We believe in one God, the father almighty. The maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible. The seen and the unseen. And yet, as Catholics, we are often far more comfortable with the things we can see than those we cannot. Which is a shame, considering how much of our faith concerns the invisible.
Angels. Demons. Souls. Saints who, though hidden from our sight, offer their prayers before the throne of God. Not to mention the holy Mass, where heaven invisibly touches earth, and the body and blood of Christ are veiled beneath the appearances of bread and wine.
And nowhere is this relationship between the visible and invisible quite so personal as in our relationship with the dead. We keep their bones and kiss their relics. We pray for their souls and ask them to pray for ours, as we believe that death has not placed them entirely out of our reach. And sometimes, according to the stories handed down through Catholic history, the dead have made themselves known to the living. Some come to console us, others to warn us, others to ask for prayers.
Some of these stories are frightening. Others, strangely enough, are remarkably human. I share three such stories here. Each offers some insight into the afterlife—heaven, hell or purgatory—and perhaps, too, some lessons for how we choose to spend our days on earth.
St. Thomas Aquinas and Brother Romanus
We do not know why Thomas Aquinas was praying alone in the Dominican church at Naples. Perhaps he simply wanted the quiet. Or perhaps something was weighing on his heart. Whatever the reason, his prayers were interrupted by the sudden appearance of a familiar figure.
It was Brother Romanus, a fellow Dominican friar whom Thomas had known in Paris. Thomas greeted his old friend, wondering what had brought him to Naples. But Romanus had rather startling news.
He was dead.
Romanus explained that he had been permitted to visit Thomas, who now found himself face-to-face with a soul who had passed through death and beheld the face of God. Yet Thomas, one of the greatest theological minds in Christian history, did not immediately begin asking questions about heaven, purgatory or the mysteries of eternity. Instead, he asked something considerably more personal.
“How do I stand with God? Are my works pleasing to him?”
How human is this?
A man who had spent his life writing about God, seeking to understand him, suddenly finds himself speaking to someone who has seen him. And his first concern isn’t intellectual curiosity. It is whether God is pleased with him.
Romanus reassured Thomas that he was indeed in good standing with God and that his works were pleasing to God. Only then did Thomas ask about his friend’s condition. Romanus explained that he was now in heaven, having spent 16 days in purgatory because he had neglected to carry out a will entrusted to him by the bishop of Paris.
And then, Thomas Aquinas becomes, well, Thomas Aquinas. He begins asking theological questions about knowledge, the soul and what it means to see God, questions the two friends had apparently discussed while Romanus was still alive.
Romanus tells him that he sees God and urges him not to inquire further. But Thomas cannot help himself. He presses on, wanting to know precisely how Romanus sees God.
“As we have heard, so we have seen in the City of our God,” Romanus replies.
And then he disappears.
Padre Pio and Pietro Di Mauro
The doors of Padre Pio’s friary were locked for the night. Somehow, a dead man got inside.
It was a cold evening in San Giovanni Rotondo, and Padre Pio sat beside a fireplace, warming himself against the harsh winter chill. He was alone, or so he thought.
An elderly man appeared beside the fire, wearing an old-fashioned cloak. He looked like any other peasant from the surrounding countryside. Padre Pio asked who he was and how he had entered the friary. The stranger introduced himself as Pietro Di Mauro. He had died there.
Pietro explained that he had died years earlier, in 1908, when the friary was still being used as a poorhouse. He had fallen asleep with a lit cigar, setting his mattress ablaze. The flames consumed his bed, and he died from the fire and smoke. And now, years later, here he was, sitting beside another fire.
But Pietro had not come to frighten Padre Pio. He had come to ask for help, explaining that he was suffering in purgatory and needed a Mass offered for his soul. Padre Pio promised to celebrate one for him the following morning.
According to the account, Pio then accompanied the stranger toward the entrance of the friary. Outside, the square lay beneath a blanket of snow, illuminated by the moon.
And there Pietro vanished.
What moves me about this encounter is not simply the appearance of a dead man. It is that he came seeking the kindness of another.
For Catholics, death does not necessarily mark the end of our responsibility to love one another. We pray for the dead because we believe our prayers can help them. And perhaps that is one of the most beautiful things about our strange faith. Even the dead are not beyond the reach of our love.
Blessed Richard of St. Ann and the Soul from Hell
Richard almost went to bed without praying that night. The evening had not been a particularly holy one. He had been drinking, carousing and had left a companion behind. But before retiring, he remembered his customary prayers to the Virgin Mary.
Perhaps it was when he reached those familiar words, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, that his thoughts returned to the friend he had left behind.
The hour of our death. He had no way of knowing how close those words were to the events of that night. Then he heard a knock.
According to the story, Richard awoke to a terrible pounding at his door. He rose to answer it, only to discover the very friend he had abandoned earlier that evening. But something was wrong. He told Richard that he was dead, that a devil had strangled him, and that his soul was now in hell.
Then he opened his cloak. His body was crawling with serpents. Flames moved between their slick bodies. Their scales glistened in the fire as they twisted and coiled, slipping beneath folds of skin, only to emerge again.
But the apparition had not come merely to frighten Richard. He had come with a warning. He told Richard that the same fate awaited him, had the Blessed Virgin not interceded on his behalf. Those few Hail Marys he had nearly neglected had mattered. Richard had been given another chance.
According to the account preserved by St. Alphonsus Liguori, Richard collapsed to the ground in tears, thanking Mary for her intercession. Then, somewhere in the darkness, a bell began to ring. It was the nearby Franciscan monastery, calling its brothers to Matins. Richard followed the sound.
Eventually, he would become a Franciscan himself, traveling as a missionary to Japan, where he died a martyr. The dead man had come with a warning. But Richard was still alive. And he still had time to change the direction of his life.
The Unbinding of Lazarus
These three stories are more than just strange tales of the dead returning to the living. They remind us that, as Catholics, we believe that those who have gone before us are not necessarily beyond the reach of our love.
The saints in heaven pray for us. We pray for the souls in purgatory. We remember them. And when they enter the kingdom, we trust that they, too, will remember us in prayer. Even the stories of damned souls appearing to the living serve as reminders that our choices have eternal consequences.
And maybe this is why I keep returning to one of the most famous dead men in Scripture: Lazarus of Bethany.
We all know the story. Christ stands before the tomb of his friend and weeps. Then he calls Lazarus out of the grave—and Lazarus comes. But he emerges still bound in burial cloths, his hands and feet wrapped, his face covered. And Jesus turns to those gathered around him and gives them a command:
“Untie him and let him go.” (Jn 11:44)
Christ calls Lazarus from the dead. But he asks the living to unbind him.
There are things that only God can do, and then there are things he asks us to do for one another, whether living or dead. To pray. To console. To warn. To reach toward someone still bound and help loosen what holds them.
Our faith is many things. Strange, certainly. Frightening, sometimes. But beneath all these extraordinary stories is something wonderfully human. We are all just walking each other home. Even death cannot make strangers of us.
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