Spectres

Ghost

Fr dear Fr: Could you appraise me of the difference in catholic theology between a ghost and a holy soul, thank you?

This QnA comes from a little old lady near London GB who says she saw a ghost once at Hampton Court on a visit with her young son who later became a priest - later as a young altar boy and then as a priest fully ordained, that boy received visits from a ghost after he visited her site at Hampton Court too, spotting her as he ate his tomato sandwiches from his school lunchbox in the cortile near the old library, which ghost requested prayers from his little soul, unaware who he was maybe at that time, but that she did so solely not because he was especially pre-sanctified but because he was a distant cousin of the said ghost in his own history, he was like a Cyrano and his tres chere cousine, La Brigitte.

Many of the younger people on here have watched the moving and emotional film "Ghost", in which a ghost struggles to communicate with the great love of his life in order to explain to her how he had been killed and by whom, so they have some ideas of this subject. Funnily once when visiting or rather staying as a Benedictine at a sister ECB monastery near Yugoslavia on the Adriatic Coast, I went to see a local Italian hermit attachee to the monastery, since in many orders hermits are only allowed hermitage once they prove themselves useful to the monastery through say ten years of hard manual labour, and this hermit lived up the forest trail on the mountain top amid a circle of trees, and after swapping pleasantries about the weather, I asked him about the ministry he enjoyed as a hermit. He looked up from his little writing desk and he explained that sometimes holy souls and even ghosts come to visit him in the evenings to ask for prayers. I stood back and asked him if there was anything more he wished to add about the subject. He asked where I was from, and I explained that I was working on the Mission in England, and he then remarked that sometimes at sunset a ghost from Britain would come and see him from time to time. I was surprised and asked him if the ghost had revealed itself and its earthly identity at any time during these visitations. He responded, "Yes, she said that she had been a Queen of England, one of the younger ones of the six wives married to Henry VIII, and that after her death she was sentenced to wander the earth and haunt the old Cardinal Wolsey palace at Hampton, chiefly because she refused to forgive her erring husband the king, at her execution." I was surprised and not a little amazed. It was interesting to have these spiritual conversations with holy hermits. He then went on to explain that she had visited him several times to discuss her situation and to explain her spiritual condition. She had found it hard vv hard to forgive the king because she had assumed like many of the girls at the royal court that he was a typical cruel and heartless male of his time rather than the victim he was too of the wicked gossips of the royal court - he had become isolated too by conniving and cunning tongues. He said she had explained more and more of her situation in her lifetime on earth during these night time visitations to his little hermitage up high on the mountain tops - where the cool evening air cleared his holy mind.

Only today on the 7th November 2021, I opened up a Sunday Mirror Weekend magazine and read in there of a nice handsome young Woke couple that have befriended the ghosts that haunt their own house out there in the countryside around the Jamaica Inn where Hannah works in Cornwall - a nice feature article and so interesting, though obviously they could have the in-depth dialogue with the ghosts and the spirits that come to them like the holy hermit near Yugoslavia Vetus. Very interesting. It is something of a growing interest among young people in this timeframe. In a user survey of about 3,000 computer owners not long ago, AOL announced that about 76% of those polled, had all confessed to having had an experience of a ghost or a supernatural occurrence in their lifetime, so evidently it is quite a popular business, and the churches are not all equipped with what they like to call mediums or mystics who can guide the younger generation Z through all the complexities of the spiritual supernatural world. Even the policeman last night on the TV at GBNews, Pc Tony, was discussing undercover cops at nightclubs and the need for vigilance when surrounded by young people ordering drinks that can be spiked, and he came out with an assumption among many police officers, they can look into most things, but the supernatural is not their jurisdiction - they like to leave that to the holy mystics and clerics and imams of the Four major world religions, especially apposite comment this Diwali. But real and genuine Christian monks and holymen are especially known for this ministry. The presenter on GBNews that night, a young man, was giving off a monologue at the beginning of the programme in which he suddenly said, "I am sure that when the good Lord sent Jesus down to our world to save us from our sins, he did not intend us to cancel Christmas just because a few politicians say so, since when are they experts in the supernatural?"

So the supernatural is a separate jurisdiction, and most of the time our own specialists and our own Christian clerics are called to haunted houses to conduct dialogues with ghosts. One of these clerics, a sometime chaplain to Hampton Court where I researched the ghost there, explained that there is a difference between ghosts and holy souls. Holy souls are detained in purgatory to expiate their unatoned sins, so fulfilling the justice of the heavenly powers, since nobody can enter heaven unless God wills it so, and he must be confident that the holy souls there have attained integration and then expiated their unconfessed sins and their unatoned for sins. A haunting accomplishes this sort of thing. Prayers are beseeched and then the ghost is delivered into paradise. A ghost thuswise is a different story, sometimes God in his mercy does not wish to condemn a soul that might not have merited time in purgatory, so he sentences that soul, especially the rich, to wander a particular place on earth and there expiate their own lack of forgiveness as per the ghost above of the young queen so cruelly and heartlessly cheated of her life by the gossipers of the royal court. She had been robbed of her life, had said many prayers asking for mercy, had appealed to the clemency of the king, but was angry at her execution and passed into life, the life of the spiritual, in a state of considerable anxst. All very sad - sad of the king who did love her so especially among all his wives, but also sad for her. This, according to the Italian hermit, open to receiving such visits from Britain because he had long been a disciple of St Paul of the Cross, a young Anglophile saint in Italy, and like so many Italians himself, very Anglophile, this was the story behind the visitation of the young queen of England - he was taken aback himself and quite moved at her dreadfully sorrowful death and as he got to know her more and more during her visits, nice hermit, nice girl. Nice confabulation. Something to think about when one next meets a ghost - to seek out prayers and the inestimable masses for the happiness of that sorrowful ghost. So we must all pray for the sorrowful Queens of England, poor things, as they have miserable lives for the most part. Something FND for the web, fresh, new, and different.