The Museum of the Souls in Purgatory, Rome

OVERVIEW

The Museo delle anime del Purgatorio is a display of documents and objects held to prove the existence of Purgatory and of the souls of the dead who wait there, seeking the prayers of the living. It is in the sacristy of the church of the Sacro Cuore del Suffragio on the Lungotevere Prati in Rome, entered by a door in the right-hand nave, a few hundred metres from Castel Sant'Angelo.

HISTORY

Victor Jouët, a missionary from Marseille, founded in 1893 an association for the suffrage of the souls in Purgatory and built the church on land he bought on the Lungotevere. In 1897 a fire devastated a small chapel of Our Lady of the Rosary; among the scorch marks behind the altar Jouët believed he saw the face of a human being with an unhappy expression — the soul of someone in Purgatory trying to reach the living, as the English article puts it, 'impressed on the wall'. He travelled through Italy, France, Belgium and Germany collecting similar evidence, and displayed it as the 'Christian Museum of the Afterlife', with the blessing of Pius X. After Jouët's death in 1912, Father Gilla Vincenzo Gremigni in 1921 reduced the display to items that could be held 'indisputably authentic', with less publicity.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

Among the items: a prayer book with the print of a hand on a page; burn marks on the habit and shirt of Isabella Fornari, abbess of the Poor Clares of Todi, 1731; a pillowcase scorched by the soul of a nun who died of tuberculosis in 1894, appearing to a sister to ask for prayers; marks left on a widower's cap by his dead wife; a photocopy of a partly burnt ten-lire note, one of thirty said to have been left in 1920 at the monastery of San Leonardo in Montefalco by the spirit of a dead priest wanting Masses said; and the nightshirt of Joseph Leleux of Wodecq, its sleeve burnt with the hand of his mother, dead in 1762, who appeared to him in 1789 to rebuke his dissolute life. The articles describe these as the museum presents them; neither cites any examination of the objects. Recorded as a collection and a belief.

VISITING

In the sacristy of the Sacro Cuore del Suffragio, Lungotevere Prati 12, entered from the right-hand nave; about a kilometre from metro line A.