Pope Francis' Missionary Church - by James V. Schall, S.J.

In CWR

 

“Each Christian and every community must discern the path that the Lord points out, but all of us are asked to obey his call to go forth from our own comfort zone in order to reach all the ‘peripheries’ in need of the light of the Gospel.”
— Pope Francis, The Joy of the Gospel, #20.

“The kingdom is here, it remains; it struggles to flourish anew. Christ’s resurrection everywhere calls for the seeds for that new world, even if they are cut back, they grow again, for the resurrection is already secretly woven into the fabric of this history, for Jesus did not rise in vain. May we never remain on the sidelines of this march of living hope?”
— Pope Francis, The Joy of the Gospel, #278.

I.

When I finished Pope Francis’ first encyclical, The Light of Faith, I concluded that Francis’ pontificate would concentrate on the parish, on local communities and dioceses as centers of worship, belief, and charity. The Church would be less in the public eye. This example of a vibrant local life would be the basis of the attraction of Christianity to the Gentiles. 

On finishing Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation, The Joy of the Gospel, however, I have to conclude differently. Francis is concerned with an active, “missionary” Church that is very much involved with everything else through its attention to and delight in its own communal life. Time Magazine’s making Francis the “Person of the Year” is enough to tell us that Pope Francis’ short pontificate so far has not been a quiet affair to which few have paid attention. From the moment of his election, Francis came on not so much as a tiny seed but as a full grown mustard tree, to adapt a famous parable. 

Since the day of his election, Francis has often, sometimes daily, made headlines of one sort or another throughout the world. Most everyone has an opinion about him. No one can ignore him, not even those who would like to. He is obviously likeable. He appreciates community life. One of the Renaissance popes (Leo X, d. 1521) quipped to his brother: “God has given us the papacy, let us enjoy it.” I have the impression that, in the best sense, Francis has enjoyed being pope. He seeks to know everyone. He drives his security forces crazy. But he has an exuberance that is catching. And he has something to say and he says it; let the chips fall where they may. He tells everyone he loves them. He tells us that he is a “sinner.” He does not think he is always right. He thanked Archbishop Marchetto for correcting him on the issue of the continuity of the Church before and after Vatican II. 

Aside from The Light of Faith, which had Benedict XVI in its background, we have seen very little of Francis’ overall thought. He has a sparse paper-trail. He gives short, familiar homilies in Santa Marta’s chapel, each with three points. His Wednesday audiences and talks in L’Osservatore Romano are generally short and homey. He affirms every settled doctrine of the Church, but wants to present it gently, in a new context. What he says is always full of personal comment. We know much of his experiences in Argentina. They loved him in Rio at World Youth Day. Several of his interviews have gained worldwide attention and sharp controversy. 

The Pope clearly wants to shift the attention of the Church to a missionary, outgoing mode. He does not want anyone to stay at home. We not only are to experience the joy of the Gospel ourselves, but its contagion is to be brought to others. The Pope prods those who stay at home or in bureaucratic offices to get out in the streets. He wants bishops and priests to have open doors. Somewhere he commented that churches should be unlocked—which makes one smile because of the experience of many parishes: if they do not lock their doors, they are constantly vandalized. But he speaks from his own experience where doors of churches can be left open. This is the goal of any peaceable society. 

The Pope has many ideas about economics and politics. He does not hesitate to tell us about them. To many, they sound very “south of the border,” even beyond Mexico way. Pope Bergoglio admits that he is not an expert in these matters. But he insists that attention to the poor is part of his and everyone else’s job. He wonders why we cannot find politicians who can figure this problem out. Actually, a good part of the world’s poor in recent decades have passed out of extreme poverty (see “Towards the End of Poverty,” The Economist, June 1, 2013). Many people at least seem to know how to accomplish this goal. But this Pope will not be content with less than everyone. This insistence is both refreshing and a little frustrating. No one can mind too much to be reminded of things yet to be figured out. St. Thomas, whom the Pope cites frequently in The Joy of the Gospel, however, said that such things often can only be done “gradually.” 

II.

