Author: Richard Owen in Rome
Publication: The Times
Date: March 27, 2007
URL: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article1572646.ece
[Note from the Hindu Vivek Kendra: Please
see the comments at the end of the article.]
Hell is a place where sinners really do burn
in an everlasting fire, and not just a religious symbol designed to galvanise
the faithful, the Pope has said.
Addressing a parish gathering in a northern
suburb of Rome, Benedict XVI said 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".
Hell "really exists and is eternal, even
if nobody talks about it much any more", he said.
The Pope, who as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger
was head of Catholic doctrine, noted that "forgiveness of sins"
for those who repent was a cornerstone of Christian belief. He recalled that
Jesus had forgiven the "woman taken in adultery" and prevented her
from being stoned to death, observing: "He that is without sin among
you, let him first cast a stone at her."
God had given men and women free will to choose
whether "spontaneously to accept salvation . . . the Christian faith
is not imposed on anyone, it is a gift, an offer to mankind".
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".
Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, a Church historian,
said that the Pope was "right to remind us that Hell is not something
to be put on one side" as an inconvenient or embarrassing aspect of belief.
It had been misused in the Middle Ages to
scare the impressionable with "horrific visions" of damnation, as
described in Dante's Inferno.
It had a pedigree, however, that went back
to Ancient Egypt and the Greek idea of Hades, and was described by St Matthew
as a place of "everlasting fire" (Matthew xxv, 41).
"The problem is not only that our sense
of sin has declined, but also that the world wars and totalitarianisms of
the 20th century created a Hell on Earth as bad as anything we can imagine
in the afterlife," Professor Bagliani said.
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".
In October the Pope indicated that limbo,
supposed since medieval times to be a "halfway house" between Heaven
and Hell, inhabited by unbaptised infants and holy men and women who lived
before Christ, was "only a theological hypothesis" and not a "definitive
truth of the faith".
Timely visions
- "From here are to be heard sighs, and
savage blows resound: then the scrape of iron, and dragged chains. Aeneas
stopped, terrified, and drank in the din" Virgil, Aeneid
- "Outer darkness . . . there shall be
weeping and gnashing of teeth" St Matthew
- "A whirling storm that turns itself
/ for ever through that air of endless black, / like grains of sand swirling
when a whirlwind blows" Dante, La Divina Commedia
- Angels "rolling in the fiery gulf"
of "ever-burning sulphur Milton, Paradise Lost
- Locked forever in a small room with two
other people Jean-Paul Sartre, writing in his play Closed Doors , published
in 1944
COMMENTS:
1. One of the readers of this site, sent us
this message: "Hell must be quite far away and rather inaccessible, as
none of the prolific air transport operators that have sprung up the world
over advertises even a once-a-decade flight to the place."
2. And then amongst the responses at the website,
the following is very pertinent: I am confused. The Pope says Hell is a real
place and not just a symbol (I agree), yet the "Vatican Officials"
are quoted as saying, hell is "to be understood symbolically rather than
physically." Is this a case of the infantry not being "in line"
with the General?
Dane, Minneapolis, USA/Minnesota