[NYer]

This is why, therefore, as a Catholic priest I encourage the traditional customs of offering Masses for our dead, lighting candles and saying a prayer for the dead and making sure we offer proper funeral masses for the dead. The living benefit from this practice because I am convinced that real spiritual bonds exist between family members just as real as the biological, genetic bonds that exist between us and our children and between us and our ancestors. Some say “time heals all wounds.” This is not true. Christ heals all wounds.

Over the past two years, working strictly from oral tradition, I have been able to track down many of my ancestors using census records and other documents available at several online genealogical sites. In the process, I discovered relatives whose names had never been mentioned. Not only was a daily regimen of prayer begun for all of them, I was also able to recover photographs of these relatives, going back 4 generations, from the estate of a recently deceased distant cousin. Masses have been offered up for them. It has brought great comfort to know they are now in my daily prayers. Given the state of contemporary society, what assurances do any of us have that our descendants will do the same for us.

Ping!

[Greetings_Puny_Humans]

This concept of going back through your ancestors to find people to pray for has a Mormonic feel to it. Although, they baptize their dead, to release them from outer darkness, whereas you are praying to get them out of, is it purgatory?

[johngrace]

I was praying a few years back at night in my room with the computer on the browser. Well I had whispering sounds coming from the room . Nobody was there but me. I thought it must be fallen angels to trick. So I covered the Blood of Christ over it. But it kept happening. So I asked The Lord what is it I am being shown here. The St Gertrude prayer for purgatory came up on my browser. I prayed it several times. I never heard the sounds like that again. I pray this prayer at more times now.

Eternal Father, I offer Thee the Most Precious Blood of Thy Divine Son, Jesus, in union with the Masses said throughout the world today, for all the Holy Souls in Purgatory, for sinners everywhere, for sinners in the Universal Church, those in my own home and within my family. Amen.

[Berlin_Freeper]

Ca C'est Bon