What is the purpose of life? How as a Catholic, one can achieve that purpose?

The purpose of our life is to share in the Divine Life by being in perfect communion with God. Perfect union with God demands and enables perfect relationship with fellow beings. Our relationship with God and fellow beings is marked by love. Love is God’s very own nature. Since God created us in His own image and likeness,  we are created by love, in love, and called to love as God loves. Our reference for love is God himself, the one who – willing our good – has given us all he has. Jesus on the cross is the example for us to emulate. Our call is to become a sincere gift by willing the good of the other. We are able to love as God loves because of the supernatural grace given to us in our soul by God.

Our capacity to love is weakened and tainted by original sin but Jesus restored it by His death and resurrection. He delivered us from the dominion of sin and freed us to love as He loves. Through his disciples, He established His Church – the Catholic Church, which is his mystical body. The Church consists of people who accepted the salvation wrought by Christ and through the sacrament of baptism are initiated into a life of holiness and mission (of calling others into this life) who continue to grow by the help of the sacramental life, and a life of virtue, battling their own weaknesses, brokenness and the devil. It is primarily through our state of life (vocation), be it married life, single or religious life, that we are pruned and disciplined in our journey from selfishness to selflessness. Every person we come across and every situation we face is an opportunity and a means for our perfection.

We will be judged when we die and further on the second coming of Christ. On the day when Christ returns our bodies will be reunited with the soul which was separated at death. And we will face the common judgement. We enter into heaven if we are found with love worthy of God or into purgatory if our love needs purification (and ultimately into heaven upon purification). We enter hell if we remain selfish, rejecting the free gift of grace and salvation. Those in heaven will continue to live (the abundance of life as Jesus calls) in our glorified bodies knowing and loving God in a beatific vision reserved only for saints. In hell it will be the opposite. This is in a nutshell the purpose of life and how as Catholics we can achieve it.