But if I am asked what is the overall impression left by this Exhortation, I have to say that it is very much “this-worldly” oriented. It points horizontally, not vertically. The inner life of the Godhead is not much spoken of. When the Father is mentioned, it is always in the context of the love of the neighbor whom God loves in Christ. Unlike Benedict in Spe Salvi, there is little attention given to “eternal life.” When Francis mentions the “kingdom of God,” he does not, as one would expect, cite Augustine. He mentions actual cities and is rather surprised by them. When Augustine talked of “the City of God,” he said that it began among us, but could not be achieved in this world. No existing city would ever be this Kingdom. Augustine, with good reason, was leery of the ambitions of the cities of this world. 

Of course, this emphasis on actual cities is Aristotelian. We are social and political animals. What concerns Francis, if I might put it that way, is the second great commandment. He obviously does not deny the first, the love of God. But Francis’ attention is given to God’s love as it exists among us. But he thinks not enough response is given to it. He wants to improve the world by emphasizing the joy of Christianity that we can experience in our lives and worship. The love of neighbor is an active thing. This pope believes in action. He talks of contemplation at times, but with overtones of Ignatius of Loyola’s simul in actione contemplativus; we behold God’s action in the doing of what needs to be done. 

Pope Bergoglio is much more oriented to modernity, to modern culture, than the previous two popes. He cites John XXIII, and sometimes Paul VI, though he certainly cites John Paul II and Benedict—and de Lubac, Guardini, Newman, Bernanos, and the various documents of episcopal conferences. He is open to modern science. He is aware of skepticism, relativism, and atheism, but he has a certain sympathy for their adherents. 

So what do I think the Pope is doing with his strong emphasis on missionary activities? He lightly touches the difficulty of political obstacles in most nations of the world to allow for much real missionary work. He mentions the basic right of religious freedom and its lack in many nations. He does not name many names. So his missionary activity first begins at home. The “joy” of the Gospel is designed to be a beacon of light in the world. It can only be seen if believers themselves see it. 

Modernity is, briefly, the position that no truth is found in things or in ourselves. We are free because we are liberated from all religion or philosophy that would limit our freedom, individual or corporate. Religion of any kind is an enemy to this liberty. Once this freedom is established, man can go forward, as Benedict pointed out, to create a world in his own image. Man is not made in any image of God. He makes himself in his own image. Once free of any transcendent claim, man is free to create a truly “human” world that has no outside demands of a god or nature. Science and politics with this background will be able to make man into what he ought to be. 

What Pope Francis seems to be doing in this Exhortation is, as it were, to present an alternative to modernity within modernity. This alternative is itself inner-worldly. That is, the emphasis is on the effects of Christianity as it truly ought to be lived in the here and now.

Another legitimate version of this living as Christians ought to live would be the admonition in Scripture that Christians will often be hated precisely because they do live as Christ asked them to live. At the end of time, it seems possible that there will be little faith. But we are dealing here with what is in fact a legitimate approach, as far as I understand it. There has always been a question of what is, in fact, the “inner-worldly” purpose of revelation. Granted that it can and often is rejected, still what would the world look like if the famous ancient phrase “see how they love one another” were practiced as a missionary endeavor? 

As far as I can see, Pope Bergoglio is bent on proposing for us a way to put into effect what the Didache once said about Christians wanting to live quietly and peacefully in the world. But this would initially involve not only Christians themselves with a life of joy in their communities, but also of intelligently confronting issues of sin, economic and political disorder, self-love, and other aberrations that prevent us from helping others. 

In the process, we do not cease to be sinners. Hence, the Pope has much to say about forgiveness and mercy. His particular proposals may be debated. Nietzsche’s complaint was that Christians did not live like Christians—so why worry about them? Pope Bergoglio’s exhortation is that we will all “worry” about them when they live in love and display the joy that Christ showed them. This love is not just a personal thing, though it that too. The Pope speaks of “structural” impediments and cultural habits that prevent us from living as we should. 

But at bottom, what this Exhortation seems to be is, indeed, an answer to classical modernity that, when spelled out, does everything modernity hopes for, only better and more securely because it is rooted in the real nature of man and is open to the gifts that have come to us in revelation. The Pope’s impatience has its charm. It also has its dangers. After all, most men who have ever lived on this planet have lived in very imperfect circumstances. The Church was for them too. Few lived in really fully developed economic and political orders with scientific and technological support that enabled man the leisure and time to create a civilization. Paul VI called it a “civilization of love,” and Pope Francis would probably call it the same. 

