The Pope believes in what?!

It's always a bit amusing (and, yes, annoying) when people—specifically, media types—get bent out of shape because the Pope articulates, defends, or preaches about this or that Catholic doctrine or dogma. The most recent example is Hell, which Benedict XVI spoke about this past weekend while celebrating Mass at the Parish of St. Felicity and Martyred Sons in the Diocese of Rome (the homily is currently available in Italian only on the Vatican website).

The New York Post featured the breathtaking headline: "POPE PROCLAIMS HELL 'EXISTS AND IS ETERNAL'", and stated, "Hell is a place where sinners burn in an eternal fire, and not just a religious symbol designed to galvanise the faithful, the Pope has said." Hey, nothing against galvanising, but let's be honest: if hell is merely symbolic (that is, if it doesn't exist, which is what the descriptive "symbolic" means here), exactly how much of a stimulation to spiritual reflection might it be? If your guess is "little to none," I'd say you're on the right track. The Post also says:

Vatican officials said that the Pope - who is also the Bishop of Rome - had been speaking in "straightfoward" language "like a parish priest." He had wanted to reinforce the new Catholic catechism, which holds that Hell is a "state of eternal separation from God," to be understood "symbolically rather than physically."

This didn't sound quite right to me, so I took a look. Nope, the Catechism never talks about Hell as being symbolic, but instead insists on the reality of Hell:

Jesus often speaks of "Gehenna" of "the unquenchable fire" reserved for those who to the end of their lives refuse to believe and be converted, where both soul and body can be lost.  Jesus solemnly proclaims that he "will send his angels, and they will gather . . . all evil doers, and throw them into the furnace of fire,"  and that he will pronounce the condemnation: "Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire!"

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."  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.

The affirmations of Sacred Scripture and the teachings of the Church on the subject of hell are a call to the responsibility incumbent upon man to make use of his freedom in view of his eternal destiny. (CCC 1034-36)

Rather than soften (distort?) the Pope's remarks, the Scotsman takes the "He's a jerk!" approach to the story:

POPE BENEDICT XVI has reiterated the existence of Hell and condemned society for not talking about eternal damnation enough.

A furious Pope Benedict unleashed a bitter attack during a sermon while on a visit to a parish church and said: "Hell exists and there is eternal punishment for those who sin and do not repent."

Sounding "more of a parish priest than a Pope" the leader of the world's one billion Roman Catholics added: "The problem today is society does not talk about Hell. It's as if it did not exist, but it does."

Pope Benedict unleashed his fury during a visit to the tiny parish church of St Felicity and the Martyr Children at Fidene on the outskirts of Rome, in his capacity as bishop of the Italian capital.

One churchgoer said: "The Holy Father was really having a go. It was a typical fire-and-brimstone sermon that you would have expected from a parish priest years ago."

That is a helpful qualification ("years ago") since my guess is that most Catholics rarely hear homilies (or even of homilies) that directly broach the topic of Hell. And did the Pope really "condemn society" for not talking about Hell enough? Was he really bitter? And filled with fury? Something tells me that the folks at the Scotsman are editorializing a wee bit, since this not only doesn't sound like Benedict, it doesn't fit the English excerpts of the homily, which emphasize the love of Jesus, as well as the free will of man, who is never coerced by God, but able to reject communion with Him: 

Using the Gospel reading of John where Jesus saves the adulterous woman from death by stoning by saying "let he who is without sin to cast the first stone", Pope Benedict said: "This reading shows us that Christ wants to save souls. He is saying that He wants us in Paradise with Him but He is saying that those who close their hearts to Him will be condemned to eternal damnation.

"Only God's love can change from within the existence of the person and, consequently, the existence of every society, because only His infinite love liberates from sin, the root of every evil."

That same love is reflected in the sacrifice of Christ, who came with the concrete goal of saving souls, he added.

And, from ZENIT:

"Jesus came to tell us that he wants us all in heaven and that hell, of which so little is said in our time, exists and is eternal for those who close their hearts to his love.

"Therefore even in this episode, we understand that our true enemy is our attachment to sin, which can lead us to failing our existence."

However, The London Times understands that, in a sense, the Pope's homily is hardly "news", as though he has something new and unheard of:

“Pope says Hell exists” is the sort of headline you might expect to see in a list of similarly self-evident truths; alongside, say, “The Sun is very hot”...

But, not surprisingly, this is treated as yet more evidence of how out of touch and fearful Benedict is:

The Pope is evidently rattled that people today are not as fearful as they ought to be of ending up in Hell, prompting his reminder to them that if  they fail to “admit blame and promise to sin no more” they risk “eternal  damnation”.

