This article first
appeared in the 1960's, but it is more relevant today than ever. It is important to note how the girl who's
soul was lost was not a Hitler or Stalin, nor was she guilty of any great crime
or atrocity. Like so many of us, she
simply didn't have time for God. In
letting the cares of the world and the flesh overtake her, she slowly wasted
the graces with which God showered her, closing herself to God's love and mercy
- at the cost of her immortal soul.
This sobering
narrative serves as a warning that describes well the slippery slope that may
overtake any one of us if we are not careful in our prayer life and in our
faith and trust in God, no matter how badly we fare in failing to overcome our
addictions and sinful tendencies.
This unusual story
recounts the revelations of a lost soul to a former acquaintance. It is a
powerful record of the steps which led a young woman to lose her soul in Hell
for all eternity. Although it has several times been printed with imprimatur,
this in itself does not guarantee the authenticity of the story. An imprimatur
merely indicates that the subject matter is free from error in faith and
morals. Is it true? Obviously, it cannot
be '`guaranteed" because the only evidence is that of the girl herself. It
certainly may be true and its instructional qualities would pertain even if the
story itself were not true. In the July
apparition at Fatima a vision of a Hell of fire was given to the three little
children, and significantly, its existence was confirmed by the great public
miracle on October 13th.
(Many people had
visions of Hell. The most famous among them are the visions of Don Bosco and
Josepha Menendez). Yet, Hell is little
spoken of in pulpits today.
And we have seen
that many Christian ministers, including some Catholic priests, have
"abolished" Hell as a place of physical pain. Because of this, the special intervention of
Heaven, may, as at Fatima, be necessary to restore this sobering doctrine to
its important place in Christian dogma.
It is well to remember that the Hell spoken of here is the Hell which
has a significant place in Catholic doctrine, the Hell described vividly by
Christ Himself, the Hell seen in all its livid horror by the children at Fatima
on July 13th, 1917.
(The names of
persons and places are omitted because of the nature of the story plus the fact
of its recent origin.)
Clara and Annette,
both single Catholics in their early twenties, worked adjacent to each other,
employees of a commercial firm in Germany. Although they were never very close
friends, they shared a courteous mutual regard which lead to an exchange of
ideas and, eventually, of confidences. Clara professed herself openly
religious, and felt it her duty to instruct and admonish Annette when the
latter appeared excessively casual or superficial in religious matters. In due course, Annette married and left the
firm. The year was 1937. Clara spent the autumn of that year on holiday at Lake
Garda. About the middle of September she received a letter from her mother:
'Annette, the victim of an auto accident, was buried yesterday at
Wald-Friedhof.’ Clara was frightened
since she knew her friend was not very religious. Was she prepared to appear
before God? Dying suddenly, what had happened to her? The next day she attended Mass, received
Holy Communion, and prayed fervently for her friend.
The following
night, at ten minutes after midnight, the vision took place . . .
“Clara, do not
pray for me! I am in hell. If I tell you this and speak at length about
it, do not think it is because of our friendship. We here do not love anyone. I do this as
under constraint. In truth, I should
like to see you too come to this state where I must remain forever. Perhaps that angers you, but here we all
think that way. Our wills are hardened
in evil, in what you call 'evil'. Even
when doing something 'good', as I do now - opening your eyes about hell, it is
not because of a good intention.”
“Do you still
remember our first meeting four years ago at . . .? You were then 23 and had
been there already half a year. Because I was a beginner, you gave me some
helpful advice. Then I praised your love
of your neighbor. Ridiculous! Your help was mere coquetry. Here we do not acknowledge any good in
anybody."
"Do you
remember what I told you about my youth? Now I am painfully compelled to fill
in some of the gaps. According to the plan of my parents, I should not have
existed. A ‘misfortune’ brought about my conception. My two sisters were 14 and
15 when I was born. Would that I had
never existed! Would that I could now
annihilate myself! Escape these
tortures! No pleasure would equal that
with which I would abandon my existence, as a garment of ashes which is lost in
nothingness. But I must continue to
exist as I chose to make myself as a ruined person. When father and mother, still young, left the
country for the city, they had lost touch with the Church and were keeping
company with irreligious people. They
had met at a dance, and after a year and a half of companionship they 'had' to
get married. As a result of the nuptial
ceremony, so much holy water remained on them that my mother attended Sunday
Mass a couple of times a year. But she never taught me to pray. Instead, she was completely taken up with the
daily cares of life, although our situation was not bad. I refer to prayer, Mass, religious
instruction, holy water, church with a very strong repugnance. I hate all that, as I hate those who go to
church and in general every human being and everything."