So while the function and inspiration of the Church is surely to stand for joy and fulfillment in this life, it never forgets that we save or lose our souls in the societies in which we live, whatever their condition. Some societies are better than others. And we are fortunate if in our lifetime we have lived in one of the better ones. One does not know this—“who are we to judge?”—but it is quite possible that more souls reached their transcendent end from the gulags and concentration camps than from the fashionable addresses of our culture. 

But that is no argument for setting up concentration camps. That is the Pope’s point. We must try with all our energy and strength for something better. Pope Bergoglio’s impatience is “this-worldly,” if you will, but it is not “utopian” or modernist. That, I think, is what this detailed Exhortation really has to teach us.

Culture at the “Heart of Liberty” - by James V. Schall, S.J.

In TCT

To read, one after the other, the following two statements is a philosophical experience. The first passage is from Justice Anthony Kennedy in the 1992 Casey decision: “At the heart of liberty is one’s own concept of existence, of the universe, of the meaning of his life. . . .People have organized intimate relationships and choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that their contraception should fail.” 

We once were told that contraception would eliminate the need for abortion. It usually increases it. The curious logic of this position has been frequently examined. What if, as in the case of abortion, my understanding of the meaning of life includes your destruction? How does the principle help those who are destroyed by my principle?

Next, we read the remarks of Pope Francis to Eugenio Scalfari: “Each of us has a vision of good and evil. We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is Good. Everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them. That would be enough to make the world a better place.” But does such a principle, when in place, make the world a better place? 

I am hard pressed to see any substantial difference between these two opinions as expressed. Both men are Catholics explaining what they hold. Both men seem to be looking at the subjective side of a person’s interior judgments. The whole objective world that is there and affected by the consequences of these positions is bypassed as irrelevant or immaterial. I cannot see why either Mao or Hitler, let alone Hobbes, would have any problem with these positions as stated. Each historical figure would maintain that he was trying to put his “understanding of existence and the good” into practice. So what’s the problem?

The problem is how the internal forum of one’s conscience is related to the objective order of the world, to what human beings actually are. Aquinas taught that an objectively erroneous conscience must also be followed. If this position were what Kennedy and Pope Francis were saying, it can be defended. The pope’s “Who am I to judge?” from the Rio return flight interview expressed our ignorance of how another person sees himself. The pope said that he was talking of someone who sincerely thought what he was doing was all right, but someone who had resolved to lead a “good” life. How many, if any, are these? We have no idea.

Whether some, say, practicing abortionist is really “unaware” of disorder in his acts, we simply speculate about. God knows as does the person involved. But if anyone “sincerely believes” that the commandments are “wrong,” so that he may practice the wrong as if it were right, this fact still does not exempt political or religious officials from challenging this understanding, its logic, and especially its harm to others. To speak of abortion without speaking of what is aborted, to look on it as a purely subjective issue, violates the standards of reason that we are to uphold.

The basic problem here is whether modern culture is itself neutral. The move to bring the Church “up-to-date” was evidently based on the notion that nothing in the existing culture militated against any fundamental teaching or practice of reason or faith. Thus, to “adapt” to modern culture did not seem to be dangerous. 

But if, within the culture, we find already an understanding of “rights, liberty, and equality” that, in their logic, undermines reason and law, then to conform to such a culture is to embrace, as good, beliefs and practices that are contradictory to reason and revelation. As a result, when we deal with modern culture in its own terms, we have to speak as if each of us has his own “understanding” of existence and good, no matter what it is. We establish governments to enable us to carry out what we want. 

When we meet someone with such “modern” cultural ideas that justify making what is evil to be good, we can only respond, on these premises, by giving everyone the “right,” “liberty,” or even “duty,” to do or choose whatever he wants. The actual public order becomes wholly subjective. It gives everyone the “right” or “liberty” to do or think what he wants. 

Once we arrive at this point, everything follows. With a subjective public order, we are unable to say anything about it because we have no tools but “modern ideas” of rights, liberty, and equality that, in their intrinsic philosophic definitions, allow no critique of them from an order said, in classical thought, to be “objective.

 

The “most evil” speech ever delivered by a sitting American president - by James Schall, SJ

In Truth and Charity
 

“One in five women in this country has turned to Planned Parenthood for health care. One in five. (Applause.) And for many Planned Parenthood is their primary source of health care—not just for contraceptive care, but for lifesaving preventive care, like cancer screenings and health counseling.”

