It’s a niggling mystery—niggling because international surveys indicate that well over 1.5 to 2 billion people worldwide believe in it.

We speak of reincarnation.

Those believers are largely in Hinduism, Buddhism, and the New Age.

But it’s not limited to them: Roughly thirty percentof U.S. adults express a belief that people will be reborn again and again in this world.

Interestingly, this belief is somewhat common even among individuals who identify with traditional Western faiths (such as certain Christian denominations or those who are religiously unaffiliated but spiritually inclined).

It seems to make sense, doesn’t it: that we keep coming back here to earth to work out what we haven’t yet accomplished?

Logical.

And also heretical.

The Bible and the vast majority of Christian and Jewish denoinations hold that we live on this planet once and then face the afterlife (in our unwavering belief, Heaven, hell, or purgatory).

The reason many believe in reincarfnation is because they don’t believe (or better said, haven’t been taught about) purgatory, where those aforementioned incompletions and imperfections are worked out. Understandably, they can’t see how a merciful God would condemn a person to one of just two places: the exquisitely joyous destination of Heaven or the unspeakably and eternal one of hell.

Another reason: alleged tesimonies.

An “extraordinary” case from India involves a boy named Toran “Titu” Singh, who, beginning at just eighteen months old, reportedly recalled a previous life in which he had a wife, children, and a radio shop in Agra — and had been murdered.

According to a 1989 investigation by researcher Antonia Mills, Titu identified the business as Suresh Radio. His family located the shop and discovered that its owner, Suresh Verma, had been shot dead in 1983.

When brought there, the boy reportedly recognized Verma’s relatives, identified a photograph of the murdered man as himself, and knew intimate family nicknames and details about the home and shop. Both families also reported striking similarities in personality.

Even more remarkably, Titu had a birthmark on his head reportedly corresponding to the location of Verma’s fatal bullet wound, a detail reported by India Today in 1988.

Skeptics suggest Titu may have absorbed information from newspaper accounts read by his father, although those reports did not contain all the details he allegedly knew. Questions also arose over conflicting birth records, while some researchers suggested unconscious memory or suggestive questioning as explanations.

Contrary to sensational online accounts, there is no solid evidence that Titu identified the murderer or helped solve the crime. Nevertheless, he reaffirmed his extraordinary childhood recollections in a 2024 interview, leaving one of India’s more intriguing alleged reincarnation cases unresolved.

Or does it?

Many are enraptured (or is the word “ensnared”) by such accounts don’t take into account the pervasive presence, while we are on earth, of spirits, including the deceased and demons.

Both could convey such details to a living person, especially a youngster.

The devil is “The Great Deceiver.” Meanwhile—and controversially—are those who believe earthbound spirits of the deceased can possessed the living, making it especially difficult to cast them out (because while demons must obey commands in the Name of Jesus, spirits of the deceased—or so goes this belief—still have free will and do not).

Several children have reportedly described memories of dying in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. One of the most striking cases involves an American boy named Cade, whose story appeared on the television series callwed—ironically—”The Ghost Inside My Child.”

At just three years old, a boy named Cade began experiencing terrifying nightmares involving falling from a great height, the Statue of Liberty, and losing a leg. He also drew pictures of two skyscrapers with a person falling from them, although he had been born years after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

For our discernment. Yes: deep mysticism. Not the stuff of Sunday homilies.

But perhaps Catholics need to make such issues plain. The Catechism (1013) says plainly, “When ‘the single course of our earthly life’ is completed, we shall not return to other earthly lives: ‘It is appointed for men to die once.’ There is no ‘reincarnation’ after death.”

The Virgin of Medjugorje said the same in messages during her early appearances at this place that has been granted a Nihil Obstat.

Nowhere—in all the hundreds of her apparitions through history—has she confirmed anything but our single journey on this planet.

[resources: The Spirits Around Us]

+