The Soul After Death

St.Alphonsus Liguori related the awful and awesome case of a monk renowned for his sanctity and devotion to the Mother of God:

At the point of death, having received the last sacraments, he summoned his religious brethren and begged that they not abandon him in his last passage.

Scarcely had he uttered those words, when in the presence of all, he began to tremble, roll his eyes, and, bathed in a cold sweat, with a faltering voice, said, "Ah, do you not see the devils who are endeavouring to drag me to hell?" He then cried out, "Brothers, implore the aid of Mary for me; in her I confide; she will give me the victory."

On hearing this, his brethren recited the Litany of our Blessed Lady and as they said, "Holy mary, pray for him," the dying man exclaimed, "Repeat, repeat the name of Mary, for I am already before God's tribunal." He was silent for a moment and then added, "It is true that I did that but I have done penance for it!"

And turning to our Blessed Lady, he said, "O Mary, I shall be delivered if thou helpest me."

Again the devils attacked him but he defended himself with his crucifix and the name of Mary.

Thus was the night spent but no sooner did morning come than the monk exclaimed with great calmness and full of holy joy, "Mary, my sovereign Lady, my refuge, has obtained for me pardon and salvation." Then casting his eyes on that Blessed Virgin who was inviting him to follow her, he said, "I come, O Lady, I come," and making an effort to do so even with his body, his soul fled after her to the realms of eternal bliss, as we trust, for he sweetly expired.

St.Alphonsus says that "when a man is on the point of leaving the world, hell is opened and sends forth its most terrible demons, both to tempt the soul before it leaves the body, and to accuse it when presented before the tribunal of Jesus Christ for judgment." And he quotes Isaiah 14: "Hell below was in uproar to meet thee at thy coming: it stirred up the giants for thee."

Satan, the Hebrew name for the devil, means accuser and adversary.

The Psalms particularly address their prayer to that time when our invisible enemies will stand before God accusing us.

Psalm 7: "Save me from them that persecute me and do thou deliver me lest at any time like a lion he seize my soul."

Psalm 30 (or 31 in the Jewish Bible): "I am become as a vessel that is destroyed. For I have heard the blame of many that dwell round about. While they assembled together against me, they consulted to take away my life. Let the wicked be ashamed and be brought down to hell. Let deceitful lips be made dumb which speak iniquity against the just with pride and abuse."

Psalm 70 (71): "For my enemies have spoken against me and they that watched my soul have consulted together, saying: God hath forsaken him; pursue him and take him, for there is none to deliver him."

As now, even more so then, at the moment of death, for according to St.Paul: "our wrestling is not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places...the prince of the power of this air."

What happens at the moment of death, the moment of truth? Most if not all those outside the true faith are dragged immediately to hell.

The soul of the righteous as soon as it begins leaving the body and rises from the Earth enters into what is called the particular judgment. It begins to strive through the aerial spaces towards its homeland in heaven but is impeded by legions of fallen spirits standing guard. Each devil is in charge of a particular kind of sin with which to accuse the poor soul. In the church fathers, they are called the toll-houses.

St.Hesychius of Jerusalem: "The hour of death will find us, it will come, and it will be impossible to escape it. Oh, if only the devil and prince of this world and the air who is then to meet us might find our sins as nothing and insignificant, and might not be able to accuse us justly."

St.Gregory the Great: "One must reflect deeply on how frightful the hour of death will be for us, what terror the soul will then experience, what remembrance of all the evils, what forgetfulness of past happiness, what fear, and what apprehension of the Judge. Then, the evil spirits will seek out the departing soul and its deeds. Then they will present before its view the sins towards which they had disposed it, so as to draw their accomplice to torment."

St.Cyril of Alexandria: "What fear and trembling await you, O soul, in the day of death. You will see frightful, wild, cruel, unmerciful and shameful demons standing before you. The very sight of them is worse than any torment. The soul seeing them becomes agitated, disturbed, troubled, seeks to hide, hastens to the angels of God. The holy angels hold the soul. Passing with them through the air and rising, it encounters the toll-houses which guard the path from earth to heaven, detaining the soul and hindering it from ascending further. Each toll-house tests the sins corresponding to it. each sin, each passion, has its collectors and testers.

