Where Do Souls Go After Death?

With impressive consistency Patrick Madrid gives great answers on his Relevant Radio phone-in show. But one recent answer spoke to me of a key weakness in Catholic catechesis. We find it difficult to find the right terms to defend and describe the human non-physical soul. In that regard, we are very much on the back foot culturally and academically.

This undermines the coherence of the Catholic faith. For without this belief the human becomes seen as just another animal, undermining the immortality and freedom of the human. It becomes hard to defend that we are in the image of the Transcendent, eternal, free, personal God.

In fact, proving the spiritual soul has rarely been a high priority in Catholic apologetics. That has proved to be a hostage to fortune. Today, outside the revival of the pre-modern science scholasticism, such proof hardly has a place at all.

The old proof of the soul from abstract knowing was too dependent upon the hylomorphic description of physical things. It has become harder to defence in the light of modern science (not least animals have abstract knowledge!), and doesn’t easily lend itself to the concept of heavenly communion though self-gift as the phenomenological vision of the human person I present.

CONTENTS

00:00 INTRODUCTION
02:13 PERENNIAL ANSWER: The Q & A
03:30 The weakness
05:30 Old anthropology
06:26 BETTER ANSWER: Anthropology
08:03 Soul’s development
09:48 Where does soul go?
10:34 CONCLUSION