Hell Yes

Gustave Dore's image of Satan

in hell.

Well tomorrow Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis Apostolic Exhortation following up from the 2014-2015 Synods on the Family is due out and the neo-trads are, fittingly enough, girding their loins for war.  For neo-trads Christianity seems to be all about lumbi (Latin for loins), that is when it isn’t all about Latin.  But before we get into that fray, let me print some responses I got from a disgruntled disciple of the late Bishop of Ypres, Cornelius Jansen.  Jansen (1585-1638) you may recall was the Catholic face of Calvinism.   Like the great Protestant Reformer and most unhappy of ecclesiastical campers Jean Calvin, Jansen believed that most souls were damned to hell through no fault of their own but simply for having been predestined to damnation from all eternity through the agency of a rather capricious deity.  In this festival of the divine wrath, should Our Blessed Lady be otherwise occupied it might even be hard to get a foursome for bridge (or golf) if such trivialities were even to be tolerated in heaven. 

Anyway here is what our own Inspector Javer wrote me

Look at what the church fathers have to say about this. They would know that most people will go to hell. Stop supporting father Barron's and von Balthazar's heresy. You are threatening souls.

Adding this is a second post  

Read the church fathers and you would realize that most people are damned. Stop supporting con (sic) Balthazar's idiotic heresy which threatens souls.

I am not really sure what provoked this admonition but let me say that both as a historian and a Christian believer, I believe there is a hell.  And despite my confidence in the overwhelming Mercy of God and the Treasury of Merits of Jesus Christ,  along with his Blessed Mother, the saints and the faithful, I would never go so far as to agree with von Balthazar’s thesis that, as some people put it, while there is a hell, it is empty.  (Von Balthazar gets that idea, by the way, from Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, but then what did she know of theology, a simple girl from the bourgeoisie.)  Hell must be an option or the human will is not ultimately free to reject God and grace is no longer free but a prison that takes away our choices. 

Besides, the words of Saint John Chrysostom have always echoed deep in my soul: Hell is paved with the skulls of bishops.  From experience I am willing to add that to the Creed.  So at least there are bishops in hell.  But as for others, I would not presume to know just how chock filled with the damned hell is.  And in fact I have no idea of what hell is like--the Church does not go into a lot of detail about hell and most of our conceptions are owed to popular mythology or classic literature.  But I do know this and believe it with all my heart:

God so loved the World that he sent his only Son that whoever should believe in him might not perish but might have eternal life.  God did not send his Son to condemn the World but so that the World might be saved through him. 

That is the gospel in a nutshell.  You can sum up our entire faith in those two verses. 

So while there are those who might reject God and the Salvation he offers, it makes no sense whatsoever that a God who is Love—who is Love, not simply who loves—would create for the sake of destroying the greater part of his creation. I also believe, because it is in Sacred Scripture, that the plan is for Christ to gather all creation to himself and present it to the Father.  How that squares with hell I am not sure.  

But Jansenism is alive and well and lurking behind this confessional door and that penitential practice and in the sermons of psycho-sexually underdeveloped priests, and in the neurosis of unhappy souls who have not yet found their own peace.  All we can do for these poor people is to pray for them that the Lord frees them to accept the overwhelming Mercy he offers us all. 

Now back to Amoris Latitia.  Love is always a joy and there is no joy without love.  There is nothing to fear in the Mercy of God. And I have heard a rumor that one of Francis' hand-picked American supporters at last year's synod is in line to get a significant Archdiocesan See.  

Hell is Real

painting depicting hell in the

Church of Debra Berhan Selassie

Gondar Ethiopia

 The Cathars were members of a medieval heretical movement that fell into the same errors as the Gnostics.  The name “Cathar” comes from the Greek ƙάθάρί or “the pure ones.”  Like the Gnostics before them and the English Puritans after them they believed that because of their religious perfectionism they were the true faithful, set apart from the rank and file of sinful humankind.  The Gnostics, the Cathars, and the Puritans all believed that most people, sinful as they are, stand outside the love of God and are damned.  This sort of heresy has plagued the Church from the very beginning.  Many of the early Christian sects that separated from “the Great Church” (the term used to designate the Christian Church before the great divide between the Churches of the East and the Catholic Church of the West) were marked by this conviction that the Church of Christ consisted of those who were sinless.  The Montanists, the Meletians, the Priscillians, the Donatists were among early Christian sects that taught to some extent such puritanism.  Some of the groups that espoused this puritanism were Christian, others were not.  The Manicheans were a non-Christian Gnostic sect to which Saint Augustine briefly adhered before his conversion to Christianity and that fell into this same error.  The Cathar movement which took root especially in southern France in the 12^th and 13^th centuries claimed to be Christian but severely distorted biblical teaching to adjust to their Gnostic convictions and were actually very similar to the Manicheans.  The Puritan movement in late 16^th century England remained Christian and orthodox but drew on Calvin’s understanding of Saint Augustine to teach that the “true Church” of Christ was a community of the elect who, by God’s grace, were preserved from the damnation to which most had been eternally condemned by God.  The mark of the “elect” in each of these systems was personal righteousness, separation from sinners, and a rigid “orthodoxy” as the particular movement defined such orthodoxy. 
This morning I was fortunate to hear a homily by a very impressive young Augustinian friar whose youth belies his spiritual perspicacity.  He drew our attention to the approaching finality of the Christmas season and called us to remember that Jesus was born “on the margins” of his society and that he spent his life with those who lived on the margins.   Jesus came not for those in the establishment but for those who had been pushed to the edges—to the lepers, to the prostitutes, to those who “didn’t belong.”  In other words, he did not come for the ƙάθάρί but for those very ones on whom the spiritually elite look down.
Recently Michael Voris has been pushing the reality of Hell and his certainty that it is filled with people who are not like him.  The usual chorus of Super-Catholic Gnostics has taken up this cry.  I believe in hell.  Saint Thérèse of Lisieux—one of my favorite saints—seemed confident that the Mercy of God would always prevail.   I appreciate her optimism, but I believe we need Hell to preserve the freedom of our human will.  I know that God loves me and will love me eternally and I think the Love of God would eventually wear me down and I would finally surrender to his love, but then I am a pretty weak man when it comes to being loved.  Just say you like me and I give in to whatever you want--love me and I become your pet dachshund. Nevertheless, I claim my freedom to resist—eternally resist if I so choose—yielding to the Love of God. If I want to remain eternally estranged from God, I have that freedom: God gave it to me.   God will love me whatever my eternal destiny--Saint Thomas assures us that God loves even those in hell.  Saved or damned our destiny is to be eternally loved by God.  For some that is a blesing; for others a soul-wracking curse.   I suspect that those who will find themselves in Hell will be those who like the older brother of the Prodigal Son will refuse to come into the banquet because the wrong sort of the people are there.  They will want their heaven to be a reception at Buckingham Palace and be appalled to find that God's heaven  is more "dive chic."   But then i think most people who will find themselves in God's eternal company are those who have spent plenty of time in seedy bars and will be right at home.