Nuke's Blog
Periodic ramblings by an old geek…

T has been reading The Diary of St. Faustina for the past couple weeks after some discussions with her cousin, and we’ve been chatting about several passages from the book.  The big discussion point right now has been the concept of Purgatory.  Neither of us had really heard much at all about the concept prior to this, though we’ve heard things here and there from our Catholic friends.  (I will spare you the details, but St. Faustina’s diary scares the bejeebers out of you when the story of a nun in Purgatory comes up.)  As of right now (and feel free to correct me), my understanding is that Catholics and Protestants agree our sins are to be purged prior to entrance to Heaven, but we do not agree on the time period.  As a Protestant, I believe the time frame is almost immediate.  Catholics, as I understand it, believe the time frame is much longer than that, and is different for everyone.

 

I often find it hard to be serious, (and I want this to be a mostly fun place ;), so instead of getting into a big debate here, I say we look at Purgatory from an engineer’s perspective.  In a random conversation with someone last year, I heard the following basic comments:

We prayed the rosary three times this morning, once for …, once for …, and once for the lost souls in Purgatory.  We saved … # of souls in Purgatory with our prayers.

 

I had to use …’s there because I can’t remember exactly how the conversation went, but the concept is there.  Praying released a certain number of souls from Purgatory and into Heaven.  Doing a bit of research online I found the following: St. Gertrude’s Prayer.  In summary, saying a specific prayer (there are others, as I understand it) releases 1,000 souls into Heaven.  When I heard a number called out during the original conversation, I think it was more like 250 (and it was a different prayer), but regardless… there was a number there.

 

This is when my engineer-geared brain simply couldn’t stop thinking.  How many souls could possibly be in Purgatory right now?  How many people are being saved by these two alone?  I believe they mentioned they do this at least every morning.  How many other Catholics around the world must be doing this right now?  What happens when the Catholics are gone and there is nobody left to pray for us Protestants still in Purgatory?  (Ok, that question is unrelated, and too serious of a question for this post… sorry.)

 

Time for a bit of analysis.  First we need to make a few assumptions, and let’s try to make some conservative ones.

• Every person to ever be on Earth is a sinner and will spend time in Purgatory.
• Nobody has ever prayed St. Gertrude’s prayer, and hence…
• Every person to ever be on Earth is either still alive on Earth, or is in Purgatory.
• Every person still alive on Earth will end up in Purgatory.

With a bit of web searching, I found a fairly decent analysis to get me the number of people to have ever lived.  The analysis resulted in a total number of 106,456,367,669 as of 2002.  It also had an estimate of 983,987,500 new folks being born between 1995 and 2002.  Let’s say the rate has increased to slightly over 1.5 billion, so another 1,543,632,331 were born between 2002 and 2009.  This brings us to a nice, round number of 108 billion people, with almost 7 billion still alive and 101 billion waiting painfully in Purgatory to finally enter Heaven.

 

We now need to make a few more conservative assumptions.

• The only prayer that helps souls in Purgatory is St. Gertrude’s prayer.
• Only Roman Catholics say the prayer.
• The prayer is only effective when said by a Roman Catholic living in California.

Some more web searching, and I found the number of current Roman Catholics in California to be 11,516,360.  Let’s just drop that to a nice even number of 10 million (they can’t all be practicing, right?).  Now, for the final assumption:

• St. Gertrude’s prayer does in fact raise 1,000 souls from Purgatory to Heaven.

If these folks still on Earth all said St. Gertrude’s prayer this Sunday… just once… they will ensure 10 million * 1,000 souls enter Heaven that day.  That’s 10 billion souls.  If these same folks said it once each Sunday for the next nine weeks, there would be only 1 billion souls remaining in Purgatory as of the afternoon of April 25th.  Nine million of them could take the next Sunday off.  And, since I’m an engineer and can’t resist more calculations, Wikipedia tells me roughly 56 million people die each year, so we need to have at least 154 of these Californians saying a daily prayer to ensure suffering is minimal (in case you want to check my math, that’s 56 million / 365 days / 1,000 souls per prayer).

 

My engineer’s brain simply can’t wrap itself around the concept of Purgatory.  As for the rest of me, that’s where the serious debates continue.

Share on Facebook