1) Bl. Anne Catherine Emmerich: “No one could behold without trembling”
Bl. Anne Catherine Emmerich lived in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in the Holy Roman Empire. She was a mystic who claimed to have had visions of all sorts of spiritual things. Here is an excerpt of one of her visions of hell:
The exterior of Hell was appalling and
frightful; it was an immense, heavy-looking building, and the granite of
which it was formed, although black, was of metallic brightness; and
the dark and ponderous doors were secured with such terrible bolts that
no one could behold them without trembling.
Deep groans and cries of despair might be
plainly distinguished even while the doors were tightly closed; but, O,
who can describe the dreadful yells and shrieks which burst upon the
ear when the bolts were unfastened and the doors flung open; and, O, who
can depict the melancholy appearance of the inhabitants of this
wretched place!
All within it is, on the contrary,
close, confused, and crowded; every object tends to fill the mind with
sensations of pain and grief; the marks of the wrath and vengeance of
God are visible everywhere; despair, like a vulture, gnaws every heart,
and discord and misery reign around.
In the city of Hell nothing is
to be seen but dismal dungeons, dark caverns, frightful deserts, fetid
swamps filled with every imaginable species of poisonous and disgusting
reptile.
In Hell, perpetual scenes of wretched
discord, and every species of sin and corruption, either under the most
horrible forms imaginable, or represented by different kinds of dreadful
torments. All in this dreary abode tends to fill the mind with horror;
not a word of comfort is heard or a consoling idea admitted; the one
tremendous thought, that the justice of an all-powerful God inflicts on
the damned nothing but what they have fully deserved is the absorbing
tremendous conviction which weighs down each heart.
Vice appears in its own, grim disgusting colors, being stripped of the mask under which it is hidden in this
world, and the infernal viper is seen devouring those who have cherished
or fostered it here below. In a word, Hell is the temple of anguish and
despair…
2) St. Teresa of Avila: “On fire, and torn to pieces”
The great 16th century mystic and Doctor of the Church claims to have had this experience of hell:
The entrance seemed to be by a long
narrow pass, like a furnace, very low, dark, and close. The ground
seemed to be saturated with water, mere mud, exceedingly foul, sending
forth pestilential odors, and covered with loathsome vermin. At the end
was a hollow place in the wall, like a closet, and in that I saw myself
confined.
I felt a fire in my soul. My bodily
sufferings were unendurable. I have undergone most painful sufferings in
this life… yet all these were as nothing in comparison with what I felt
then, especially when I saw that there would be no intermission, nor
any end to them.
I did not see who it was that tormented
me, but I felt myself on fire, and torn to pieces, as it seemed to me;
and, I repeat it, this inward fire and despair are the greatest torments
of all.
I could neither sit nor lie down: there
was no room. I was placed as it were in a hole in the wall; and those
walls, terrible to look on of themselves, hemmed me in on every side. I
could not breathe. There was no light, but all was thick darkness.
I was so terrified by that vision – and
that terror is on me even now while I am writing – that though it took
place nearly six years ago, the natural warmth of my body is chilled by
fear even now when I think of it.
It was that vision that filled me with
the very great distress which I feel at the sight of so many lost souls,
especially of the Lutherans – for they were once members of the Church
by baptism – and also gave me the most vehement desires for the
salvation of souls; for certainly I believe that, to save even one from
those overwhelming torments, I would most willingly endure many deaths.
3) St. John Bosco: “Indescribable terror”
In 1868, St. John Bosco claimed to have had a dream about hell. His full narration is fairly long, so here is just a short excerpt:
As soon as I crossed its threshold, I
felt an indescribable terror and dared not take another step. Ahead of
me I could see something like an immense cave which gradually
disappeared into recesses sunk far into the bowels of the mountains.
They were all ablaze, but theirs was not an earthly fire with leaping
tongues of flames. The entire cave – walls, ceiling, floor, iron,
stones, wood, and coal – everything was a glowing white at temperatures
of thousands of degrees. Yet the fire did not incinerate, did not
consume. I simply can’t find words to describe the cavern’s horror.
My guide seized my hand, forced it
open, and pressed it against the first of the thousand walls. The
sensation was so utterly excruciating that I leaped back with a scream
and found myself sitting up in bed.
My hand was stinging and I kept rubbing
it to ease the pain. When I got up this morning I noticed that it was
swollen. Having my hand pressed against the wall, though only in a
dream, felt so real that, later, the skin of my palm peeled off.
Bear in mind that I have tried not to
frighten you very much, and so I have not described these things in all
their horror as I saw them and as they impressed me. We know that Our
Lord always portrayed Hell in symbols because, had He described it as it
really is, we would not have understood Him. No mortal can comprehend
these things.
4) Sr. Lucy of Fatima: “Shrieks and groans of pain and despair”
Sr. Lucy of Fatima isn’t a saint (she died recently, in 2005), but she was one of the visionaries of Fatima in the early 20th century, an approved apparition in the Church. As a part of that vision, she claims she saw hell:
We saw, as it were, a vast sea of fire. Plunged in this fire, we saw the demons and the souls [of the damned.
The latter were like transparent burning
embers, all blackened or burnished bronze, having human forms. They were
floating about in that conflagration, now raised into the air by the
flames which issued from within themselves, together with great clouds
of smoke. Now they fell back on every side like sparks in huge fires,
without weight or equilibrium, amid shrieks and groans of pain and
despair, which horrified us and made us tremble with fright (it must
have been this sight which caused me to cry out, as people say they
heard me).
The demons were distinguished [from the
souls of the damned] by their terrifying and repellent likeness to
frightful and unknown animals, black and transparent like burning coals.
5) St. Maria Faustyna Kowalska: “A place of great torture”
St. Maria Faustyna Kowalska, often known simply as St. Faustina, was a Polish nun who claimed to have a large number of mystical experiences in the 1930s. Here’s an excerpt from her diary about one of her visions:
Today I was led by an Angel to the chasms of hell. It is a place of great torture; how awesomely large and extensive it is!
The kinds of tortures I saw: the first
torture that constitutes hell is the loss of God; the second is
perpetual remorse of conscience; the third is that one’s condition will
never change; the fourth is the fire that will penetrate the soul
without destroying it – a terrible suffering, since it is a purely
spiritual fire, lit by God’s anger; the fifth torture is continual
darkness and a terrible suffocating smell, and, despite the darkness,
the devils and the souls of the damned see each other and all the evil,
both of others and their own; the sixth torture is the constant company
of Satan; the seventh torture is horrible despair, hatred of God, vile
words, curses and blasphemies.
Each soul undergoes terrible and
indescribable sufferings, related to the manner in which it has sinned.
There are caverns and pits of torture where one form of agony differs
from another.
But I noticed one thing: that most of the
souls there are those who disbelieved that there is a hell. When I came
to, I could hardly recover from the fright. How terribly souls suffer
there! (Diary of St. Faustina, 741)
excerpted from:http://churchpop.com/2015/10/28/5-saints-who-had-terrifying-visions-of-hell/
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