By Fr John Flader
Question – I remember someone saying that the souls of the good people who died before Christ, like Moses and St Joseph, only went to heaven when Christ ascended there. Is this true?
WHILE not a dogma of faith, the proposition you mention is a common teaching of the Church, which has taught and believed it for many centuries.
As background, we should remember that when Adam and Eve committed the original sin of disobedience to God’s command not to eat of the fruit of a certain tree, heaven was closed and no one was able to go there.
It is a common teaching of the Church that the good people who died before Christ, like the ones you mention, were in a state of natural happiness called the “Limbo of the Fathers” awaiting their Redemption, which took place when Christ died on the Cross and rose from the dead (cf. J. Flader, Question Time 2, q. 184).
When we say that Christ “descended into hell”, or “he descended to the dead”, we are referring to that state or place, where he went to announce the good news of Redemption.
The reason why we say that these souls only went to heaven when Christ himself did, is that he is the head of the Mystical Body and it is only right that the head should precede the body in entering heaven.
In this regard the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches: “Left to its own natural powers humanity does not have access to the ‘Father’s house,’ to God’s life and happiness. Only Christ can open to man such access that we, his members, might have confidence that we too shall go where he, our Head and our Source, has preceded us” (CCC 661).
Ludwig Ott, in his Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma writes: “From the soteriological angle it [the Ascension] is the crowning conclusion of the work of the Redemption. According to the general teaching of the Church, the souls of the just of the pre-Christian era also moved with the Saviour into the glory of Heaven.”
Ott cites as a reference St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, which in turn quotes Psalm 68: “When he ascended on high he led a host of captives, and he gave gifts to men” (Eph 4:8; cf. Ps 68:18; Ott, p. 194).
St Thomas Aquinas, in answer to the question: “Whether Christ’s Ascension is the cause of our salvation” answers in the same vein: “In regard to those things which, in ascending, he did for our salvation. First, he prepared the way for our ascent into heaven, according to his own saying (Jn 14:2): ‘I go to prepare a place for you’ and the words of Micah (2:13), ‘He shall go up that shall open the way before them.’ For since he is our head, the members must follow where the head has gone; hence he said (Jn 14:3): ‘That where I am, you also may be’. In the saints delivered from hell, according to Ps 68:18 (cf. Eph 4:8): ‘Ascending on high he led captivity captive’, because he took with him to heaven those who had been held captives by the devil, – to heaven, as to a place strange to human nature; captives indeed of a happy taking, since they were acquired by his victory” (STh III, q. 57, art. 6).
Catholic doctrine on this subject was stated authoritatively by Pope Benedict XII in his Apostolic Constitution Benedictus Deus (1336), in which he defined the Church’s belief that the souls of the departed go to their eternal reward immediately after death, as opposed to remaining in a state of unconscious existence until the Last Judgment.
He wrote: “By this Constitution, which is to remain in force for ever, we, with apostolic authority, define the following: According to the general disposition of God, the souls of all the saints who departed from this world before the passion of our Lord Jesus Christ […] since the ascension of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ into heaven, already before they take up their bodies again and before the general judgment, have been, are and will be with Christ in heaven, in the heavenly kingdom and paradise, joined to the company of the holy angels.”
How then can we explain Our Lord’s words from the Cross to the good thief: “Today you will be with me in paradise” (Lk 23:43)?
Since “with the Lord one day is as a thousand years (2 Pet 3:8), Christ was not referring to that particular day, Good Friday, but rather to God’s time.
The good thief no doubt went to heaven, along with all the other good people of the Old Testament, on the day of Christ’s Ascension.
