"He said, 'You tell everybody you know and everybody you don't know that there's an awesome Heaven waiting for them when they die.' "

LoL :ape:

I have thought of these stories also, and made up my mind I will not judge the soul of anyone, but I do feel that when a person who is on the wrong path and will eventually be damned. On their death God shows the person a little bit of what he has/will lose.  Think about it, these people that come back were never judged, they just saw perhaps a bit of heaven.
 
It doesn't seem Just that God would take a few people here and dare and tell them all about what to do to save their soul, He has given a Church for that. "Seek and you will find." Again, I have never heard of any near death experience where the person was being judged by Jesus and lived to tell about it.

Sometime you will read where a person sees his/her life whizz by then they come back a changed person, searching at times for that void, that we all experience one time or another.  God might have given them a second chance, perhaps through the prayers of another.

Yet I do think there is a  :devil2: influence, especially when I will read where a movie star recently died and comes back to a dear friend and says, "I'm okay."  No mention of Purgatory, no mention of asking for prayers, just "I'm okay."

True Story:  Many years ago, I had a dear friend who was married to an agnostic.  I introduced her to CMRI, she was attending the novus ordo, as I was also a short time before this.   For several years she followed tradition, wore her scapular faithfully, but moved to another state  and we lost touch.

Years later I heard from her daughter she passed away, however I was told  she died with her scapular on, although her daughter confessed to me that her mother, my friend was confused about tradition/novus ordo. Got the feeling when she moved she went back to her neighborhood church.

 After a few more years passed her daughter called me quite upset, it seems my friend's agnostic husband called his step daughter and told her about an experience he had that night. His wife appeared to him and begged him to pray for her.  He got out of bed and knelt on the floor while she was still there begging him for prayers and telling over and over how cold she was, she was so cold.  She begged him for prayers, and he stayed on the floor kneeling afraid to look up, so afraid was he, he said.   He prayed till morning, then called the daughter, and she called me.  I told her I would have a Mass offered and gave her the address of CMRI, to also have continued Masses offered.
 
Her dad, spoke to some friends of this, and they told him to get rid of all her possessions he still had, and so he did.  

I never heard back.  

None of this is rocket science, although it may seem that complicated.

An earnest investigation of mystical phenomenae (and not all things called that are even close) as studied and confirmed by the Church over many centuries, such as the magnificent discussion from Fr. Adolph Tanqueray's "The Spiritual Life" (TAN has an edition, I am told) will clear up many questions.

99.99999% of any and all such absurd claims are pure bunk, at best.

That is not to say that aesthetes and other exemplary Catholics do NOT ever receive communications from the Great Beyond, nor are the young exempt from any such favored possibility. However, it is only the Church Herself that has authority to confirm or condemn such claims.

She has done so and will continue to do so. And no one else may. Period.

The number of heretics, bigots, idiots and others who have claimed a "divine mandate" have caused revolutions, wars, schisms, mayhem, and in cases like Medjugoogo, criminal enterprises to cash in, big time, for centuries.

And from this ridiculous swirl of madness not a few traditionalists have not been found exempt, either. A prime example is the infamous "Poem of____" by Valtorta, an heretical concoction still in print despite the efforts of the Vatican, going back decades, to utterly suppress its mad fiction.