I'd say that The Times is evidently trying to ignore what Benedict is saying, which may or may not reflect how rattled they are by the possibility that Hell is real. If only one could get paid for every time a reporter or pundit tries to sweep away an uncomfortable proposition by immediately painting the proposer as "rattled," "afraid," "old fashioned," and so forth, a common and dreary example of ad hominem abusive. And, by the way, anyone who has seriously read Ratzinger/B16 knows how unrattled he is in the face of addressing modern and post-modern skepticism. So, for example, when he writes of Hell in Introduction to Christianity, he refers to the thought of Sartre and Herman Hesse. Likewise, he engages with Sartre again in Truth and Tolerance in discussing freedom and damnation. And in Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, he critiques Hegel while remarking upon the reality of Hell.

In his excellent essay, "Hell," contained in Hell and Other Destinations (Ignatius Press, 2006), Piers Paul Read remarks insightfully on the unpopular status of damnation:

While Pascal's contemporary, René Descartes, made the philosophical lbservation 'I think therefore I am', Pascal would have us say: 'I believe therefore I am forever'. The last item of the Apostles' Creed, life everlasting, is by no means the least because, as Ronald Knox pointed out, 'once a man or woman has attained the age of reason he is bound for one of two ultimate destinies, fixed and eternal - hell or heaven; and this is true even of those myriads of souls which have never had the opportunity or never had full opportunity, to hear the Christian message preached.' (2)

Knox also warned his readers, in the late 1920s, that 'the prevalent irreligion of the age does exercise a continual unconscious pressure upon the pulpit; it makes preachers hesitate to affirm doctrines whose affirmation would be unpopular. And a doctrine which has ceased to be affirmed is doomed, like a disused organ, to atrophy.' As early as 1915 George Bernard Shaw wrote in the Preface to his play Androcles and the Lion that 'belief in . . . hell is fast vanishing. All the leaders of thoughts have lost it; and even for the rank and file it has fled to those parts of Ireland and Scotland which are still in the XVII century.' 'Even there,' he added, 'it is tacitly reserved for the other fellow.' (3)

To insist that some of us may be damned inevitably makes a Christian apologist unpopular: it is something horrible to contemplate and therefore best pushed to the back of the mind or even out of the mind altogether. A belief in damnation is deemed unsophisticated and 'fundamentalist' - viz. not something that could be taken seriously by a contemporary Christian outside Ireland and Scotland, as Shaw said, or - we might now add - the Bible Belt in the United States. Each man is entitled to his opinion and one is as good as another. To suggest that one set of beliefs or mode of behaviour is better than another is deemed 'judgemental'; and while it is right to warn that smoking will cause the death of the body, it is intolerable to point to sins that might lead to the death of the soul.

Read the entire essay here. Other IgnatiusInsight.com pieces on Hell:

• The Brighter Side of Hell | James V. Schall, S.J.
• Socrates Meets Sartre: In Hell? | Peter Kreeft
• Are God's Ways Fair? | Ralph Martin

Comments

[Little Gidding]

Seems to me that His Holiness might well address his remarks to those within the Church who, following hints in von Balthasar, have liberated everyone from Hell and have imprisoned only one person there, Jesus Himself.

[Teresa Polk]

There is an unofficial translation of the homily on the website of Papa Ratzinger Forum (scroll down to it).  It is one of many unofficial translations posted there by Teresa Benedetta soon after the Italian transcript became available. Not surprisingly, the commentary you found does not appear to have considered the reference to hell in context.

Here is the reference to hell in context from that translation:

"Dear friends, concrete indications for our life emerge from the word of God that we heard today. Jesus did not get into a theoretical discussion with His interlocutors. He was not interested in winning a dispute over the interpretation of Mosaic law. His objective was to save a soul and to reveal that salvation is only found in God's love.

"That is why He came to earth, why he would die on the Cross, and why the Father would resurrect Him on the third day. Jesus came to tell us that He wants us all in Paradise, and that Hell - of which very little is spoken these days - exists, and is eternal for those who close off their hearts to His love.

"Even in this episode, we understand that the true
enemy is attachment to sin, which can lead us to the failure of our existence. Jesus sends off the adulterous woman with the advice, "Go, and sin no more." He grants forgiveness so that "from now on", she would no longer sin."
 

[Carl Olson]

Seems to me that His Holiness might well address his remarks to those within the Church who, following hints in von Balthasar, have liberated everyone from Hell and have imprisoned only one person there, Jesus Himself.

Well, sure. And this explains why, in poll after poll, when Catholics are asked why they doubt the existence of hell, they immediately refer to their vast von Balthasar libraries. Sigh...

[Chris Burgwald]

Everyone knows that von Balthasar argued that we don't *know* that any human beings are actually in hell, and that we should *hope* that no human beings ever are. But we also know that he didn't sin against hope by *presuming* that no human is or will be in hell. Anyone who claims that hell is definitively empty of human beings -- and says that they were only following von B's hints in so claiming -- didn't read the Swiss theologian very well.

