The Souls in Purgatory appeared to Santa Margarita de Cortona and begged her to offer all her suffering to reduce her pain and anguish. In particular, there were two merchants who had been killed on the way and died suddenly without having made restitution to those with whom they had dealt unjustly, cheating them out of life. Death had come so unexpectedly that they had not had time to go to a priest and confess their sins.
They said that only by the Grace of God with His Merciful Compassion, and with the intercession of His Most Precious Mother, they were able to make a last act of contrition, before taking their last breath and saving themselves from eternal damnation. Now they begged him to help them, since their suffering was unbearable, to pay for the wrongs they had committed against the people who had trusted them. They told Margaret that they would have no relief until these debts were paid on earth. Would she go to her families and ask them to make peace with those they had deceived, giving them back all the money they had wrongfully taken from them? Having communicated to our Saint where she could find them, the souls of the merchants disappeared. Margaret fulfills her wishes and the souls never reappeared.
Margaret not only showed undying love and compassion for all the poor souls in Purgatory, but also with great passion for her deceased mother and father, the father who had rejected her and her son, and her less than loving stepmother who had shown so little charity towards her. . She never stopped offering all her suffering for them; she sacrificed the sleep she so badly needed; she gave to the Lord her dear and precious Communions and all the Masses in which she had participated with the greatest reverence for her deliverance from Purgatory. The Lord listened to his little bride; He appeared to her and declared, because of her pleas, not only had the immeasurable period of suffering lessened, but that her parents would have had to endure, through their pleas, they had been released from Purgatory and were in Paradise. .
Was Margarita compassionate and affectionate with the Poor Souls in Purgatory, offering all her mortification and suffering for their liberation, because she felt like such a great sinner? We do not know the most intimate regions of her heart; We only know that when she died she saw an Army of Souls that had been released from Purgatory forming a guard of honor, a royal escort to Heaven. On his deathbed, he had been entranced with ecstasy and when he briefly regained consciousness, he shared with those around his bed how the Lord had shown him a precious army of saints whom he said, through their prayers and mortification, were with Him and His Father in Paradise.
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