By John M. Grondelski
In the Catholic Church, November has a distinctly eschatological tone. The month is dedicated to praying for the souls in Purgatory, while the readings at the end of Ordinary Time—both on Sundays and weekdays—focus on the “Last Things,” that is, death, judgment, heaven, and hell.
In a sense, the traditional eschatological focus of November clashes with the usual approaches of the rest of the year in post-conciliar Catholicism. Critics denounce the tone of almost instant canonization in many funeral homilies, while the lack of attention to the sacrificial character of the Eucharist makes it difficult for many Catholics today to explain the need to pray for the faithful departed.
The ancient heresy of apocatastasis—the idea that everyone will ultimately be saved—persists in a kind of “Catholic version” that skirts heresy: “dare we hope” that all will be saved?
Yes, we hope. But the usual expressions of that hope seem like a knowing wink that “hope” is, in reality, our belief, held back only by the persistent bonds of Church teaching that prevent us from making a definitive statement. Pope Francis repeatedly leaned in that direction. Yes, we grant that theoretically hell could exist, but in reality we hope it is empty.
The practical expression arises from our pastoral refusal to speak of hell as something real, to mention Purgatory only in November, and to canonize the deceased while “celebrating their life” in our funeral rites. All of this clashes with St. Paul’s sober exhortation: “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12).
This November, let me suggest that hell is an expression of God’s mercy.
That idea is hardly novel, although many today probably do not understand it. Its usual expression involves a combination of anthropology and morality. Since heaven is not so much a “place” as a “state” of love for God, justice—toward God and toward the sinner—cannot force love upon someone who chooses not to love.
Heaven or hell ultimately depends on taking seriously the reality of human freedom, which finds its ultimate challenge in love and therefore includes the possibility of not loving. It remains a matter of justice and love: justice in respecting free choice, love in the sense that God does not impose Himself without reciprocity on those who do not love Him.
Although this explanation is traditional, it does not necessarily ring true to today’s ears. Most seem to imagine a “happily ever after” scenario in which, somehow, God’s persistence will finally triumph over human obstinacy, leading everyone to true love of God.
If human life is any indication—and many of these same people are great advocates of “experience”—we know that, despite a lover’s diligence, there are cases in which that love is rejected, and rejected definitively. Proponents of this position do not explain how God will inevitably overcome human resistance without undermining human freedom.
I would like, however, to take the idea of hell as an expression of God’s mercy to an even more overlooked dimension: the ontological, the realm of reality. The modern understanding of what is truly real is weakening. Perhaps today’s impoverished eschatology points to that.
Pope Francis at times seemed to suggest that the idea of an eternal hell was incompatible with a merciful God and that the true punishment of the damned might be annihilation. What is the problem with that?
Two things.
First, those who can swallow universal redemption but resist eternal damnation are often unable to seriously consider the self-reflective meaning of the human act. They seem to think that human acts, temporal and of finite duration, can hardly “merit” eternal consequences.
But, as Karol Wojtyła explained in Person and Act and in his other philosophical writings, human acts have a double meaning. Acts accomplish things, some of which endure beyond the act that caused them: a murder may be brief, but it endures. And, in a sense more important for these considerations, acts make me a certain kind of person.
Plunging a knife into someone’s chest does not only cause a murder; it makes me a murderer. And, until I repent of that act (and freedom must reckon with the fact that I may not), I remain a murderer, long after the fact… even into eternity.
Why not “solve” the problem by making the damned “disappear”? Pope Francis at times made comments that seemed to support annihilationist interpretations of hell, although such comments are not Church teaching.
As Genesis reminds us, what God creates is “good.” Man remains ontologically good even if he becomes morally evil. God’s gift of life—including spiritual life—is and remains good. That the gift is misused does not make it evil. And God does not revoke His gifts.
Should we perhaps seek the roots of this preference for annihilation in the current struggle between a culture of life and a culture of death, between the ethics of the sanctity of life and that of the quality of life?
Those who advocate the annihilation of existentially frustrated condemned souls shift the focus from the great gift of life that God gives—the possibility of eternal life—to the concrete usefulness of that gift for the condemned soul. Does it now become “God’s fault” for not having withdrawn the gift of life once given?
Reality remains, even if we do not like it.
And there, I suspect, lies much of the modern problem: the refusal to accept what is real. The real as good, evil as real in the sense of a lack of good that should be there, the real as something objective and independent of my consciousness and my decisions. God is truly merciful when He invites us to live as we have chosen to live, in that real world.
There is, moreover, something profoundly merciful in God’s refusal to make reality other than what it is. Mercy does not mean that evil becomes good, that decisions lose their consequences, or that the moral order is suspended whenever its demands become uncomfortable.
God’s mercy is manifested in His willingness to redeem the sinner, to forgive, to restore, and to offer the grace of conversion. But mercy does not require God to declare that a definitive rejection of His love is something other than what it is.
In fact, to do so would be to deny the very human freedom that makes love possible. Hell is not proof that God’s mercy has failed. It is the terrible possibility that a human being rejects the gift that mercy continually offers.
About the author
John Grondelski (Ph.D., Fordham) is former associate dean of Seton Hall University’s Immaculate Conception Seminary School of Theology in South Orange, New Jersey. All opinions expressed herein are exclusively his own.