Should we believe in hell?
by Ian Paul, Psephizo:
Last week the Pope garnered some unwanted press coverage (unwanted especially during Holy Week) when it was claimed that he had denied the existence of hell as a place of conscious punishment for the wicked. The words were reported in an Italian daily publication La Repubblica by its founder, Eugenio Scalfari, a 93-year-old atheist who is apparently friends with Pope Francis. The discussion is quoted as follows:
Scalfari: Your Holiness, in our previous meeting you told me that our species will at some point disappear and God will always create other species from his creative seed. You have never spoken to me of souls who have died in sin and go to hell to suffer for it forever. Instead, you have spoken to me of good souls who are admitted to the contemplation of God. But the bad souls? Where are they punished?
Pope Francis: They are not punished, those who repent obtain God’s forgiveness and join the ranks of souls who contemplate him, but those who do not repent and cannot therefore be forgiven disappear. Hell does not exist; the disappearance of sinful souls exists.
(I must confess to finding some of the Pope’s comments about creation rather odd, but that’s for another day.) The Vatican immediately issued a denial that these were the exact words of Pope Francis:
“What is reported by the author in today’s article is the result of his reconstruction, in which the literal words pronounced by the Pope are not quoted,” the Vatican said. “No quotation of the aforementioned article must therefore be considered as a faithful transcription of the words of the Holy Father.”
Previous popes have said a range of things about the nature of hell. In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI said hell “really exists and it eternal, even if nobody talks about it much anymore.” In 1999 Pope John Paul II declared that Heaven was “neither an abstraction nor a physical place in the clouds, but that fullness of communion with God which is the goal of human life.” Hell, by contrast, was “the ultimate consequence of sin itself … 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.”
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
