“The Pope has said that hell does not exist…”
“Whaaaat?”
“Just as you hear it: the Pope said it, so you can see that the Church says one thing today and another tomorrow….”
Similar conversations must have occurred hundreds of times, and I must have witnessed at least ten of them.
It is not that it was not evident to me from the first moment that this could not be true; but I was intrigued to know whether these were simply invented words put into the Pope’s mouth, or merely a misinterpretation of them.
After investigating a little, I found that the catechesis in which the Pope supposedly denied the existence of hell (Hell as the definitive rejection of God, by John Paul II) was published on www.apologeticacatolica.org, and that I had read it at least more than a dozen times. Did it deny the existence of hell? Nowhere.
Several years later, after His Holiness John Paul II had died and been succeeded by His Holiness Benedict XVI, I found that several newspapers began publishing news items such as these: “the Pope was resurrecting hell”, “the Pope opens hell”, whose only intention was to make people believe that Pope Benedict XVI’s teaching was opposed to that of Pope John Paul II.
Recently I saw an opportunity to address the subject when a reader of my blog (a Jehovah’s Witness) arrived “armed” with the argument, like a soldier with a wooden rifle.
To analyze the argument I will reproduce some excerpts taken from the Web on the matter:
“John Paul II, the previous Pope, was assailed by doubts. So much so that he dared to correct thoroughly, and in the opposite direction, the traditional Catholic concept of hell. Heaven, the Polish Pope then said, ‘is not a physical place among the clouds. Hell is not a place either, but the situation of one who turns away from God.’ On July 28, 1999, during an audience, John Paul II declared: ‘The images of the Bible must be rightly interpreted. Rather than a place, hell is the situation of one who freely and definitively turns away from God’.”
He almost went so far as to say, like Jean-Paul Sartre, “hell is other people.” Specialists in Vatican matters said at the time that John Paul II wanted to dispense with hell in order to comply with the Second Vatican Council in the sense of aggiornamento, bringing the Church closer to the times, taking into account that 60 percent of Italian Catholics claim to believe in Jesus Christ, but not in hell.
The Pope opens hell, by Juan Antonio Monroy (article published in Protestante Digital)
“About eight years ago, exactly in 1999, Pope John Paul II stated that hell did not exist, to the relief of all those people who have been real devils in this world. Now his successor, Benedict XVI, says that we must recover the sense of the infernal in order, in this way, to fight against the lack of morality and the modernity that is invading us like a terrible epidemic.”
Article “Hell: today it exists and tomorrow it does not, according to the whim of the Pope of the day,” by an unknown author.
Comments like the previous ones abound on the Web, with different levels of misinformation.
The root of the problem
Before entering fully into the subject, it is important to look a little more deeply at the Church’s teaching regarding the existence of hell.
The official Catechism of the Catholic Church says:
“CCC 1033 We cannot be united with God unless we freely choose to love him. But we cannot love God if we sin gravely against him, against our neighbor or against ourselves: ‘He who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him’ (1 Jn 3:15). Our Lord warns us that we shall be separated from him if we fail to meet the serious needs of the poor and the little ones who are his brethren (cf. Mt 25:31-46). To die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God’s merciful love means remaining separated from him for ever by our own free choice. This state of definitive self-exclusion from
communion with God and the blessed is called ‘hell’.”
Later the Catechism continues:
CCC 1035 The teaching of the Church affirms the existence of hell and its eternity. Immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into hell, where they suffer the punishments of hell, “eternal fire” (cf. DS 76; 409; 411; 801; 858; 1002; 1351; 1575; SPF 12). The chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God, in whom alone man can possess the life and happiness for which he was created and for which he longs.
From the above it follows that whoever is in hell suffers the infernal punishments: the pain of loss (eternal deprivation of the beatific vision) and the pain of sense (sensible torment). It is important to realize that although the Catechism (approved precisely by John Paul II) mentions both infernal punishments, it emphasizes that the principal one is not sensible torment, but the pain of loss. Father Carlos Buela also explains this in his article “A Light Hell”:
“The pain of loss is the essential punishment of hell.