St.Basil the Great: "The noble athletes of God, who have wrestled considerably with the invisible enemies during the whole of their lives, after they have escaped all of their persecutions and reached the end of their life, are examined by the 'prince of this world' in order that if they are found to have any wounds from wrestling or any stains or effects of sin, they may be detained [that is to say, in that part of the inferno called Purgatory meaning Purification]. But if they are found unwounded and sinless, they may be brought by Christ into their rest as being unconquered and free."

The righteous obtain help from heaven, from their guardian angel and other angels and saints, even our Lady herself. Not so, not so, the ordinary sinner. He has to face the demons alone.

St.John Chrysostom describes their ordeal. "The dying may then be heard relating horrors and fearful visions, the spectacle of which they are unable to endure, but often shake their bed with great power, gaze fearfully on the bystanders, the soul urging itself inwards, unwilling to be torn away from the body, and unable to bear the sight of the approaching spirits. If human beings that are frightful strike terror into us beholding them, when we see angels threatening and stern powers among our visitors, what shall we not suffer, the soul being forced from the body and dragged away, bewailing much, all in vain?"

Chrysostom adds, "Then we will need many prayers, many helpers, many good deeds, a great intercession from angels in the journey through the spaces of the air. If, when travelling in a foreign land of a strange city, we are in need of a guide, how much more to guide us past the invisible powers and rulers of this air who are called persecutors and publicans and tax-collectors!"

St.Adamnan in his Life of St.Columba (available in Penguin books) tells of how the founder of Iona and the Scottish Catholic church was able to see with spiritual eyes several of these battles. "The saint called his monks one day telling them, 'Now let us help by prayer the monks of Abbot Comgall drowning at this hour in the Lough of the Calf. For behold at this moment they are warring in the air against hostile powers who try to snatch away the soul of a stranger who is drowning along with them.' Then, after prayer, St.Columba said, 'Give thanks to Christ, for now the holy angels have met these holy souls and have delivered the stranger.'"

St.Bede, the Abbot of Jarrow Abbey, in his work The History of the English Church, related of a near-death or rather actual after-death experience that changed a lucky man's life. He returned to life after appearing to have been dead for a whole night. Laid out before his mourning wife, he sat up and said to her,

"Do not be afraid, my dearest one, for I have truly risen from the grasp of death and am allowed to live among men again. But henceforth I must not live as I used to and must adopt a very different way of life."

With her permission, they separated and he became a monk in accordance with Christ's words recorded in the Gospel of St.Luke: "Unless you do penance you shall likewise perish."

Fully conscious when out of his body, the man's soul had found itself in the midst of dense darkness. Here are his words as recorded by the venerable Bede.

"Frequent masses of dusky flame suddenly appeared before us, rising as though from a great pit and falling back into it again. As the tongues of flame arose, they were filled with the souls of men, who, like sparks, were sometimes flung high into the air and at other times dropped back into the depths as the vapors of the fire died down. Furthermore, an indescribable stench welled up with these vapors and filled the whole of this gloomy place. I suddenly heard behind me the sound of a most hideous and desperate lamentation accompanied by harsh laughter. I saw a throung of wicked spirits dragging with them five human souls howleing and lamenting, one of them a priest, one could tell by his tonsure..."

St.Boniface, the English Saxon founder of the German Catholic church, related the tale of a monk who died and came back to life after some hourse. "Angels of such pure splendour bore him up as he came forth from the body that he could not bear to gaze upon them. In the space of time that he was out of the body, a greater multitude of souls left their bodies and gathered in the place where he was than he had thought to form the whole race of mankind on Earth. He said also there was a crowd of evil spirits and a glorious choir of the higher angels. And he said that the wretched spirits and the holy angels had a violent dispute concerning the souls that had come forth from their bodies, the demons bringing charges against them and aggravating the burden of their sins, the angels lightening the burden and making excuses for them. He heard all his sins which he had committed from his youth on and had failed to confess or had forgotten or had not recognized as sin, crying out against him, each in its own voice, and accusing him grievously, naming the very times and places...And so his sins piled up and reckoned out, those ancient enemies declared him guilty and unquestioningly subject to their jurisdiction. On the other hand, the poor little virtues which he had displayed unworthily and imperfectly spoke out in his defence. And those angelic spirits in their boundless love defended and supported him, while the virtues greatly magnified, as they were, seemed to him far greater and more excellent than could ever have been practised by his own strength."

