PURGATORY, THE “place” where many still on earth will pass through, is also the place where ghosts come from. Yes, there have been ghosts even before history put them on record and I suppose there will always be until the end of the world when all in Purgatory are delivered up to Heaven.
In his earthly lifetime, St. Padre Pio had encounters with ghosts. The first ones caused him to shiver, until he got used to them because of their frequency of manifestations to as for his intercessions so that they could speed up their purgation and shoot up to the Eternal Bliss.
One day while praying alone, Padre Pio opened his eyes to see an old man standing there. “‘I could not imagine how he could have entered the friary at this time of night since all the doors are locked, ” he later recalled.
Then, he asked the ghost: “Who are you? What do you want?”
The man responded, “Padre Pio, I am Pietro Di Mauro, son of Nicola, nicknamed Precoco. I died in this friary on the 18th of September, 1908, in cell number 4, when it was still a poorhouse. One night, while in bed, I fell asleep with a lighted cigar, which ignited the mattress and I died, suffocated and burned. I am still in purgatory. I need a holy Mass in order to be freed. God permitted that I come and ask you for help.”
Pio replied, “‘Rest assured that tomorrow I will celebrate Mass for your liberation.” Then the man left.
The following day, Padre Pio dug up records and found out that the ghost had told him the truth. He thus concelebrated a Mass for him.
Padre Pio had once revealed that “As many souls of the dead come up this road [to the monastery] as that of the souls of the living.”
Then there’s the case of mystic Maria Simma of Sontagg, Austria (1915-2004). She was a God-fearing Catholic who lived simply and had more ghost visitors than humans in her lifetime.
She recounted that the ghosts, or holy souls as she would say, were uniform in telling her that the greatest help for them that they can obtain from those here on earth is the offering of holy Mass. Next to the Mass, the holy Rosary and the Stations of the Cross are very beneficial to them.
“Any sacrifice we make – even the smallest ones – offered specifically for them have a great value in the eyes of God, and greatly lessen their sufferings and time in purgatory. The poor souls have told her that even the smallest prayer or sacrifice is like giving a cool glass of water to a parched sojourner travelling in the driest desert,” said the website mysticsofthechurch.com.
The website site the ghosts “normally appear to her in their normal clothes, that is, the ones that they most often wore during their lifetime, and they often have the appearance of one earnestly begging and desiring help. Sometimes they appear somewhat distraught but this presumably is to elicit compassion on the part of Maria. They normally appear to her looking as they did in the prime of their life, however children and teenagers always appear as they did right before their deaths. And while there are indeed some children in purgatory, their Purgatory is normally not very long or painful, since during their lifetimes they often could not have committed any grave sin since they did not attain much understanding or discernment, and are therefore not accountable to the extent that an adult is.”
“The holy souls have also told her that there are many, many degrees in purgatory, and that the lower parts of purgatory are the most difficult and the most purifying, and this is where those with grave (severe) sins go–that is, grave sins that have not been forgiven in the sacrament of Confession. As each soul makes reparation for his/her sins that they have committed against God and their fellow man, they are slowly purified and therefore they slowly make progress to the higher levels of purgatory. The souls that appear to Maria are almost always souls that are residing in the higher levels of purgatory. Essentially, the more repentant and sorrowful one is for the sins committed against God and neighbor during one’s lifetime, the quicker one progresses from the lower to the higher degrees of purgatory,” the site also noted.
And their greatest complaint? Abandonment by their loved ones on earth. And so sometimes they come, even in the dead of the night, to remind us they still exist and in need of our help.
