THAT living human beings can rectify the pain and suffering of those who are dead is a tenet of faith that establishes one of the most consoling and living bonds between us and those who are gone from this world. We are social creatures and exist with the dead in an economy of salvation, in which we can provide mutual aid. It is not true, as is rumored today, that good people automatically go to heaven or even achieve heaven at all. We should at the best presume that those who are dead need our help and that, from those who are in heaven, we need their help. That these ideas are extremely offensive to many people in our world who have a profound distaste for the supernatural because they are immersed in the things of the world does not detract from their truth or splendor.

A man went to a friend’s house at midnight, asking him to lend him three loaves of bread, because he had nothing to set before a friend of his who had come off his journey to visit him. We may easily imagine, that this petition, at midnight, was very inopportune to the friend, who with his children, had retired to rest for the night; he, therefore, refused the petitioner, in these words: “Trouble me not, the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot rise and give thee.”–Luke, 11:7. But he does not go away. On the contrary, he continues knocking the longer and louder, and because of his importunity, his friend rises from his couch more unwilling than willing, opens the door and gives him the three loaves. This petition, “Friend, lend me three loaves,” the souls detained in the prison of purgatory direct to us on this day of All Souls, for they are certainly in greater distress, and need our help far more, than the petitioner mentioned in the Gospel. They cry out to us at midnight, in the dark night, i. e., from the dismal prison in which they are detained; they call us their friends, and ask us to lend them three loaves of bread. Let us contemplate this cry for help of the suffering souls, and reflect upon it word for word.

— “The Cry of the Souls in Purgatory to Us,” Rev. John Evangelist Zollner, 1884

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