If with the most tropical imagination and the most feverish heart we were to imagine the most refined and incredible tortures, the most frightful pains of sense ever conceived, and if we were even to leave far behind the baroque imagery about hell, Chinese torture, and modern torturers with their refined techniques, if hell had all those sensible torments, even raised to the nth power, but if there were no pain of loss, hell would not be hell but rather paradise, since God would be seen. On the contrary, if in hell there were no pain of sense, but there were deprivation of the sight of God, hell would be hell and as unbearable as one that had the most dreadful and horrible punishments inflicted by creatures.”
This is nothing new, for this is how the Fathers of the Church have understood it for centuries, and a similar explanation was received from the pen of Saint John Chrysostom more than a millennium ago:
“The double punishment of hell: fire and deprivation of God
Apparently there is here only one punishment, that of being burned by fire; nevertheless, if we examine it carefully, we shall see that there are two, because the one who is burned is at the same time banished forever from the kingdom of God. And this punishment is more serious than the first. I know that many fear only the fire of hell, but I do not hesitate to affirm that the loss of eternal glory is more bitter than the fire itself. Now, that we cannot express this in words is nothing strange, for neither do we know the nature of eternal goods so as to be able to realize fully the misfortune of being deprived of them…. Certainly, hell and the punishment suffered there are unbearable. Nevertheless, even if you put a thousand hells before me, you would tell me nothing comparable to the loss of that blessed glory, to the misfortune of being hated by Christ, of having to hear from his mouth, ‘I do not know you’, of being accused by him because we saw him hungry and did not give him food. It would be better for a thousand thunderbolts to burn us than to see that meek face rejecting us, and those serene eyes unable to bear looking at us.”
John Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew 23,8 BAC 141, 489-491
This is what Pope John Paul II emphasized in his catechesis when he said “Rather than a place, hell indicates the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy”, words that neither deny that hell exists, nor that it is a place, and much less that the damned suffer the pain of sense.
Illustrating this would seem unnecessary because a careful reading of the Pope’s words would suffice to dispel any doubt; even so, it will be prudent to offer a few examples.
If someone said: “Messi, more than a player, is a football star”, could it be understood that Messi ceases to be a player because he is a football star? Or should it rather be understood that, more than denying the first statement (that Messi is a player), the speaker is emphasizing the second (that he is a star…)?
If someone said “Cancún, more than an excellent tourist destination, is a paradise”, could it be understood that we cannot do tourism in Cancún? Or should we understand that the second part of the sentence (“it is a paradise”) highlights the first (“it is an excellent tourist destination”) at a superlative level?
If today the Pope himself declared: “Christ, more than a man, was God”, could it be understood that the Pope is denying the hypostatic union of the Person of Christ? Or should we understand, just as sound Catholic doctrine teaches, that Christ does not cease to be man because he is God?
Exactly the same happens with the Pope’s words: he neither denies that hell exists nor intends to define whether hell is or is not a place (which is, in the end, irrelevant). Thus, even if the condemned souls were in a vacuum (where nothing exists) or were free to go anywhere, they would not for that reason cease to suffer deprivation of the beatific vision. They would carry hell with them wherever they went.
Literal or metaphorical fire?
If we study the Tradition of the Church, we will find many references to “eternal fire.” Some Fathers of the Church seem to understand this fire as literal, others as metaphorical. These different interpretations, which for the Church’s detractors seem to be an opportunity to show that Catholic doctrine is not uniform, are also irrelevant, for they are simply different interpretations of the figures used by Scripture.
The important point is that both those who interpret the fire as metaphorical and those who interpreted it as literal understand that reference is being made to a sensible torment suffered by the condemned, which is a dogma of faith.
Author: José Miguel Arráiz
