What They Know in Purgatory When You Come.

Most people who stand at a grave believe the one they loved knows they came. More than seven hundred and fifty years ago, one of the most careful teachers the Church has ever had took up that exact question - and he never promised you that. Three things in this video. What the dead actually know about us: St Augustine's hard opinion, formed when his mother Monica never came back to comfort him, and the warning he put in front of it ("Let every one take, as he pleases, what I say"); Pope St Gregory the Great's view that the souls who see God know what happens here; and why St Thomas Aquinas called Gregory's view the more probable one, and how he says the souls in purgatory can be told. What the records say happened at graves: a child praying at his mother's grave, a holy bishop named Bristan hearing "Amen" from the graves, and the plague town of Arona, where an archpriest and the governor both saw the same procession moving toward the church. And what your prayer at that grave does, whether or not they know you came. Along the way: why grief at a grave is not a failure of faith ("Jesus wept," John 11:35), the days the Church kept for offering Mass for the dead, and the plenary indulgence the Church grants from November 1 to November 8 to the faithful who visit a cemetery and pray for the souls in purgatory, with the usual conditions. Drawn from St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, First Part, Question 89, Article 8 (English Dominican translation, 1920), quoting St Augustine and St Gregory the Great; F. X. Schouppe, Purgatory Illustrated by the Lives and Legends of the Saints (1893); Rev. John A. Nageleisen, Charity for the Suffering Souls (1895); and Henry James Coleridge, The Prisoners of the King (1882). All public domain. The accounts of what happened at graves are private accounts; the Church has never required anyone to believe them. What Augustine, Gregory and Aquinas wrote about what the dead know are the opinions of teachers, not a definition of the Church. Leave the name of the soul you are praying for in the comments, so the people watching can pray for that soul by name too.