for God’s sake, have pity on me!” The other, terrified, exclaimed: “Holy soul, what do you want from me?” “Masses! Masses!” was the eager answer, “that I may be released from my torments!” “What? You in torments! You who have led such an angelic, innocent, and penitential life? Was not that sufficient purification and atonement for you?” “Alas!” sighed the soul, “no one believes how strictly God judges, and how severely He punishes!”[1] No one believes it! O my dear brethren, how many are there not in purgatory who are thought to be in heaven! St. Antoninus relates in his Summa that a preacher of his Order appeared a month after his death to the infirmarian of the convent in which he had lived and told him that he had been kept in purgatory all that time for no other reason than that he had been too familiar and jocose in his conversations with seculars.[2] A whole month he had to suffer because he had not observed that gravity of demeanor that becomes the religious when in the society of seculars. And how many Masses and prayers had not been offered for him by his brethren in the meantime?
Confirmed by others. Baronius, writing of the year 498, and St. Gregory in his Dialogues, mention with astonishment the case of Cardinal Paschasius, who was a great friend to the poor, a generous alms-giver, a most courageous despiser of himself, and a brave champion of the Catholic faith. He died in the odor of sanctity, and the mere touch of his coffin was enough to drive out devils, so that no one doubted that he was already in possession of heavenly glory. But how different the judgments of God from those of men! The same Paschasius, a long time after, as St. Gregory says,[3] appeared to Germanus, the holy Bishop of Capua, and mournfully begged his help that he might at last be freed from his torments and be admitted to the beatific vision. When asked why he was detained so long in purgatory he said: “For nothing else than my obstinacy in persisting in my opinion that Lawrence was more worthy of the papacy than Symmachus, although Symmachus had been unanimously voted to the Apostolic See.” Still more wonderful is what we read in the Annals of the Capuchin Fathers, under the year 1548, of Brother Anthony Corio, who was renowned in the Order for his extraor-
