What is the soul, and how can we know or prove that it exists?
Robert Sungenis answers that he does not know what the soul is in itself: it is invisible, part of our being, can be marred by sin and leaves the body at death. He holds that its existence cannot be proved scientifically and is known only because the Church teaches it, and that the same mystery applies to angels, who are spirits.
A viewer asks what a soul is and how we know or prove that it exists.
Answer
This is another thing that is difficult to understand. I do not know what a soul is; I could not tell you. I know it is invisible, I know it is part of my whole being, I know I can harm it or mar it with my sin, I know it can be dead in the sense of having no relationship with God when I am in mortal sin. I know the qualities that go into the soul, but I do not know what the soul is in itself. We say it is a spiritual essence, but who knows what a spiritual essence is? Can a spiritual essence see, smell, hear, and feel, and if so, how? I could not tell you, and I could not even tell you that I have a soul unless the church taught me, because that is where the information comes from. Put a man who never heard the gospel under scientific scrutiny and ask him to prove he has a soul, and he cannot. We only know it by the information given to our intellect. I know that when my physical body dies, my soul leaves the body because it no longer has a living entity to be one with; even demon spirits look for a living human body to inhabit, not a dead one. But how to describe that with pencil and paper, I could not tell you, and neither can anybody else. The same is true of angels; they are spirits, and they can assume human form for a purpose.