Immediately after death, each soul stands before Christ in the particular judgment and receives its
eternal sentence: heaven, hell, or purgatory as a passage to heaven. At the end of the world, all
men will rise and stand together at the general judgment, when the justice and mercy of God will
be revealed before all creation, and every hidden thing made known. Then the body will share
the eternal lot of the soul. Purgatory, the Church teaches, is the state of those who die in God’s
grace but still owe some temporal punishment for their sins; they suffer for a time and are certain
of heaven. The thought of judgment is meant not to terrify the faithful but to make them serious
about the one thing necessary.