No matter where you get your news
from, you likely saw this week that Pope Francis apparently “did away with Hell”!
Now, of course, you can look it up
yourself, but the Pope has preached TONS of times about the reality of
Hell. So the Vatican issued a
clarification that what the Pope said was falsely reported. The person doing the interview is a 93 year
old reporter who doesn’t write anything down nor record his interviews, so we
ought not be surprised. The reporter
accomplished his likely goal of selling newspapers because we saw how far the
report spread.
As we think about this Divine Mercy
Feast Day that we celebrate today, Hell is an important aspect of Divine Mercy.
The devotion of Divine Mercy has
sprung out of the life of St. Faustina, who was visited numerous times by our
Lord. One of the times our Lord came to
St. Faustina, she records the following:
"I,
Sister Faustina Kowalska, by the order of God, have visited the Abysses of Hell
so that I might tell souls about it and testify to its existence...the devils
were full of hatred for me, but they had to obey me at the command of God, What
I have written is but a pale shadow of the things I saw. But I noticed one
thing: That most of the souls there are
those who disbelieved that there is a hell.
Let the sinner know that he will be tortured throughout all eternity, in those senses which he made use of to sin. I am writing this at the command of God, so that no soul may find an excuse by saying there is no hell, or that nobody has ever been there, and so no one can say what it is like...how terribly souls suffer there! Consequently, I pray even more fervently for the conversion of sinners. I incessantly plead God's mercy upon them.” (Diary 741)
Now those who think Hell is made up,
whether it was made up by someone from the middle ages thinking of some way to
keep people in line and paying their tithes, or whether it was invented by nuns
to keep second graders in line…anyone who says Hell is made up is really saying
that from a place of great “privilege”
This week I came across a poem by the English
Catholic poet Francis Thompson, who authored the famous poem “The Hound of
Heaven”. I found a much shorter (6 line)
poem by Thompson that I think is extremely relevant titled Heaven and Hell
The
gist of what Thompson says is this:
“It is said that no one would have
thought up hell, except that hell has been taught
And they say that it is obvious and
self evident that there is a Heaven
But it is not so, it seems to me.
It seems that Heaven lies beyond
our sights and rather it is Hell that is quite evident
For all can feel the God that
smites, but ah, how few the God that loves.”
The
only people who ever come up with the idea that there might not be a Hell are
people from materially blessed, prosperous places, people who have had the “privilege”
of living in a culture that has been GOSPELIZED already…that have heard about
the joy and peace of Heaven…those are the only people who ever think that maybe
there is not a Hell.
What
Thompson is saying is that for the vast majority of Humanity, it is
self-evident that there is a HELL. Just
looking inside myself for a moment, I recognize the destructive power of sin
tearing me down and killing me in my own life.
And certainly looking beyond ourselves, for people who are parents or
siblings of one of the 25,000 children who die every day from starvation, the
people who lived through the Holocaust, the people who see their kids get
burned alive by Syrian chemical weapons, the early Church who lived through the
slaughters and tortures and the Church around the world that continues to be
persecuted, for the people who lived amidst the cultures that had yet to be
Christianized…for all such people, I think, Francis Thompson is rightly saying
It is HELL that is almost self-evident.
If
I don’t think Hell is real, one problem with that: I don’t really appreciate
Divince Mercy, and in fact, Divine Mercy isn’t really that awesome. To deny Hell, to say that there isn’t a place
where evil can run and hide from God, then God’s gift of His own Son isn’t
REALLY that spectacular nor is it that inspiring.
It
is precisely because evil is real, in our hearts, in the world, and in eternal
life if we so choose…precisely BECAUSE Hell is real that Divince Mercy is
CELEBRATED!
There
is a path OUT of and away from Hell, a ladder that Christ extends to us into
the pit, His Divine Mercy that comes through the Church and Her Sacraments is
given to us to bring us into the eternal joy of Heaven and the Peace that comes
on Earth that comes from following Christ.
Finally
then, an important implication of all this is that if I don’t think there’s a
Hell, then I’m really not going to be that worried about myself NOR will I be
worried about anyone else. Everything is
sort of “blah” and it is all the same.
If there’s no Hell, and there’s no Heaven, but especially if there’s no
Hell, then I’m not really going to care what my neighbor Dave (or any other
neighbor or any other person) I’m not really going to care WHAT they do.
But
inherent in the Divine Mercy devotion is not just a desire for us to experience
it, but a desire to help OTHER PEOPLE experience in their lives Divine Mercy
too.
Do
you really believe any of your neighbors might be living at risk of Hell? Do you really believe that any of your
classmates are at risk of Hell? If you
answer “no” to that, then you aren’t going to be a vessel of Divine Mercy to
anyone.
In
the Gospel today, Jesus tells the doubting Thomas: “Do not be unbelieving, but
believe!”
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