms a more vivid, though less defined, reality: that the soul, after death, remains conscious - alert to judgment, to mercy, to whatever God has prepared. That the saints are not resting but interceding; that the faithful departed are not slumbering, but undergoing transformation. That while time may pass here, in the soul’s encounter with eternity, something more mysterious unfolds.

Still, for all this confidence, the details recede. The Church does not describe the soul’s perceptions, its mode of being, its experience of time. We are not given a picture of the soul in purgatory: no dioramas, no progress bars. There is no cosmology of the interim.

And this, perhaps, is the most telling thing of all.

For here, amid the certainties of creed, the Church chooses silence over invention. The saints are alive, but how they live we do not know. The dead are not asleep, and yet their waking life is veiled. There is an unspoken acknowledgment that the soul, without the body, escapes our categories. It is not less real, but differently real: unmapped, ungrasped.

Some theologians have gestured at solutions. Ratzinger suggested that time, for the soul, may not flow as ours does. Balthasar proposed that judgment might be the soul’s own recognition of truth, drawn out in God’s loving light. Such insights illuminate, but they do not resolve. They are the shimmer of light on the surface of the water, not the bedrock beneath.

And perhaps that is as it should be. In the end, Catholic eschatology offers not an itinerary but a promise. It says the soul endures. That it meets the God who knows it. That nothing is wasted, and nothing left unfinished. It forbids soul sleep not to impose dogma, but to preserve the dignity of the soul’s encounter with the divine: not as a delayed broadcast, but as an immediate reality.

And so Catholicism says that we stand at the grave not with certainty, not with charts, but with faith. That the dead are awake, awaiting the parousia. And that what they see is more than we can imagine.