These reports are a far cry from the benign and reassuring but trite and banal reports of the "heaven" given to us as so-called "after-death" experiences of people who have apparently died and come back to life. More often than not, these are diabolical deceptions. For the dissembling spirits or "ghosts" that appear to those that are a state of sinfulness and the fallen condition are demons and not in the least holy angels and men. The impression is designed to reinforce modern society's false sense of peace and security. This is the new religion of the age, universal salvation or universalism.

St.Paul: "And no wonder for Satan himself transforms himserlf in an angel of light."

One good effect of some near-death experiences for the benefit of the modern skeptic is that they teach that the faculties of a person reside in the person that is the soul not the body. The most edifying case was that of a totally blind woman whose soul separated from her body in the hospital operating room. The real "she" floated above the whole scene, in which doctors and nurses were resigning themselves to the apparent fact that the woman had died. She then came back to life and to her former blindness and to the astonishment of all involved told them that she had seen everything going on in the room when she had separated from her body. it is the soul that sees and thinks, the innermost person, and the soul uses the body as the means of its activities only in the material world.

The new one world religion with its naive anodyne message of love and peace is preached even by Catholic or supposedly Catholic popes, cardinals, bishops and priests. The previous pope stated falsely that "by the fact that our Lord died on the Cross and by the action of the Holy Ghost every man is a child of God" and "by his Incarnation the Son of God has united himself to every man."

Contradicting St.Paul that only those that are led by the Spirit of God are the sons of God, and St.John that those who are not children of God are children of the devil.

"But as many as received him [that is in Holy Communion] he gave them power to be made the sons of God." Or in Jesus' words, "many are called but few chosen."

How such arrant and fatuous nonsense as is taught by modern bishops and priests could be received by the faithful as doctrinally correct shows that the last of the deceived modern Catholics have got used to checking their brains at the door. So that seeing that do not see and hearing they do not hear, lest they be converted and flee!

St.Paul distinguished between two kinds of people: "For what man knows the things of a man but the spirit of a man that is in him? So the things that are of God no man knows but the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of this world but the Spirit that is of God that we may know the things that are given us from God, which things also we speak, not in the learned words of human wisdom, but in the doctrine of the Spirit, comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the sensual man perceives not these things that are of the Spirit of God. For it is foolishness to him and he cannot understand, because it is spiritually examined. But the spiritual man judges all things, and he himself is judged of no man. For who has known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ. And I, brethren, could not speak to you as unto spiritual but as unto carnal. As unto little ones in Christ. I gave you milk to drink not meat, for you were not able as yet. But neither indeed are you yet able, for you are yet carnal. For whereas there is among you envying and contention, are you not carnal and walk according to man?"

The effect of the new religion is that today's Catholics and other so-called Christians treat the Cross with a casual air bordering on derision. They call themselves charismatic and pentecostalist but there is no charism and there is no new Pentecost only confusion and deception.

As for "speaking in tongues", it is, in the words of Solange Hertz, "a rite of initiation whereby a demonic influx may be received by a candidate who freely opens his will to spiritual influences coming from outside the Church...usually by the imposition of hands...provides nothing less than a threshold for diabolical possession."

They have no sense of the reality of God's awe, majesty and holiness and of the infinite offense they give by their corrupted, disfigured, unruly worship, not to mention matching lifestyles. For a reality check, it pays to read the Bible. "Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." And, "Who is like unto God!"

One book that should be on every thinking man's reading list is Marie Carre's AA1025--The Memoirs of an Anti-Apostle, the story of one among thousands of communist szecret agents who entered the seminary and became priests and in this case a bishop for the purpose of destroying the Church from within.

In the book the communist agent stated, "If you suppress fear, you suppress religions. A God whom no one fears quickly becomes a God about whom no one thinks."

When the children shall ask what was the true Mass? you shall say, It is the sacrifice of the Lord's passover, for He passed over the houses of the people of Israel in Egypt when He slew the Egyptians but spared our houses.