Greatest Secret of the Eucharist Is its Role in Attaining a Happy Eternity
[Adapted from Secrets of the Eucharist]

By Michael H. Brown

As we all know, there are three basic destinations: hell, purgatory, and heaven. Only in a pure, flawless state can we go directly to heaven. We must be as pure as the driven snow -- as white as the Host. Even the holiest and most dedicated people we have ever met might well be in need of a little purging. To kneel in God's Presence and behold His indescribable Face requires a spotless soul. The Catechism tells us that heaven is the place of saints and angels. It's the ultimate destiny. It's where the majority eventually end up.

But to go there directly a soul must be in a perfect state of faith, love, and humility. Only without a single blemish are we worthy.

Only in a pure state can we enter into God's Pure Presence. Heaven is God and God is love. To blend into heaven we have to be love incarnate. We have to be Eucharistic. We have to be humble. At the evening of death, says the Catechism, that's what we'll be judged on. It says that Heaven is for those "who die in God's grace and friendship and are perfectly purified."
All who are still imperfectly purified are indeed assured of their eternal salvation, adds the Catechism, "but after death they undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven."

As the Catechism further points out, the Church has always honored the memory of the dead. It does this during Mass in what's called the memento. It's done so that, purified, the souls can finally attain the vision of God. The Council of Trent declared that "those detained in purgatory can be helped by the faithful through prayers and other expiatory works" -- and above all by the Holy Sacrifice.
According to Our Blessed Mother at Medjugorje, we are in "full conscience" and aware "of the separation of the body and soul" at the moment of death. Those who have experienced clinical death but have been resuscitated often describe a feeling of leaving the body and hovering over it, able to watch the nurses and doctors trying to revive them. We're told by our great mystics and theologians that immediately upon death, immediately upon separation from the body, our entire lives flash before us. In a way that can't be understood while we're still bound to the earth, the free soul is able to see every single act he or she ever did and review each and every situation of life, feeling what others felt while they were around us. There is no earthly time in eternity, and so in just a second -- in just a flash -- an entire lifetime can reviewed with exquisite and often excruciating detail.

"It does not come by a voice to be heard by the ear, but in a manner entirely spiritual," wrote the esteemed Dominican theologian Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange. "Intellectual illumination awakens all acquired ideas, gives additional infused ideas, whereby the soul sees its entire past in a glance. The soul sees how God judges, and conscience makes this judgment definitive. All this takes place at the first instant of separation."

"When the soul leaves the body it is as if it were lost in or, if I may say so, surrounded by God," wrote an anonymous 19th-century French nun whose mystical insights were considered most profound. "It finds itself in such a bewildering light that in the twinkling of an eye it sees its whole life spread out and at this sight it sees what it deserves, and this same light pronounces its sentence."
If we have led a dutiful life, and especially if we had a dedication to Mass and the Blessed Sacrament, the purgation is lessened because in taking Communion we have already accomplished much in the way of purification. Masses that we attend while alive are more powerful than those said for us afterward. Every single moment spent in Mass or at the Blessed Sacrament is credited to us.
What a joy for those who had such a devotion, because as one holy writer said, a single Mass is more acceptable to Almighty God than all the sighs and tears of the whole world put together. During Mass it is God, a pure God, offered up to God.

[Resources: Unpublished Manuscript on Purgatory, Catechism of the Catholic Church]