Hell: not for the faint-hearted

Go back a century or more, and there were a lot of “fire and brimstone” preachers – and sermons. People heard the dire warnings of hell, and amended their lives out of sheer terror of landing up there after their death.

Whatever happened to all that?

Has the modern church reinterpreted Holy Scripture and realised all the hell stuff was wrong?

Or perhaps the modern church is embarrassed about the hell side of things – doesn’t really sound like the work of a loving God, does it? Might scare off potential recruits…

The reality is that the Catholic Church’s doctrine on hell has never changed – it just never gets a mention any more. And as a result, Catholics – and other Christians as well – are being lulled into a very false sense of security.

In 1917, three illiterate shepherd children in Fátima (Portugal) claimed they saw visions of Our Lady (Mary, Jesus’s mother). The visions came one a month, from May to October of that year. The Fátima apparitions are perhaps the best-known Marian apparitions in the world, probably due to the Great Miracle witnessed by over 70,000 people during the final apparition in October. So the Fátima story deserves serious attention.

During the July apparition the three children were given three secrets, and the first of these was the Vision of Hell. The eldest child, Lucia (aged 10 at the time), gave this account:

… we saw, as it were, a great sea of fire; submerged in that fire were demons and souls in human shapes who resembled red-hot, black and bronze-coloured embers that floated about in the blaze, borne by the flames that issued from them with clouds of smoke, falling everywhere like the showering sparks of great blazes – with neither weight nor equilibrium – amidst shrieks and groans of sorrow and despair that horrified us and made us shudder with fear. The devils stood out like frightful and unknown animals with horrible and disgusting shapes, but transparent like black coals that have become red-hot.

From the Memoirs of Sister Lucia of Fátima

Fast-forward 19 years. In convents in Poland and Lithuania, Sister Maria Faustina has been receiving visions and words from Jesus for a number of years. She records her experiences in six notebooks. These writings are among the most important spiritual masterpieces of the Twentieth Century, despite the fact that Sister Faustina herself had minimal schooling. In October 1936, she wrote this:

Today, I was led by an Angel to the chasms of hell. It is a place of great torture; how awesomely large and extensive it is! The kinds of tortures I saw: the first torture that constitutes hell is the loss of God; the second is perpetual remorse of conscience; the third is that one’s condition will never change; the fourth is the fire that will penetrate the soul without destroying it – a terrible suffering, since it is purely spiritual fire, lit by God’s anger; the fifth torture is continual darkness and a terrible suffocating smell, and despite the darkness, the devils and the souls of the damned see each other and all the evil, both of others and their own; the sixth torture is the constant company of Satan; the seventh torture is horrible despair, hatred of God, vile words, curses and blasphemies. These are the tortures suffered by all the damned together, but that is not the end of the sufferings. There are special tortures destined for particular souls. These are the torments of the senses. Each soul undergoes terrible and indescribable sufferings, related to the manner in which it has sinned. There are caverns and pits of torture where one form of agony differs from another. I would have died at the very sight of these tortures if the omnipotence of God had not supported me. Let the sinner know that he will be tortured throughout all eternity, in those senses which he made use of to sin. I am writing this at the command of God, so that no soul may find an excuse by saying there is no hell, or that nobody has ever been there, and so no one can say what it is like.

I, Sister Faustina, by the order of God, have visited the abysses of hell so that I might tell souls about it and testify to its existence. I cannot speak about it now; but I have received a command from God to leave it in writing. The devils were full of hatred for me, but they had to obey me at the command of God. What I have written is but a pale shadow of the things I saw. But I noticed one thing: that most of the souls there are those who disbelieved that there is a hell. When I came to, I could hardly recover from the fright. How terribly souls suffer there! Consequently, I pray even more fervently for the conversion of sinners. I incessantly plead God’s mercy upon them. O my Jesus, I would rather be in agony until the end of the world, amidst the greatest sufferings, than offend You by the least sin.

St Maria Helena Faustina Kowalska, Divine Mercy in My Soul, Notebook II, paragraph 741

We are immortal, and after death there is eventually only one of two options for us: heaven or hell.

Who can understand the mystery of hell? Why would a loving God allow His precious souls to enter such a place – and be there for all eternity? We have to remember that God has given us all perfect Free Will, and there has to be somewhere for those who choose to turn their backs on God totally.

Don’t let it be you.