So what did the Pope say on hell?

Toronto--At a Catholic wedding reception in Toronto this past August, a group of guests were joyfully and gaily discussing the Pope's recent explanations that hell does not exist. No more hell. No more of that medieval scaremongering. What great stuff! What enlightenment!

They based their conversation, apparently, on Michael Valpy's report in Toronto's Globe and Mail, printed on the front page under the heading "throwing cold water on the fires of hell" (July 29, 1999). This "departure from traditional Catholic teaching," Mr. Valpy stated, will pose many questions. Meanwhile, is there then "no lake and brimstone into which the souls of the damned are cast? No devils, no hooves, no pitchforks? No deep abyss, dark netherworld?" Nothing, in a manner of speaking, to look forward to after death?

It's all part of the 20th-century debunking of hell and devils, Valpy proffered. Only the previous week, the Pope had said that heaven is not up in the clouds. This week he tells us that hell "is not a punishment imposed externally by God".

"Hell has been losing its grip", Valpy continued. Take Professor Lombardi Vallauri of Milan's Sacred Heart University who recently called hell a" 'colossal injustice, contrary to all the principles of modem law and ... the Italian constitution'.... The Vatican, interestingly, ordered him fired."

Perhaps Valpy pretended to be humorous. But what about the guests at the wedding who learn their Catholic doctrine from the daily papers? How will they find the truth? Even in church hell is not a favorite topic for Sunday sermons today. (Two years ago, a priest gave a sermon on hell in the Sault diocese and was driven out of the parish--and eventually out of the diocese where he had gone to help out. The charge against him: being "pre-Vatican II".) So perhaps these Catholics will never learn that hell does exist, except, of course, on Judgement Day, when it is too late.

Needless to say, the Pope did not "depart from Catholic teaching" nor did he introduce any novelties. What did he say?

At his Wednesday general audiences on July 21 and 28 and August 4, 1999, Pope John Paul spoke about heaven, hell, and purgatory. What he said about them was standard Catholic teaching.

The Pope said that heaven is not a physical place somewhere in outer space so much as a personal relationship of union with the Holy Trinity. Hell is not a place, but rather a free and definitive rejection of God not corrected even at the last moment of life. Purgatory is not a place, but a condition of being purified from sin before entering heaven (there is no second chance to make up for our sins except by suffering, but those still alive can help us by their prayers and sacrifices).

When the Pope says not a "place", he is referring to our understanding of place, that is according to our puny knowledge of physics which is as nothing in the sight of God. Do not be relieved therefore to hear that there is no physical fire in hell, as we understand it, because the reality of eternal damnation, of eternal constant remorse at our freely chosen separation from the origin and goal of our existence, will be far worse than any human physics about fire can explain.

Even now there are no human bodies in hell or purgatory, and only two of them in heaven: the risen Christ, and his mother Mary taken up into heaven. And the resurrected body, of course, has special properties which we can hardly imagine.

The fact that the punishment in hell or purgatory is not physical should not surprise us, nor should it make much of a difference in our attitude toward them. Fire and the gnashing of teeth in hell are mentioned in Scripture, certainly, but they are only images of a deeper reality. And the Pope doesn't rule out the company of demons. Pope Paul VI describes them as "living, spiritual beings, perverted and corrupting."