The foundation of our love and devotion for the poor souls in purgatory is this: “If one member suffer any thing, all the members suffer with it; or if one member glory, all the members rejoice with it” (I Cor. 12:26). This is the bond of charity that binds the Church Militant to the Church…
The traditional Catholic lectionary — dating back to the first millennium of Christianity and, since the Middle Ages, included in the contents of the altar missal itself — includes far fewer readings than the revised (postconciliar) lectionary used for the Novus Ordo Mass. However, this is not a strike against the former, since the lectionary,…
“In this month, which the Holy Church consecrates to the dead, we urge you to gather in the Christian suffrage, so that those who, having obtained forgiveness from their sins, had not yet deserved the remission of their punishment, may soon rise from Purgatory to Paradise, welcomed by the Angels, by the Saints, by the…
The month of November is a time to contemplate the reality of death and remember the souls of our deceased brothers and sisters. This is a brief account of the funeral of Sister Wilhelmina of the Holy Rosary, the foundress of an extraordinary community of Benedictine nuns. On the feast of the Ascension this year,…
St. Anthony Mary Claret is often depicted in paintings as having a glowing substance within his breast. This is because on May 16, 1862, Our Lord gave St. Anthony the extraordinary privilege of retaining the Sacramental Species perpetually within him. St. Anthony writes in his autobiography that he considered omitting this remarkable detail about himself…
I recall arguing once with a Catholic friend of mine during our teenage years. He was from a big city far away and attended a publicly funded Catholic high school. I was a homeschooled boy from the country. The debate was on whether there were souls in Hell. I held the ideologically rigid belief that…
On July 13, 1917, Our Lady vouchsafed to the three children at Fatima a vision of Hell (this is the content of the “First Secret”): Our Lady showed us a great sea of fire which seemed to be under the earth. Plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form, like transparent burning…
Again and again as of late, we see Catholic bishops and the pope making statements that seem to call into question the basic attributes of Hell, particularly the insistence of the Church that Hell is a place of eternal punishment and separation from God, and that it is not empty of human souls. Most of…
Tradition tells us that as Saint Thomas Aquinas was approaching the end of his life, Jesus Christ appeared to him in a vision and spoke to him from the cross, inquiring as to how he may reward the great Doctor for his contributions to the Church’s body of thought. “You have written well of me,…
The time from Michaelmas until the Hallowtide, for me, has always been a time to reflect upon Hell itself. After all, as fall settles on the Northern Hemisphere, people tend to reflect upon the afterlife as the days grow shorter and darker. And didn’t Christ talk about perdition quite a bit? It used to be…
“My Lord and my God, from this moment I accept at Thy hands, with resignation and cheerfulness, the kind of death it may please Thee to send me, with all its pains and anguish.” Despite the countless daydreams I’ve indulged in throughout my sanguine life, it struck me a few days ago that I have…