[Carl Olson]

didn't read the Swiss theologian very well

But may have read New Oxford Review. It's rather tiresome hearing how von Balthasar supposedly denied hell, or said that nobody was in hell, for the same reason that it's tiresome to hear that Benedict is "rattled" or "fearful" or "won't engage with modernity." Because it's not true!

[Rick]

"Seems to me that His Holiness might well address his remarks to those within the Church who, following hints in von Balthasar, have liberated everyone from Hell and have imprisoned only one person there, Jesus Himself."

..On the other hand, my words were continually twisted with a view to claiming that he who hope for the salvation of all his brothers and sisters ‘hopes hell empty’ (what an expression!). Or that he who voices such a hope advocates the universal redemption (apokatastasis) condemned by the Church-SOMETHING THAT I HAVE UTTERLY REJECTED (caps are mine): we stand completely and utterly under judgment, and have no right, nor is it possible to peer in advance at the Judge’s cards….
-Dare We Hope (p. 166)

Well, it is better to read the good Cardinal than misconstrue what he actually said!

[Adam Janke]

"But may have read New Oxford Review. It's rather tiresome hearing how von Balthasar supposedly denied hell, or said that nobody was in hell, for the same reason that it's tiresome to hear that Benedict is "rattled" or "fearful" or "won't engage with modernity." Because it's not true!"

Seems like the appropriate question usually is, "Oh, so you've read 'Dare we Hope', etc?". The answer is of course almost always, "No". I'm finding Amazon.com to be a new mission ground with the recent discussion boards they've enabled on every product. Fundamentalists and Anti-Catholics are starting to write up tracts and fast rebuttals on nearly every Ratzinger text (see "What it Means to be Christian for example") on their site. The content of their comments though hardly reflects any knowledge of the text, and it is usually easily to silence them when you bring the fact up.

[Joe]

Tiresome? Not to impugne von Balthasar, but the NORs articles make solid arguments by credible priests, as does Pitstick's new book, and pieces by Cardinal Avery Dulles. Plenty of folks who have thorough knowledge of the Swiss theologian's text do see his views as more than a little problematic, and those who insinuate otherwise may be the ones who may be guilty of glossing over works. Sheesh.

[Carl Olson]

Plenty of folks who have thorough knowledge of the Swiss theologian's text do see his views as more than a little problematic,

"Problematic" is one thing. There are statements by Church Fathers and Doctors that are problematic. But saying that von Balthasar denied the existence of hell, or distorting his theological propositions about Christ's descent into hell is another thing. Thus Cardinal Dulles writes:

"The most sophisticated theological argument against the conviction that some human beings in fact go to hell has been proposed by Hans Urs von Balthasar in his book Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved?” He rejects the ideas that hell will be emptied at the end of time and that the damned souls and demons will be reconciled with God. He also avoids asserting as a fact that everyone will be saved. But he does say that we have a right and even a duty to hope for the salvation of all, because it is not impossible that even the worst sinners may be moved by God’s grace to repent before they die. He concedes, however, that the opposite is also possible. Since we are able to resist the grace of God, none of us is safe. We must therefore leave the question speculatively open, thinking primarily of the danger in which we ourselves stand.

"This position of Balthasar seems to me to be orthodox. It does not contradict any ecumenical councils or definitions of the faith. It can be reconciled with everything in Scripture, at least if the statements of Jesus on hell are taken as minatory rather than predictive. Balthasar’s position, moreover, does not undermine a healthy fear of being lost. But the position is at least adventurous. It runs against the obvious interpretation of the words of Jesus in the New Testament and against the dominant theological opinion down through the centuries, which maintains that some, and in fact very many, are lost."

Check out this recent post by Michael Joseph for more.

[Rick]

In reference to the pope's remarks, does anyone think that one reason we have lost sight of Hell's existence is that the existence of its main tenant, Satan, is either denied or neglected as well?

I think Lewis made a similar point in Screwtape!

[Carl Olson]

In reference to the pope's remarks, does anyone think that one reason we have lost sight of Hell's existence is that the existence of its main tenant, Satan, is either denied or neglected as well?

Absolutely! See my article, "Satan and the Saint".

[kentuckyliz]

Perhaps folks are misusing von Balthasar, which leads to complacency about the very things that would constitute ACTING on our HOPE that all men be saved: evangelization and intercessory prayer.

Private revelations show souls falling into Hell like snowflakes--St Teresa of Avila, who unlike von Balthasar, is a Doctor of the Church. The Fatima children also saw souls falling into Hell like snowflakes.

So, let's ACT on our HOPE. We aren't fundamentalists who think an act of faith (no one's in Hell) makes it so. Faith requires action.