The month of November is dedicated to the faithful departed. Commemoration of the faithful departed or feast of all Souls is celebrated on November 2.

First, we pray for the dead because we know by faith these three truths: Everyone who dies does not necessarily go to a ‘better place’, contrary to popular belief. Second, the dead may not have, by default, gone to a ‘better place’ than they were while on Earth, so they may need our help. Third, our prayers and sacrifices can indeed help them.

Some of our departed brethren, like the protestants and Pentecostals dispute this, but Bible passages such as 2 Macc. 12:42, 2 Tim. 1:18, 2 Tim. 1:16, 4:19 affirm the practice of praying for the dead. These truths we, however, got from the Church’s teaching on heaven, hell and purgatory.

The Catholic Church holds that entering heaven requires complete devotion to God and total freedom from sin and worldly attachments. This teaching is supported by Revelation 21:27, which states that nothing impure can enter heaven.

Since many people do not achieve this level of spiritual purity during their lifetime, they require a purification process after death. This cleansing state is known as Purgatory, derived from the Latin word purgare (meaning "to cleanse").

In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI addressed these concepts of the afterlife - Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory - in an encyclical focused on Christian hope.

This period is an excellent time to review these words where he described hell as a state where those who do not directly merit heaven by the life they had lived go. Those “who have totally destroyed their desires for truth and readiness to love, people for whom everything has become a lie, people who have lived for hatred and have suppressed all love within themselves.” The CCC tells us that hell is a place of “definitive self-exclusion” from God.

In contrast, heaven, according to Pope Benedict, is the place where people “who are utterly pure, completely permeated by God, and thus fully open to their neighbours—people for whom communion with God even now gives direction to their entire being and whose journey towards God only brings to fulfilment what they already are.”

Is it all the canonized who go straight to heaven? Not really, despite having lived the Christian faith with heroic virtue. It is possible that some parts of their lives are not fully redeemed of defects, which could range from anger to impatience, vanity, a lack of forgiveness for those who have hurt them, etc., hence the need for purgatory.

I hope you have been better educated on this somewhat controversial topic of praying for the dead.

Source: https://catholicpreaching.com/wp/why-we-pray-for-the-dead-commemoration-of-the-faithful-departed-november-2-2014/