–President Obama to Planned Parenthood Convention, April 26, 2013

“They (Christians) play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them.”

–Epistle to Diognetus, 2d Century A.D.

The morning after President Obama gave his bemused lecture to an enthusiastic Planned Parenthood Convention in Washington, a friend of mine wrote to me. This man is experienced in political things and a man of good sense. He stated that this address to the Planned Parenthood Convention was the “most evil” speech ever delivered by a sitting American president. At the time, I had not yet heard or read the speech.

But one can hardly not be curious about why a good man would call this speech simply evil. What was his exact point?

One other item has been striking to me in recent years. It is the number of people from various angles of life who have spontaneously wondered about the similarity of the president to the anti-hero in Robert Hugh Benson’s 1913 novel, The Lord of the World. 

 

The similarity is not just in the sudden rise of an obscure American senator to the highest of earthly powers, but in the agenda that he advocated in reaching it. The Benson novel falls into the tradition of Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984 with its systematic effort not to name things what they really are so that we are never faced with what we are actually doing.

Be that as it may, I read President Obama’s upbeat urgings that the Planned Parenthood ladies get into the “fight” against those backward, out-of-date types who would work against the “woman’s right to choose.” The latter is a phrase that comes up suspiciously often in the address. It lingers in our minds because we know that it really means something else than what the words specifically indicate.

The president’s speech was full of warmth and affection. The head of Planned Parenthood was addressed by her first name, “Cecile.” Mr. Obama said that the effusive welcome there made him “blush.” Someone in the audience called out, “I love you.” The president responded: “I love you back.”

At the end, President Obama thanked Planned Parenthood, after telling them that the “President is going to be right there with you fighting every step of the way.” He even asked God to “bless” them, presumably for their “good” works. What Planned Parenthood is set up to do is to kill human babies on a massive scale. It is difficult to imagine why such a request of God is not, in fact, blasphemous.

Human life begins at conception. At any pre-natal stage what is at stake is an already begun human life. Most commentators on this address have remarked that the president was scrupulous never to pronounce the word “abortion,” as if that “service” were not an essential part of the Planned Parenthood agenda.

In Planned Parenthood clinics, over 300,000 abortions are performed per year. The vague phrases “reproductive services” along with “right to choose” are preferred over using the word abortion. The reason for this preference is a clue to why the president’s speech might be considered evil.

The “service” provided is the elimination of a child. The president’s address studiously contains no mention of what it is that is in fact eliminated when the “services” are provided, usually with government funding.

If the President has no problem with the rightness of the deed, why would he not want to use the proper word, abortion, to describe that deed?

The further question is this: “Why would a reasonable man consider this friendly Planned Parenthood address to be the ‘most evil’ address ever given by an American president?” The first approach to this consideration is, I think, grammatical. The oft-repeated phrase “right to choose,” which is said to underpin the whole rationale of abortion without mentioning its name, does not, in itself, really tell us anything about what is going on. That is why the phrase is used.

Let us suppose I spoke of a “right to hear” or a “right to eat.” Hearing, eating, and choosing are powers found in certain living beings. The fact that I have a power that enables me to hear, eat, or choose tells me nothing about what I hear, eat, or choose. I did not give myself these powers. They come with the kind of being I am. To say that I have a “right to choose” means only that I have, as part of my being, a free will, a faculty. It says nothing about what I do with this free will.

What I do with my choice or free will is the whole issue here. These capacities belong to what I am. Does my “right to eat” mean that I may eat poison? The capacity of eating may be abused by deliberately eating poison. We usually call it suicide. But the capacity itself enables us to eat what we need for our well-being. The capacity does not mean that we may eat whatever we want, with no restrictions about what it is we eat and its relation to the kind of being we are.

We do not know anything about the so-called “right to choose” until we have put an object to the infinitive. To choose what? It is a verb and needs an object. Until that object is stated, we do not know what this “right to choose” means in practice.

The “right to choose” does not give me a “right” to choose to kill someone.  All it does is to tell me that I can kill someone if I choose. I have the power to do so, not any “right,” unless, like many moderns, by “right” we only mean “power.” But if I so choose, I am responsible for the act that, because it was a choice, came out of my freedom and power. What we have here, then, is the deliberate use of bad or incomplete grammar to cover up what we are actually promoting.

