Death and everlasting life

Choose an option and you are told at once whether it was right. The answer and the reason wait behind “Show the answer”.

A watercolor of two lambs cupping a lit candle before an open doorway that shows a starry night, while another lamb walks toward the sunrise past a small green sprout

When does a person come to judgment after death?
1. At the very moment of death they stand before Christ and are judged on the life they lived
2. Not until the Last Judgment at the end of the world are they judged for the first time
3. After death they fall for a while into a sleep that knows nothing, and are judged on the day they wake
4. Judgment is only a figure of speech from an older age; when we die God takes everyone in just as they are
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Answer ① At the very moment of death they stand before Christ and are judged on the life they lived
There is a particular judgment immediately after death, and at the end of the world the Last Judgment before the whole human family. The second and the third erase the particular judgment and leave the dead simply waiting, with nothing yet having happened to them; the fourth does away with judgment itself and takes all the weight out of what a person chooses.
Catechism of the Catholic Church 1021-1022
After death a person is reborn in another body and lives an earthly life many times over.
1. Yes
2. No
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Answer ② No
A person dies once, and after that comes judgment. The idea of being reborn to repeat a life does not fit Christian faith — and it is precisely because this life is given once that it weighs so much.
Catechism of the Catholic Church 1013
What is purgatory?
1. A place where you get one more chance to repent after you have died
2. A place of lighter punishment than hell, where you are let out once you have served the term set for you
3. The purification that those who died in God's grace and friendship, but are not yet wholly cleansed, pass through before they enter the joy of heaven
4. A place where those whose destination is still undecided, heaven or hell, wait for the verdict
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Answer ③ The purification that those who died in God's grace and friendship, but are not yet wholly cleansed, pass through before they enter the joy of heaven
Those in purgatory are already assured of their salvation; all that is left is purification. The first turns purgatory into a second chance, the second into a milder hell with a sentence to serve out, and the fourth into a waiting room where the outcome has not been decided.
Catechism of the Catholic Church 1030-1031
The prayers, the Masses, and the almsgiving we offer for the dead really do help them.
1. Yes
2. No
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Answer ① Yes
Yes. From very early on the Church has remembered the dead and offered Mass for them, and it teaches that this help reaches them within the communion of saints. Masses for the dead, and the month of November kept for the holy souls, come straight out of that belief.
Catechism of the Catholic Church 1032, 1479
Which of these matches what the Church teaches about hell?
1. God has decided in advance that certain people are to go to hell
2. The chief punishment of hell is being separated from God for ever, and that separation comes from the person's own choice, unrepented to the end
3. Hell is only a story made up to frighten people; it is not something that really exists
4. Since God is love, everyone is saved in the end, so it is impossible for anyone to go to hell
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Answer ② The chief punishment of hell is being separated from God for ever, and that separation comes from the person's own choice, unrepented to the end
God predestines no one to go to hell. The first slides into a doctrine of predestination that makes God the one who assigns people to damnation; the third and the fourth tip the other way and erase human freedom together with the weight of what it chooses.
Catechism of the Catholic Church 1033-1037
What do we mean in the Creed when we profess “I believe in the resurrection of the body”?
1. It is another way of saying that the soul of the dead returns to God and does not pass away
2. It means that after death a person is given another body and reborn into this world
3. It means that Christ alone rose, and that we do no more than remember it
4. It means that on the last day our bodies too will be raised and reunited with our souls, and made like the body of the risen Christ
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Answer ④ It means that on the last day our bodies too will be raised and reunited with our souls, and made like the body of the risen Christ
The resurrection is not another name for the soul not dying. The first choice shrinks it to something that happens to the soul alone, the second swaps it for reincarnation, and the third cuts Christ's resurrection off as a past event with nothing to do with us.
Catechism of the Catholic Church 997, 999-1001
What is everlasting life — that is, heaven?
1. A prize you earn for yourself by piling up good deeds — wages paid for the work
2. Seeing God as he is and sharing in his own life, in communion with Christ, with the Blessed Virgin Mary, and with all the saints
3. A place where the pleasures of this world carry on exactly as they were, with only the pain left out
4. A state in which the body is abandoned for ever and the soul alone rests without end
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Answer ② Seeing God as he is and sharing in his own life, in communion with Christ, with the Blessed Virgin Mary, and with all the saints
Heaven is in essence not a place but the vision of God face to face. The first turns grace freely given into wages earned, the third pictures a heaven that does not need God in it, and the fourth erases the resurrection of the body.
Catechism of the Catholic Church 1023-1029
At the end of the world God will wipe out this present world altogether and build from scratch a new one that has nothing to do with the old.
1. Yes
2. No
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Answer ② No
No. What Scripture promises is not the disappearance of the world but its transfiguration — new heavens and a new earth. Even this visible universe is destined to be made new in Christ, so the work we do on this earth and our own bodies are not for nothing.
Catechism of the Catholic Church 1042-1047