http://acatholiclife.blogspot.com/2005/08/why-have-mass-for-deceased-loved-one.html
A: Just as we pray for others here on earth, we are encouraged by the Church to pray for souls who may be in purgatory. Why? We are all in need of grace to come into the perfection of charity. We cannot enter heaven if we have not been completely cleansed of sin and all punishment due to sin. See Catechism of the Catholic Church #1031 and 1472
Since the Mass is the "source and summit" of the Christian Life, we naturally look to that Holy Sacrifice of Christ, containing the perfect prayer, to offer for our deceased relatives and friends who may still need the help of our prayers. Priests are under a strict obligation to remember in a special way the person for whom the Mass is being offered. Often you wil hear the priests say the name of the person in the part of the Mass which specifically remembers those who have gone before us. Sometimes the intention for the Mass is listed in the bulletin or announced before the Mass.
We can't really speak of "time" since the deceased person has entered eternity, but we can speak in terms of "final purification" before entrance into heaven. We believe that a Mass offered for a departed relative or friend may help hasten that final purification which he/she may still be undergoing in purgatory.
http://www.ncregister.com/site/article/best_of_mass_intentions/
“The Mass is the same sacrifice as the sacrifice on Calvary,” Father Serpa explains. “It is brought down through history into our very lives, so that whatever we are praying for is united with the prayer of Christ to the Father. It is the most perfect prayer.”
Read more: http://www.ncregister.com/site/article/best_of_mass_intentions/#ixzz21PcZwMb2
The most efficacious of all prayers, in Catholic teaching, is theessentially public office, the Sacrifice of the Mass.............
Coming to the proof of this doctrine, we find, in the first place, that it is an integral part of the great generaltruth which we name the communion of saints. This truth is the counterpart in the supernatural order of thenatural law of human solidarity. Men are not isolated units in the life of grace, any more than in domestic and civil life. As children in Christ's Kingdom they are as one family under the loving Fatherhood of God; as members of Christ's mystical body they are incorporated not only with Him, their common Head, but with one another, and this not merely by visible social bonds and external co-operation, but by the invisible bonds of mutual love and sympathy, and by effective co-operation in the inner life of grace. Each is in some degree the beneficiary of the spiritual activities of the others, of their prayers and good works, their merits and satisfactions; nor is this degree to be wholly measured by those indirect ways in which the law of solidarity works out in other cases, nor by the conscious and explicit altruistic intentions of individual agents. It is wider than this, and extends to the bounds of the mysterious. Now, as between the living, no Christian can deny the reality of this far-reaching spiritual communion; and since death, for those who die in faith and grace, does not sever the bonds of this communion, why should it interrupt its efficacy in the case of the dead, and shut them out from benefits of which they are capable and may be in need? Of very few can it be hoped that they have attained perfect holiness at death; and none but the perfectly holy are admitted to the vision of God
.................http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04653a.htm
How are we, theoretically, to conceive and explain their efficacy?
For a theoretical statement of the manner in which prayers for the dead are efficacious we must refer to the articles MERIT and SATISFACTION, in which the distinction between these terms and their technical meanings will be explained. Since merit, in the strict sense, and satisfaction, as inseparable from merit, are confined to this life, it cannot be said in the strict sense that the souls in purgatory merit or satisfy by their own personalacts. But the purifying and expiatory value of their discipline of suffering, technically called satispassio, is often spoken of in a loose sense as satisfaction. Speaking of satisfaction in the rigorous sense, the living canoffer to God, and by impetration move Him graciously to accept, the satisfactory value of their own good workson behalf of the souls in purgatory, or in view of it to remit some part of their discipline; in this sense we may be said to satisfy for the dead. But in order that the personal works of the living may have any satisfactoryvalue, the agents must be in the state of grace. The prayers of the just are on this account more efficacious in assisting the dead than the prayers of those in sin, though it does not follow that the general impetratory efficacy is altogether destroyed by sin. God may hear the prayers of a sinner for others as well as for thesupplicant himself. The Sacrifice of the Mass, however, retains its essential efficacy in spite of the sinfulness of the minister; ad the same is true in lesser degree, of the other prayers and offices offered by the Church'sministers in her name.
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