For more than sixty years, a humble seamstress in the Austrian Alps insisted that the dead came to visit her. Maria Simma (1915–2004) of Sonntag never sought fame, yet her reported encounters with the souls in Purgatory drew letters from around the world and gave a tender, human face to one of the Church's quietest doctrines. Her testimony is not binding teaching, but it echoes an ancient Catholic conviction: that the living and the dead remain bound together in charity.
A Quiet Life in the Vorarlberg Mountains
Maria Simma was born on February 2, 1915, in the mountain village of Sonntag, in Austria's Vorarlberg region, the second child of a poor farming family. From childhood she felt drawn to religious life, but her frail health led three different convents to turn her away. Rather than abandon her vocation, she chose to live it as a single laywoman, supporting herself by sewing and tending a small garden, and giving her remaining hours to prayer.
She remained in her modest mountain chalet for the whole of her long life, never marrying and never accepting money for her spiritual work. By the time of her death on March 16, 2004, she had become known internationally, yet those who visited her described the same plainness that marked her entire existence: a woman of the soil who spoke of the next world with disarming simplicity.
The Visits Begin
By her own account, Maria's unusual apostolate began one night in 1940, when she was twenty-five. A man appeared, pacing silently in her room. Frightened, she sought the counsel of her parish priest, who advised her not to fear but to ask the soul what it wanted. The figure requested that three Masses be offered for him, and then departed.
In those early years the visits were rare, perhaps two or three a year, clustered around November, the Church's traditional month of prayer for the dead. From 1954 onward, she said, the encounters became frequent and continued for the rest of her life. She always maintained a crucial distinction: she never summoned anyone. The souls came only by God's permission, and she warned repeatedly that séances and spiritism are forbidden and dangerous, never genuine contact with the faithful departed.
What the Souls Reportedly Revealed
According to Maria, the souls described Purgatory not as a place of despair but of purifying love, with many degrees of suffering corresponding to how much cleansing each soul still needed. Even amid genuine pain, she said, the souls retain hope and joy, consoled by the Blessed Virgin, because they are certain of eventually reaching Heaven. Many, she reported, actually desire this purification, unwilling to stand before God while still stained.
When asked why souls go to Purgatory, she pointed less to dramatic crimes than to ordinary failures of love: hardness of heart, hostility, slander, and sins against charity toward one's neighbor. One young man who died while rescuing others, she recounted, needed only three Masses, because, in the words she attributed to him, "charity covers a multitude of sins."
The complaint she heard most often, she said, was abandonment. The dead are quickly forgotten by the living, who offer comfortable memorials but few prayers. She likened even a small prayer offered for them to a cool drink of water given to a traveler dying of thirst in the desert.
How the Living Can Help
The means of helping the holy souls that Maria described are precisely those the Church has always recommended. Foremost among them is the Holy Mass, which she called the greatest possible aid, since it makes present the one sacrifice of Christ. After the Mass she placed the Rosary and the Stations of the Cross, devotions woven through the Passion and the intercession of Our Lady.
Beyond formal prayer, she emphasized personal sacrifice. No offering was too small to matter: a fast, a patiently borne hardship, an act of self-denial quietly given for the dead. She also pointed to indulgences, the Church's application of Christ's superabundant mercy, and to almsgiving and works of mercy performed on behalf of the suffering souls. Among the great intercessors, she named the Blessed Virgin Mary above all, followed by Saint Joseph, the angels, and the saints to whom a person was devoted in life.
"Get Us Out of Here!" and the Interviews
Maria Simma's testimony reached a wide audience chiefly through interviews. The French religious Sister Emmanuel Maillard produced a short, widely circulated booklet, The Amazing Secret of the Souls in Purgatory, drawn from conversations with her. A fuller account appeared in Get Us Out of Here!, the fruit of more than thirty interviews conducted over roughly five years by Nicky Eltz and published in 2002.
In these books Maria answers, with candid plainness, hundreds of questions about death, judgment, suffering, and salvation. Her local pastors testified to her ordinary holiness, noting the streams of letters she received and her refusal of any payment. The interview format keeps the focus where she always placed it: not on herself, but on the forgotten dead and the duty of the living to pray for them.
The Catholic Doctrine of Purgatory
Whatever one makes of Maria Simma's private experiences, the doctrine they illustrate is firm Catholic teaching. The Catechism (paragraphs 1030–1032) defines Purgatory as the final purification of those who die in God's grace and friendship but remain imperfectly purified, a state "entirely different from the punishment of the damned." It affirms the ancient practice of praying for the dead.
The Church formulated this teaching most precisely at the Councils of Florence and Trent. Trent's twenty-fifth session declared that Purgatory exists and that the souls detained there are helped by the prayers of the faithful and, above all, by the Sacrifice of the Altar. Maria's reported messages add no new dogma; they restate, in vivid form, what the Church already holds.
A Word on Discernment
The Church draws a careful line between public revelation, which closed with the death of the last Apostle, and private revelation, which may genuinely come from God yet never adds to the deposit of faith. Even approved private revelations, the Catechism teaches, do not demand the assent of faith; their role is to help the faithful live the Gospel more fully in a particular age.
Maria Simma's experiences have not received a formal Church judgment declaring them supernatural. They enjoyed the encouragement of her parish priests and align closely with settled doctrine, but they remain in the realm of private testimony, to be weighed with prudence. The proper response to Maria's story is not credulity or sensationalism but the very thing she urged: to pray for the dead.
Sources & Further Reading
- MysticsOfTheChurch.com — Maria Simma: Visits from Souls in Purgatory
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1030–1032 (vatican.va)
- EWTN — Twenty-Fifth Session of the Council of Trent
