“That second kingdom where the human spirit is purged and becomes worthy of ascending to heaven”. This is what Dante Alighieri calls him in his Divine Comedy. The Purgatory for the Church it is the final purification of those imperfect souls who thus obtain the sanctity necessary to enter the joy of heaven. A teaching that bases its foundations on the practice of prayer for the deceased already present in the Holy Scriptures and already affirmed by the fathers of the Church. Saint Augustinedear to Leo XIV, wrote in the 4th century: “it cannot be denied that the souls of the deceased can be helped by the pity of their still living loved ones”. Coming to the present day, there is a place in Rome that was created precisely to prove the existence of Purgatory.
A church and many mysteries
The church of the Sacred Heart of Suffrage is certainly not among the top destinations on tourist and pilgrim tours, yet anyone who sees it even fleetingly cannot fail to notice it. The facade full of spiers, arches and niches and the neo-Gothic style have earned it the nickname of “small Milan Cathedral”, but on Lungotevere. In a room to the side of the sacristy stands the museum of the souls of Purgatory, a small but unique collection of relics that testify to the existence of what Benedict XVI defined “inner fire”.
The strange fire
The idea for the museum came to Father Victor Jouëta French missionary of the Sacred Heart who lived between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. The religious celebrated in the church on Lungotevere Prati, inside a chapel dedicated to the Virgin of the Rosary. The latter was destroyed by a fire which broke out on 15 September 1897. When the flames were put out, Father Jouët noticed a sad, human face left engraved in one of the walls behind the altar. This event greatly impressed the missionary who from then on decided to search around the world for similar testimonies and to found a museum to collect evidence of manifestations of souls of the deceased in earthly life.
The footprints
The artefacts collected by the French religious figure can still be seen today on the noticeboard died in 1912. Among the objects there is a German prayer book that belonged to George Schitz and in which appear the footprints of his late brother who appeared to him on the night of December 21, 1838 asking prayers for the expiation of his sins. Another footprint appears on a pillowcase and is attributed to a Spanish nun who appeared to one of her sisters after her death in 1894. Other footprints they would have been left on the apron of a nun and on a wooden tablet of an abbess who lived at the end of the eighteenth century. Another find is a nightcap on which the deceased wife of a certain Giovanni Le Sénéchal left her mark when she appeared to him on the night of 15 January 1875 to reproach him for the failure to celebrate a celebration. mass of suffrage. The man tried to apologize by saying he didn’t have enough money, but his wife urged him to ask his daughter for it.
When Le Sénéchal objected that his daughter would not believe him, the soul decided to leave proof of his appearance on the cap. In fifteen years of research, Jouët collected approximately three hundred testimonies but then he selected many fewer. Those present today are the same ones that were chosen by the missionary.