"From a great
many things do we receive torture. Every
knowledge received at the hour of death, every remembrance of things lived or
known is, for us, a piercing flame. In
each remembrance, good and bad, we see the way in which grace was present, the
grace we despised or ignored. What a torture is this! We do not eat; we do not sleep; we do not
walk. Chained with howling and gnashing of teeth, we look appalled at our
ruined life, hating and suffering. Do
you hear? We here drink hatred like
water. Above all we hate God. With great
reluctance do I force myself to make you understand. The blessed in heaven must love God because
they see Him without veil, in all His dazzling beauty. That makes their bliss
indescribable. We know this and the
knowledge makes us furious. Men on
earth, who know God from nature and from revelation can love Him, but they are
not compelled to do so. The believer, I
say this with gnashing of teeth, who contemplates Christ on the cross, with
arms extended, will end by loving Him.
But he whom God approaches only in the final storm, as punisher, as just
avenger, because He was rejected by him, such a person cannot but hate Him with
all the strength of his wicked will.
We died with
willful resolve to be separated from God.
Do you now understand why hell lasts forever? It is because our wills
were fixed for eternity at the moment of death. We had made our final choice.
Our obstinacy will never leave us."
"Under
compulsion, I must add that God is merciful even towards us. I affirm many
things against my will and must choke the torrent of abuses I should like to
vomit out."
“God was merciful
to us by not allowing our wicked wills to exhaust themselves on earth as we
should have been prepared to do. This would have increased our faults and our
pains. He caused us to die before our time, as in my case, or had other
mitigating circumstances intervene. Now
He shows Himself merciful towards us by not compelling a closer approach than
that afforded in this remote inferno. Every step bringing us closer to God
would cause us a greater pain than that which a step closer to a burning
furnace would cause you."
"You were scared
when once, during a walk, I told you that my father, a few days before my first
Communion, had told me: `My little Annette, the main thing is your beautiful
white dress, all the rest is just make-believe.’ Because of your concern, I was almost ashamed.
Now I sneer at it. The important thing
is that we were not allowed to receive Communion until the age of 12. By then I
was already absorbed in worldly amusements and found it easy to set aside,
without scruple, the things of religion.
Thus, I attached no great importance to my first Communion. We are furious that many children go to
Communion at the age of seven. We do all
we can to make people believe that children have insufficient knowledge at that
age. They must first commit some mortal sins.
Then the white Particle will not do so much damage to our cause as when
faith, hope and charity, these things received in Baptism, are still alive in
their hearts. Marta K and you induced me
to enter ‘The Association of the Young Ladies’. The games were amusing. As you
know, I immediately took a directive part. I liked it. I also liked the picnics. I even let myself
be induced to go to confession and Communion sometimes. Once you warned me, ‘Anne, if you do not
pray, you go to perdition'. I used to
pray very little indeed, and even this unwillingly."
"You were
then only too right. All those who burn
in hell did not pray or did not pray enough.
Prayer is the first step towards God.
And it is the decisive step. Especially prayer to her who is the Mother
of Christ, whose name we never pronounce. Devotion to her rescues from the
devil numberless souls whom sin would infallibly give to him. I continue my story, consumed with rage and
only because I have to. To pray is the easiest thing man can do on earth. And
God has tied up the salvation of each one exactly to this very easy thing. To him who prays with perseverance, little by
little God gives so much light, so much strength that even the most debased
sinner will, at the end, come back to salvation. During the last years of my life I did not
pray any more, so I lacked those graces without which nobody can be saved. Here we no longer receive graces. Moreover,
should we receive them we would cynically refuse them. All the fluctuations of earthly existence
have ceased in this other life. For
years I was living far away from God.
For, in the last
call of Grace, I decided against God.
I never believed
in the influence of the devil. And now I
affirm that he has strong influence on the persons who are in the condition in
which I was then. Only many prayers,
others' and mine own united with sacrifices and penances, could have snatched
me from his grip, and even this only little by little. If there are only few externally obsessed,
there are very many internally possessed.
The devil cannot steal the free will from those who give themselves to
his influence. But in punishment of
their, so to speak, methodical apostasy from God, He allows the devil to nest
in them.
I hate the devil
too. And yet I am pleased about him,
because he tries to ruin all of you, he and his satellites, the spirits fallen
with him at the beginning of time. There
are millions of them. They roam around
the earth, as thick as a swarm of flies, and you do not even notice it.
It is not reserved
to us damned to tempt you; but to the fallen spirits. In truth every time they drag down here to
hell a human soul their own torture is increased. But what does one not do for
hatred?"
