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Pope reinstates Hell as a place to avoid

ROME. Where the hell is Hell? It’s a question many Roman Catholics must be asking themselves after the latest pontification on the subject from the Pontiff himself, Pope Benedict XVI.

Addressing a parish gathering in a Rome suburb, he said Hell “really exists and is eternal, even if nobody talks about it much any more”. In doing so, he appears to be contradicting his predecessor, John Paul II, who said in 1999: “Rather than a place, hell indicates the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God”.

Pope Benedict XVI, on the other hand, is not only specific about Hell as a place but also about the condition in which sinners will find themselves. He told the congregation that in the modern world many people, including some believers, had forgotten that if they failed “to admit blame and promise to sin no more” they risked “eternal damnation – the inferno”.

On a previous occasion, in October 2006, he indicated that “limbo” – which for centuries has been regarded by the Catholic Church as a halfway house between heaven and earth – was “only a theological hypothesis” and not a “definite truth of the faith”.

With successive Popes making different statements about Hell, it would not seem unreasonable to regard their views as also no more than a theological hypothesis. It is, after all, simply a matter of interpretation.

Left: A typical medieval illustration of Hell in the Hortus deliciarum manuscript of Herrad of Landsberg, dated around 1180.

Posted on Monday, April 02, 2007
Category: Afterlife

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