ST MAGDALEN DE PAZZI SAW LIARS HAVE BOTH FIRE AND FREEZE, TWO OPPOSITES LIKE LIES AND TRUTH

My piece on St. Magdalen de Pazzi (which concerned the time she saw her brother in Purgatory)  whetted my appetite for the full account of her tour of Purgatory. 

St Magdalen was a Florentine Carmelite. One evening Magdalen and some other nuns were enjoying a stroll in their garden. Suddenly, the other sisters saw that Magdalen's attention was absolutely absorbed. They did not see what she saw, but Purgatory opened in front of Magdalen and she was invited to see all the quarters of purification and the other nuns heard her consent, "Yes, I will go." The other nuns saw her face turn white, she started to wring her hands and her back bent under the burden of beholding the bastilles of the Holy Souls. She saw the barracks in breathtaking detail.  She was taken to where children and simple souls are detained, they mainly expiated their sins through ice and fire. These simple and child-like souls did not have sufficient ability to reason or to amass knowledge when they were alive, and so their torments were comparatively less. They had their guardian angels for company which cheered them up immensely. But they also saw the hideous forms of demons, the experience of such hellish ugliness was a sore suffering for these simple souls.

Magdalen was taken to a new wing where she saw souls being pierced by swords and being cut to pieces, which caused her to cry out, "Oh, how horrible is this place...Who, O my God, are the victims of these cruel tortures?" She was instructed that these were the souls of hypocrites, who when they lived they had spoken as one person and acted as another person, so in like manner they were being carved into separate pieces as their conduct and speech had been separate in life. She moved on and was shown a great congregation of souls who looked crushed, and she saw they were ground down under a press. She was led to understand that these souls were those who had given themselves over to impatience and disobedience. She was then brought to the lair for liars, and she called out, "Liars are confined in a  place in the vicinity of Hell and their sufferings are exceedingly great. Molten lead is poured into their mouths, I see them burn, and at the same time tremble with cold." Thus for their dishonesty, liars are subject to two forms of torture: burning and freezing simultaneously, in the same way they first shunned truth and invented a second story.

Next Magdalen was taken to the place where souls who sinned in weakness languished in fire. The sight of them corrected a notion she had nursed: she had thought they would suffer like the simple souls who had sinned through ignorance, but as she said to them, "You burn with an intenser fire."

On she went to the part where the materialistic souls were held, the souls of the avaricious who sought the decaying goods of the world, and they provoked in her pity, "What blindness...to seek a perishable fortune! Those whom formerly riches could not sufficiently satiate, are here gorged with torments. They are smelted like metal in the furnace." She was led then to the imprisonment of the impure, and she saw them in so sordid and septic a squalor that she was induced to vomit.

From then she was led to a place of darkness, the den of proud souls. For their desire to shine like stars when they were alive, they were like ones hidden in mud. Magdalen commented, "Those who wished to shine before men, now they are condemned to live in this frightful obscurity."

She then beheld the lake of molten lead where she saw the souls of those who had been ungrateful to God. Their ingratitude had ravaged their piety and made it impossible for them to become holy.

Lastly, she was shown souls who had not been owned by a particular sin or particular vice, but who had committed all kinds of petty misdemeanors and they were given a small sampling of the punishments from all the vices.

I find there is a happy marriage between the vision afforded St Frances of Rome, and the revelations given to Magdalen in her tour of Purgatory. Once we have grasped that which Frances saw, we can graduate to a better, fuller understanding of Purgatory through the insights given us by Magdalen. While Frances was given an overview of the places, the three levels, and saw the lakes of fire and of molten lead, Magdalen was given a series of deeper visions into these same places and of the souls who are detained in each cell and why. There are many meeting points between our lives and the various states of the Holy Souls.  As for the souls who were bruised under the press, who were ground down, it is interesting that the origin of the word "contrite" means to be ground down, or crushed, and every time we go to confess our sins, we have to have contrition, and develop sorrow when we put ourselves under the press of our conscience. The purification of the proud was to be in a pit of obscurity, and often in life the person who wants to shine bright and eclipse everyone else is rejected and thrust into the shadows by the same people they wish to impress. That which stays with me is the purification that met liars. The two opposites of hot and cold are imposed on the liar at the same time, in the same way that during their lives the liar brought to bear the two opposites of truth and lies. In this life a liar often has to cope with the pain of truth, and the pain of their lie at the same time, the feeling of being hot under the collar when they fib, and then the cold humiliation when they are found out.

When her vision ended, Magdalen implored the Lord not to show her the barracks of the Holy Souls again, she had found the experience too heartbreaking.  She was overheard asking Our Lord as to why He had given her this vision, and after she heard His answer, she exclaimed, "Ah! I see, You wished to give me the knowledge of Your infinite sanctity, and to make me detest more and more the least stain of sin, which is so abominable in Your eyes."

My source for the above is Father Cepari's remarkable biography of St Magdalen which you may read here. The analysis offered throughout and at the end is my own.