Be generous this Advent and Christmas season with your prayers, your works of mercy, your indulgenced acts, and your suffrages for the Holy Souls. Be generous like Christ and His Church, like the saints who have gone before us, and like those precious souls alive and at work in the Church today who are most faithful to mercy, charity, and prayer.
By Fr. Dan Cambra. MIC
It’s strange that the story that helped revive in the English-speaking world the modern celebration of Christmas, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, is mainly a ghost story.
The ghosts of Marley and his fellow suffering souls mark the beginning of an unforgettable night for the miser and usurious banker Ebenezer Scrooge, one which leads him to repentance, conversion to generosity and mercy, and a new way of life as a pillar of his community rather than a weight dragging people down into bankruptcy, the workhouse, and death.
The great Catholic writer G. K. Chesterton commented that “the whole human tradition has tied up together in a strange knot these strands of festivity and fear. It is over the cups of Christmas Eve that men have always competed in telling ghost stories.”
But why?
For the living and the dead
Well, Advent and the Christmas season can be a time when we think of the dead as much as we remember the living. Who can forget Grandma, sitting in her chair? Or Grandpa, with his cane? Or the aunts and uncles who are with us no longer in the flesh, for all that we may hope that the Communion of Saints continues to join us at every Mass, in every Eucharist?
Christmas is a time of memory and grace, of peace and gift-giving. It is a time specially blessed by God and the whole Holy Family, by the Church’s celebrations and by the events it commemorates.
And it is a time for us to make sure we are giving gifts to the dead, as well as to the living.
What greater gift could we give than one of the Church’s plenary indulgences to a soul in need, after all? What more thoughtful act could we perform than helping one of the Holy Souls more swiftly achieve heavenly glory? What hope do we have of being more generous than that?
Whether or not Charles Dickens knew it, he was depending on Catholic Tradition and doctrine in his storytelling. Perhaps that’s part of the secret of the transformative power of that story! There’s so much of our doctrine on Purgatory in the story, after all — evil deeds on earth being atoned for by spirits after death, sometimes long after death. Marley, after all, had been dead for some time before he disturbed Scrooge at home, and his motivation for doing so was in partial expiation for his own greed.
Penance! The story is full of it, and concludes in it. It’s one of the paradoxes of virtue that the cure for greed is feasting, and the cure for hatred of one’s neighbor is to throw a party. We are obliged to generosity, and to joy, and these two things are more closely connected than our present society often remembers.
And so, actually, are ghosts and Purgatory.
Holy and haunting
You see, there are a number of possible causes of what’s commonly called haunting or ghostly presences. They may be the souls of the damned, sadly, or the demons sent from hell to deceive gullible people.
They may be natural occurrences, mistaken by those who encounter them for ghostly or supernatural realities.
Or they may well be souls sent from Purgatory to ask for prayers, suffrages, and indulgences from the living.
Saint Faustina shares with us a number of such occurrences in her Diary. Here’s just one:
When we arrived at the novitiate, Sister [Henry] was dying. A few days later she came to me [in spirit, after her death] and bid me to go to the Mother Directress of Novices [Sister Margaret] and tell her to ask her confessor, Father Rospond, to offer one Mass for her and three ejaculatory prayers. At first I agreed, but the next day I decided I would not go to Mother Directress, because I was not sure whether this had happened in a dream or in reality. And so I did not go.
The following night the same thing was repeated more clearly; I had no more doubt. Still, in the morning I decided not to tell the Directress about it unless I saw her [Sister Henry] during the day. At once I ran into her in the corridor. She reproached me for not having gone immediately, and a great uneasiness filled my soul. So I went immediately to Mother Directress and told her everything that had happened to me. Mother responded that she would take care of the matter. At once peace reigned in my soul, and on the third day this sister came to me and said, “May God repay you” (Diary of Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska, 21).
There are many other stories of great saints having such encounters with the Holy Souls in our Church’s history, from the dream recounted by St. Gregory the Great of a deceased Benedictine who needed prayers and so received the first round of what are today called Gregorian Masses, straight through to St. Padre Pio’s numerous visions of the Holy Souls, who came to San Giovanni Rotondo to ask for his prayers, sufferings, and Masses. There’s a museum in Rome that I’ve described before in these pages that collects objects marked by the purifying fires of Purgatory when the Holy Souls touched them during visits to the living.
Be prepared
I share many of these stories in my book from Marian Press, Prayers and Practices for the Souls in Purgatory. They are good stories to recall, even in this festive season of the year. After all, the Holy Souls in Purgatory do not stop suffering when November is done and the Church’s annual remembrance of the Holy Souls is complete. Every season is a good time of year to help them finish their purgation, complete their sanctification, and enter into heavenly glory, especially as we near the end of the Jubilee Year of Hope.
The Holy Doors will soon be closed, with the last one being shut on Jan. 6 of next year, the feast of the Epiphany. That certainly doesn’t mean that we will no longer have hope, or that we will no longer be able to obtain indulgences for the Holy Souls. Not at all! The Church is generous with her indulgences, including four daily plenary indulgences that we can obtain in any ordinary year.
So be generous this Advent and Christmas season with your prayers, your works of mercy, your indulgenced acts, and your suffrages for the Holy Souls. Be generous like Christ and His Church, like the saints who have gone before us, and like those precious souls alive and at work in the Church today who are most faithful to mercy, charity, and prayer. Be the holy Catholics you wish to see in the world, and celebrate this holiday season in the Jubilee of Hope with the joy and the love that God gives us all through the Holy Spirit.
May God bless you, the Holy Family assist you, and the Holy Souls repay you with grace and blessings!
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