Stupid things religious people say

[Fake Messiah]

Here is some wisdom from my favorite consecrated virgin and a canonist, Jenna M. Cooper, who already had an honor to be in this topic before.

Is there any way to know how long a person might be in purgatory?

Generally, there is no clear way to know whether or not someone is still in purgatory.

There is one major exception, of course. That is, the church's process for canonizing saints is essentially a long discernment of whether or not the person in question is actually in heaven. If it is determined that the individual is now in heaven, it logically follows that they would no longer be in purgatory -- if they were ever even there in the first place.

It is entirely possible that a person may still be in purgatory 20 years after their death, or even longer. I am reminded of the apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima, where one of the visionaries reported that Our Lady told her that a recently deceased teenager from their village would be in purgatory until the end of the world!

But purgatory, like heaven and hell, is a state that exists outside of our earthly experience of time. So even if there was an easy way to determine whether or not someone is currently in purgatory, we couldn't really gauge that soul's spiritual progress there in terms of months, days or years.

source

So there you have it, my dear Catholics: you never know if your deceased family member is still in purgatory, so you better pay for church masses for them at least once a year to get them out of there. Capisce, bitches?