Echos from the Beyond: Purgatory and Catholic Communication with the Dead
A paper to be presented at the Western Society for French History, October 2003
Lynn L. Sharp
ABSTRACT
Despite the strands of secularization that ran throughout nineteenth-century France,
religion remained central to understandings of life and death. Recent religious history
has complicated the story of secularization, exploring the ways that religion remained
important to those outside the Church and the ways the Church reacted to changes in
politics and social values. One reaction by the religious elite, including urban,
seminary-trained priests, was the attempt to eradicate "pagan" or popular beliefs
surviving in religious practices. One strain of these practices dealt with the activities
of the dead, how they lived after death as well as how they might encroach on the life of
the living. Even as the Catholic Church strove to eradicate many forms of popular
"superstition," however, one area sustained ideas of communication between the dead
and the living, imagining direct intervention by the dead on the living world.
This was the belief in purgatory. This paper uses the Echo du Purgatoire, and the
Libérateur des âmes, both popular catholic periodicals in the latter half of the
nineteenth century to explore popular belief in purgatory. It looks also at Frederick William
Faber's All for Jesus, (1853) which argued for extensive communion with souls in
purgatory, and the catholic reaction thereto, to explore the popular belief in purgatory
and the ability to pierce the veil of death. Comparing three threads: official catholic
ideas; popular catholic practice; and finally the burgeoning spiritist movement; it will ask
in what ways the vision of the soul was changing in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Both popular Catholicism and popular spiritism continued to imagine the lives led by the dead,
the worlds awaiting the living. This tendency to imagine the beyond helped lead to the birth
of purgatory in the late middle ages, as described by Jacques Le Goff. "The inception,
elaboration, and dissemination of this doctrine depended crucially on the imagination."1
This paper explores how the nineteenth-century imagination constructed its own version of
purgatory, including the visions of punishment offered by Catholics and of progress offered
by spiritists. The paper will discuss whether catholic ideas of purgatory changed in reaction
to spiritist visions of the afterlife and whether popular visions of the soul itself underwent
a transformation in reaction to dominant ideas of science and progress.
1. Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, tr. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 360.
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Copyright 2003, Lynn L. Sharp
revised: 18 September 2003