When Fr Victor Jouët’s church caught fire in 1897, he noticed a terrifying sight. Burned into the wall of the neo-Gothic Sacro Cuore del Suffragio in Rome was the image of a face seemingly crying out for help. The priest concluded that this could only be one thing: the soul of a deceased man in purgatory, calling out to the living for prayers to ease his passage to heaven.
The image spurred Fr Jouët to dedicate the rest of his life to searching Christendom for similar instances of the dead contacting the living. What resulted was the Museum of the Holy Souls in Purgatory, one of the most unusual collections of artefacts in Rome.
Housed in Fr Jouët’s Sacro Cuore church, the museum is really little more than a cabinet on a wall. But what the museum lacks in size it makes up for in strangeness. There’s the nightcap of a man who woke to discover his deceased wife’s handprint burned into it; an apron with a similar mark; and fingerprints seared into the pages of prayer books. Indeed, hands and fire are a theme that runs through all the exhibits that Fr Jouët collected from across Europe.
Among the most striking is a prayer book from 1838 with the prints from a thumb and four fingers clearly burned into it, as if the hand was searing hot as it touched it. The museum guide says the prints belong to the deceased Joseph Schitz of Sarralbe in Lorraine, who asked his brother George for prayer in reparation for his lack of piety during his earthly life.
It is difficult to see how these careful marks could have been faked with the technology of that time, at least not without setting the whole book alight.
Another is a photograph of a mark left by a woman named Mrs Leleux on her son’s shirt when she appeared to him one night in 1789 in Belgium.
The son recalled hearing terrifying noises for 11 consecutive nights before seeing a vision of his deceased mother. She reproached him for his ungodly lifestyle and reminded him to have regular Masses said. Her son abandoned his sinful life and founded a congregation of pious laity.
Some exhibits, it has to be said, are more convincing than others. One of the less compelling is a photocopy of an Italian 10 lire banknote. The guide says a deceased priest left the note, along with 29 others, at a monastery along with a request for them to say Masses for him. There is little other information on what is, essentially, just a banknote that could be like any other.
The museum will jolt any Catholic into thinking more seriously about this often neglected doctrine. Do we really pray enough for the dead, or regularly try to gain indulgences either for ourselves or for a Holy Soul? After seeing what the souls described in the museum have endured, you may take your own mortality and sinfulness rather more seriously.
Blessed John Henry Newman depicts purgatory as a peaceful place of final purification in the Dream of Gerontius, a sort of angelic hospital where souls are gently nursed until they are ready to enter heaven. The Museum of the Holy Souls in Purgatory presents a rather more terrifying image: a place of torment from which those enduring the cleansing fires long to escape.
One thing is for sure: if this is what purgatory is like, one dreads to think what would happen in hell.
Nick Hallett is the Catholic Herald’s online editor
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