"Deep down I
was rebelling against God. You did not understand it; you thought me still a
Catholic. I wanted, in fact, to be called one; I even used to pay my
ecclesiastical dues. Maybe your answers were right sometimes. On me, they made
no impression since you must not be right! Because of these counterfeited
relationships between the two of us, our separation on the occasion of my
marriage was of no consequence to me.
Before the wedding I went to confession and Communion once more. It was a precept my husband and I thought
alike on this point. Why not comply with this formality? So we complied with
this, as with the other formalities. Our
married life, in general, was spent in great harmony. We were of the same idea
in everything. In this, too, that we did
not want the burden of children. In truth, my husband would have liked to have
one, no more, of course. In the end I succeeded in dissuading him even from
this desire. Dresses, luxurious furniture, places of entertainment, picnics and
trips by car and similar things were more important for me. It was a year of
pleasure on earth, the one that passed from my marriage to my sudden
death. Internally, of course, I was
never happy, although externally at ease. There was always something
indeterminate inside that gnawed at me. Unexpectedly I had an inheritance from
my aunt, Lotte. My husband succeeded in
increasing his wages to a considerable figure. And so I was able to furnish our
new home in an attractive way. Religion did not show its light but from afar
off, pale, feeble and uncertain."
"I used to
give free vent to my ill humor about some mediaeval representations of hell in
cemeteries or elsewhere, in which the devil is roasting souls in red burning
coals, while his companions with long tails drag new victims to him. Clara! One
can be mistaken in depicting hell, but never can one exaggerate. I tell you,
the fire of which the Bible speaks does not mean the torment of the conscience.
Fire is fire! What He said: ‘Away from Me, you accursed ones, into eternal
fire’, is to be understood literally. Literally! How can the spirit be touched by material
fire, you will ask? How can your soul
suffer on earth when you put your finger on the flame? In fact the soul does not burn; and yet what
torture all the individual feels! Our
greatest torture consists in the certain knowledge that we shall never see God.
How can this torture us so much, since on earth we are so indifferent? As long
as the knife lies on the table it leaves you cold. You see how keen it is, but
you do not feel it. Plunge the knife into the flesh and you will start
screaming in pain. Now we feel the loss of God; before we only thought of it.
Not all the souls suffer to the same degree. With how greater wickedness and
how more systematically one has sinned, the more weighs on him the loss of God
and the more the creature he abused is choking him. The lost Catholics suffer
more than those of other religions, because they, mostly, received and despised
more graces and more light. He who knew more suffers more cruelly than he who knew
less. He who sinned out of malice suffers more keenly than he who sinned out of
weakness. But nobody suffers more than he deserves. Oh, if that were not true,
I should have a motive to hate!"
"My death
happened this way . . . A week ago; I am
speaking according to your reckoning , because according to the pain, I could
very well say that it is already in years that I am burning in hell. A week ago, then, my husband, and I, on a
Sunday, went on a picnic, the last one for me.
The day was glorious. I felt very
well. A sinister sense of pleasure that
was with me all the day long, invaded me.
When lo, suddenly, during the return, my husband was dazzled by a car
that was coming full speed, he lost control.
Jesses! (misspelling of JESUS, used frequently by some people of German
language) escaped from my lips with a shivering. Not as a prayer, but as a
shout. A lacerating pain took hold of the whole of me, (in comparison with the
present one, only a trifle). Then I lost
consciousness.
Strange, that
morning this thought had come to me in an inexplicable way:
'You could go to
Mass once more'. It seemed like the last
call of Love.
Clear and
resolute, my 'NO' cut off that train of thought.
You will know
already what happened after my death. The lot of my husband and that of my
mother, what happened to my corpse and the proceedings of my funeral are known
to me through some natural knowledge we have here. What happens on earth we
know only obscurely, but we know what touches us closely. So I see also where you are living. I myself awoke from the darkness suddenly, in
the instant of my passing. I saw myself
as flooded by a dazzling light. It was
in the same place where my dead body was lying.
It was like a theater, when suddenly the lights in the hall are put out,
the curtains are rent aside and an unexpected scene horribly illuminated
appears, the scene of my life.
My soul showed
itself to me as in a mirror; all the graces despised from my youth until my
last `NO' to God.
I felt myself like
an assassin, to whom his dead victim is shown during his trial at court.
Should I repent?
Never! Should I feel ashamed? Never!
However I could
not even stand before the eyes of God rejected by me. There was only one thing
for me: flight! As Cain fled from the dead body of Abel, so my soul rushed from
that sight of horror.
This was the
particular judgment: the invisible Judge said: 'Away from Me'.
Then my soul, as a
yellow brimstone shadow, fell headlong into the place of eternal torture…"