Posted July 2, 2013
What most Catholics don’t know is that Mary said at Medjugorje that there are many forms of purgatory that extend beyond our traditional views of that transitional state of heaven-bound human souls. I feel that probably one of these “unrecognized” types of purgation hinted at by our Blessed Mother might be manifested, by God’s permission and sovereign design, in some of the entities that parapsychologists refer to as ghosts. (I’m not here referring to poltergeists or séance contacts, which are probably demons and /or disembodied evil human souls acting in consort with demons. (See my booklet, Poltergeists and Seven Types of Ghosts.)
These particular types of ghosts, (the ones that Kenneth McAll refers to as “bewildered souls”) are usually cognitively non-responsive to humans who encounter them; they differ from the communicative apparitions or wraiths with messages from the spirit world–as the classical biblical post-mortem Saul-Samuel encounter (See 1 Samuel Chapter 28).
I conjecture that they are souls who rebel against God’s plan for them to surrender their earthly life at their assigned time of death, and cling to this earth as if it were all that matters; God may grant their wish and leave their souls on earth as spirits for a time of pugation–to be “purged” of their worldly attachments by a purgatorial suffering in the form of unfulfillment, social isolation and confusion.
There is a place for our intercessory prayer for these souls in this type of purgatory, rather than practicing the stupid ghost-busting techniques of “ghost-hunters” and psychics.
This conjecture does not contravene any Catholic magisterial doctrine about purgatory or after-life existence of human souls, and it may be one of the “unrecognized forms” of purgatory that Mary was referring to at Medjugorje.
This observation is only one of many outcroppings of the ever expanding knowledge of demonology and/or spiritual warfare, and even eschatology.
I offer this prayer-focused conjecture for what it’s worth, with the thought of St. Paul found in 1 Cor. 15:58: “Nothing you do for the Lord–or in his name– is ever wasted.”
John H. Hampsch, cmf
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