THE HANDPRINT OF A HOLY SOUL BURNT IN WOOD AS WITH A RED-HOT IRON

160 years ago this November, the tiny hand of a Holy Soul burnt a door in a convent. 

The Holy Soul's name was Sister Teresa Gesta. She had been a nun in the community of the Franciscan Tertiaries in Foligno, near Assisi, Italy. 

Sister Teresa succumbed to sudden death of stroke on November 4th, 1859. Exactly 12 days later, a certain Sister Anna Felicia was outside the sacristy, about to go in, when she heard sobs and wailing come from inside. Sister Anna Felicia hurried to open the door and found it empty but still she heard wailing, and she exclaimed, "Jesus! Mary! WHAT CAN THAT BE?" Hardly had she asked the question, when she clearly heard Sister Teresa sorrowfully lament, "Oh, my God, how I suffer!" The sacristy become dusky with heavy smoke, out of which Sister Teresa appeared and when she walked over to the door, she cried out, "BEHOLD A PROOF OF THE MERCY OF GOD" as she planted her hand on the door and left a handprint brunt in the wood as though with a burning hot iron. 

When this scorched sign or her smoldering soul was handprinted on the door, Sister Teresa promptly disappeared.  Sister Anna Felicia was petrified, and she cried out for help. One nun came to assist, then another nun and then the entire convent of sisters flocked around her. They were met with the smoky smell of singed wood. Sister Anna Felicia recounted that Sister Teresa had visited from Purgatory and pointed out the small handprint on the door, which they all recognized as the hand of Sister Teresa, because her hands had been curiously tiny. The sisters were seized with an urgency to pray for poor Sister Teresa, and they flocked into the chapel where they prayed all night, and then the next morning they all received the Eucharist for her. In the coming days, word of Sister Teresa's burnt hand emblazoned on wood spread like wildfire, and the nuns and priests of many religious communities in and around Assisi prayed for Sister Teresa's soul. 

On the third day after Sister Teresa's first apparition, she came again to Sister Anna Felicia, and appeared as a balloon of brilliant light. Sister Teresa was ecstatic "I died on a Friday, the day of the Passion and, behold on a Friday, I enter into eternal glory!"  Before she parted for Heaven, she advised Sister Anna Felicia, "Be strong to bear the cross, be courageous to suffer, love poverty." 

An inquiry was held days after the apparitions of Sister Teresa, and they opened the crypt where her body rested and found that the handprint on the door matched exactly with the hand of the dead nun.  

What impressed me about this account is that it took merely 3 days of intense prayer for Sister Teresa to be delivered from Purgatory, albeit many people were praying for her: when it comes to delivering a soul from Purgatory, it is not a matter of how much time we spend praying, as how much prayer is offered. When I first heard this account of a nun rising up out Purgatory with a burning hand, I instantly thought she must have used her hand to give someone an unfair beating. But I was mistaken. The first time she appeared, she made known that the reason for her great suffering was that when she was sacristan, she flouted some rules and breached her vow of poverty.  Among these historical accounts which are my concern this month (November is the month devoted to the Holy Souls) a common motif is that Our Lord punishes priests and nuns much more severely than He does laypeople. There was more than a hint of this in the vision given St Frances of Rome who saw a priest being doused in the flames of the lower level of Purgatory for his gluttony.