Therefore, Lord, we pray: graciously accept this oblation of our service, that of your whole family; order our days in your peace, and command that we be delivered from eternal damnation and counted among the flock of those you have chosen

— The Roman Canon/Eucharistic Prayer I

Our contemporaries, including some Christians, reject the notion of hell as something incompatible with God’s love and mercy. In fact there have been those who have maintained that at the end even Satan will be reconciled to God, a theory called apocatastasis, meaning a restoration to the original state, that the Church has rejected as contrary to the teachings of the Faith.

There is no contradiction between hell and God’s mercy because God will not force mercy on anyone Satan included. The doctrine on hell ultimately is a meditation on the mystery of freedom, whether the freedom of men and women or the angels. “Therefore I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven.”; 136 Mt 12:31; cf. Mk 3:29; Lk 12:10 There are no limits to the mercy of God, but anyone who deliberately refuses to accept his mercy by repenting, rejects the forgiveness of his sins and the salvation offered by the Holy Spirit. Such hardness of heart can lead to final impenitence and eternal loss.

Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit does not properly consist in offending against the Holy Spirit in words. It consists rather in the refusal to accept the salvation which God offers to man through the Holy Spirit working through the power of the Cross. If Jesus says that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit cannot be forgiven in this life or in the life to come it is because this is linked to non-repentance, the radical refusal to be converted. Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is the sin committed by the person who claims to have a right to persist in evil in any sin at all and who thus rejects Redemption by Christ through His saving death and resurrection. This is spiritual ruin. See the encyclical Dominum et Vivificantem on the Holy Spirit #46

There are six sins against the Holy Spirit as taught by the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and they include:

1. Presumption
2. Despair
3. Resisting the known truth
4. Envy of another’s spiritual good
5. Obstinacy in sin
6. Final impenitence

Hell is the state of definitive self-exclusion (!) from communion with God and the blessed. (Catechism of the Catholic Church #1033) We cannot be united with God unless we freely choose to love Him. But we do not love God if we sin mortally against Him, against our neighbor, or against ourselves.

Mortal sin is a turning in a disordered way to some changeable good and a turning away from God the unchangeable good. The person disobeys God not because he does not love Him but because he loves Him less than some created thing less than himself. Placed between God and something created prohibited by God he would like not to be forced to choose, but he does choose and chooses to please himself. His conscience may yield with a pang of the heart, but it yields. Anything created is but a means to serve God and go to Him. The sinner turns it into an idol and shamelessly lowers himself.

To die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God’s merciful love means separation from Him by our own free choice. Jesus often spoke of the reality of hell: “Gehenna, “the unquenchable fire” reserved for those who will lose body and soul. (CCC#1034) Hell is part of the teachings of the Catholic Faith: Immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend to hell where they suffer eternal punishment. (CCC#1035)

The chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God, the Source of all life and happiness and love. The teachings of the Lord and His Church are a call to human beings to use their freedom with their eternal destiny in mind: Man was created to praise, reverence, and adore God and thereby save his soul. Earthly life is a time of conversion from sin and coming to God, which is not easy. In fact the Scriptures warn us to enter by the narrow gate: for wide is the way and easy the way that leads to destruction but narrow is the gate and hard the way that leads to life and how few there are who find it.

God predestines no one to hell. For this there has to be a free turning-away from God as one’s final choice by persisting in mortal sin to the end of one’s life. Imploring the mercy of God means that He will give us the grace to live the narrow way and never use our freedom to reject Him in the end. For this grace we must all pray. (CCC #1037)

The sins that cry out to God for vindication: #1867 The catechetical tradition also recalls that there are “sins that cry to heaven”: the blood of Abel, the sin of the Sodomites, the cry of the people oppressed in Egypt, the cry of the foreigner, the widow, and the orphan, injustice to the wage earner.

• The “blood of Abel”; homicide, infanticide, fratricide, patricide, and matricide
• The “sin of the Sodomites”: Genesis 19 cf. Jude 1:7
• The “cry of the people oppressed in Egypt, the cry of the foreigner, the widow, and the orphan”:oppression of the poor.
• The “injustice to the wage earner” taking advantage of and defrauding workers (James 5:4).

Everyone -- past, present, and future -- will be judged. Now, then, is the time for mercy, while the time to come will be the time for justice only. For that reason, the present time is ours, but the future-time will be God’s only!
—St. Thomas Aquinas

Our Lady Help of Christians, Pray for us!

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