edited by Gabriele Cantaluppi

If Hell, Purgatory and Paradise are not "places", but "states", where is the body of the Risen Christ if not in a place?

No one has been to the afterlife and come back to tell us what it is like, therefore, when we want to reconstruct that world, we must be very cautious and above all take into account that on this earth we are always conditioned by our ways of knowing the world that we live in. surrounds. Catholic theology has always maintained that to talk about God and supernatural realities we can only use "analogous" and not "univocal" language, that is, to put it more simply, we use images which, however, do not exhaust the whole of reality.

We don't know well what our glorious and spiritual body that we will resume at the resurrection of the dead will be like and we don't have suitable categories to be able to say it.

From the Gospels and the texts of Saint Paul we know that Jesus, after the resurrection, appeared to the disciples as he had been in life, however he did not have the same characteristics of material corporeity. So much so that every time they met him they had difficulty recognizing him, except when he made some gesture that revealed who he was. He ate and let himself be touched, to demonstrate that he really had a physical body, that he was not a ghost, but he showed up in different places and passed through walls. There was a physicality, which did not have the characteristics of materiality. 

Saint Paul in 1 Cor 15,4 uses a beautiful analogy: «So also [is] the resurrection of the dead: a corruptible [body] is sown and it is raised incorruptible; it is sown ignobly and resurrected glorious; it is sown weak and resurrected full of strength; an animal body is sown and a spiritual body is resurrected."

The only bodies that we know are in the other world are only those of Jesus and his mother Mary: all the rest are souls awaiting the resurrection of the bodies.

In sowing, says Saint Paul, life remains in the maceration of the grain and reappears as a living and vital sprout.

The body will be physical, but no longer material, that is, physicality will lose the space-time qualities of matter, it will lose the characteristics that make it of this world.

It was original sin that broke direct communion with God and caused the world to enter a "material" dimension, where "quantity" was imposed, that is, divisibility, which is the reason for death.

The resurrected bodies regain their original properties of eternal life and, losing their space-time characteristics, will find direct communion with God without the need to occupy material places or areas.

This is indicated to us by the fact that the body-humanity of Jesus and Mary had not contracted original sin, and therefore they return to being as God had originally created them in intimate communion with Him.

Joseph Ratzinger writes in his book "Introduction to Christianity": «Paul teaches not the resurrection of bodies, but of people, and this not in the return of "bodies of flesh", i.e. biological structures, but in the specific diversity of resurrection life , just as it was exemplary manifested in the risen Lord" (page 347).

The Catechism of the Catholic Church clearly states that «With death the soul is separated from the body, but in the resurrection God will return to give incorruptible life to our transformed body, reuniting it with our soul. Just as Christ was resurrected and lives forever, so we will all be resurrected on the last day" (CCC 1016).

Don Guanella exhorted his parishioners with the hope that «the very eyes and ears and senses of your body will be glorious as the resurrected body of the divine Savior is very glorious, so it will be very true that a life of paradise will possess you entirely in the powers of the soul , in the very faculties of the body."