In short, this second view is that of St. Catharine of Genoa, which comes home to our hearts, as we read her treatise, with joyful conviction—giving new conceptions of that holy realm of pain.
This treatise is not the production of human vanity. St. Catharine only wrote by the express wish of her spiritual director, who fathomed her genius and knew her familiarity with the secrets of the Most High. It is, in the estimation of judges of the highest authority, one of the most astonishing and admirable productions of mystical theology, says M. de Bussierre. And it has been approved of by the Holy See, and by the Sacred Congregation of Rites.
It was one of the favorite books of St. Francis de Sales, with whose spirit it is so greatly in harmony, and he calls the authoress a seraph.
And Faber styles her, "The Great Doctress of Purgatory."
St. Catharine was contemporary with Christopher Columbus, being born a few years later in the same city. And she was the grand-niece of Pope Innocent IV., who first gave, authoritatively, the name of Purgatory to the Intermediate State, and who was, like her, of the noble house of the Fieschi.
The French author so often quoted says: "There are many expressions in this work to which a forced meaning is not to be given. St. Catharine represents a soul as strictly united to God as it can be without being absorbed in the divinity. But she does not annihilate individuality. She does not teach pantheism. She only expresses the doctrine of St. Paul, 'In ipso vivimus, et movemur, et sumus:' 'In him we live, and we move, and we are.'"
How she makes us long for that union, and welcome all that hastens it! We would join with all our earth-worn heart in that "liturgy of hallowed pain." "O world!" we cry with Faber—"O weary, clamorous, sinful world! who would not break away, if he could, like an uncaged dove, from thy perilous toils and unsafe pilgrimage, and fly with joy to the lowest place in that most pure, most safe, most holy land of suffering and of sinless love?"
(Hector Vernaccia, who first published the works of St. Catharine of Genoa, wrote the following preface to her Treatise on Purgatory:)
"The soul of Catharine, still clad in the flesh, was plunged in the furnace of God's ardent love, which consumed and purified her from every imperfection, so that at the end of her life she was fitted to pass at once into the presence of God, the only object of her affection. This interior fire made her comprehend that the souls in purgatory are placed there to be purified from the rust and stain of the sins which they had not expiated on earth. Swallowed up in this divine and purging fire, she acquiesced in the will of God, rejoicing in all his love wrought in her; she clearly understood what must be the state of the souls in purgatory, and thus wrote thereof:"