In the context of the president’s speech, the “right to choose” is cagily used to avoid stating what it is that, in every case, is chosen when this so-called “right” is exercised. The question is: “Why does President Obama not want to say this word?” Evidently, it is not because he has any problem with approving abortion itself or what it actually is. He does not deceive himself about what happens. He just does not want everyone to know what he is doing. Hence words are used that obscure what is happening, at least to those unwilling or unable to catch what is actually meant by these words.

No one can doubt that President Obama knows what is chosen to happen when this “right” is exercised. A child’s life is terminated in her mother’s womb. By the judicious way he avoids calling abortion what it is, the president implies that he does not want to name in public what it is that happens when the “choice” is exercised. What can we conclude from these observations?

Plato often said that the worst thing that can happen to us is to have a lie in our soul about the most important things, to tell ourselves something is good when it is evil. Even though it takes place in millions of instances yearly throughout the world, the fact is that objectively every abortion is the killing of an already begin, innocent human life. In using the phrase “right to choose,” we never simply talk of the “woman’s right” as if it had no object chosen.

The child about to be aborted has a prior claim to be protected and cared for. That is implied in the begetting itself and that to which a woman’s (and man’s) being is directed. We cannot separate the two by stressing only a natural faculty (power of choice) and not the complete act that results in another actual human being.

The direct consequence in every instance of the exercise of the “right to choose” is the killing of a begotten human child. It is clear that the “right to choose” really means “freedom to kill the human child.” No wonder no one wants to speak what it is. But if we won’t admit in public what we do, we must latch on to words that obscure, confuse, or deny what we do and know that we do.

Whenever President Obama spoke in his recent address to Planned Parenthood about the principal activities of their organization, he talked about dealing with “contraceptive services.” Now let it be stated that, if all that the Planned Parenthood organization were doing was searching to cure diseases in women, like cancer, we would all be delighted to join them. Many other organizations exist for the purpose of treating medical issues that do not imply abortion in their work. 

When the president includes a good or neutral activity along with the evil (albeit unnamed), he wants us to believe that both were in the same acceptable moral category. Who would want to be against helping women with cancer?

Here, however, we are asked to believe that finding cancer is equivalent to having an abortion. But pregnancy is not a sickness, while cancer is. We are meant, by the president’s rhetoric, to glide over these two different things as if they are the same worthy moral act. This is a deception. It seeks to puts a lie in our souls about what is.

President Obama, in his lecture, ridicules states like Mississippi and North Dakota for their efforts to limit abortion. He implies that these efforts are wrong because they are “out-of-date.” This is his argument: “So the fact is, after decades of progress, there’s [sic] still those who want to turn back the clock to policies more suited to the 1950s, than in the 21^st century … When you read about some of these laws, you want to check the calendar, you want to make sure you are still living in 2013.” The criterion of truth here seems to be chronology, based on “progress,” which is always what we do now.

The president, to be sure, does not always eschew the language of right and wrong. “Forty-two states have introduced laws that would ban or severely limit access to a woman’s right to choose.” He calls the North Dakota and Mississippi initiatives to restrict abortion (i.e. “woman’s right to choose”) “absurd” and “wrong.”

If it is “wrong” or “absurd’ to seek to limit or ban abortion, then what the president is doing must be right, namely fostering and providing facilities for abortion. God’s “Thou shalt not kill” now means “Thou shalt kill certain designated groups according to the time or year in which they live.” It is evil to say of what is right that it is wrong, and of what is wrong that it is right. The more subtly we do this, the more effective.

With regard to whether something is right or wrong because of the time in which it was enacted, we recall Chesterton’s comment about those who say something can be right in one century but wrong in another. “It’s like saying something can be right on Tuesday but wrong on Wednesday.” It is striking that President Obama’s logic would allow him to invoke such a dubious chronological principle to justify what he wants.

Moreover, as Robert Reilly pointed out, if we go back not to the 1950s, but a hundred years ago to the founding of Planned Parenthood and Margaret Sanger’s influence, the whole impetus of that organization was based on Darwinian eugenics. It was to weed out inferior races by preventing them from breeding. With this background, the president’s own genetic origins would have been the object of Planned Parenthood concern.

Whether a thing is right or wrong does not depend on the time in which it appears but on the truth—on the validity of the argument that establishes it.

What the president evidently calls wrong is anything that disagrees with his own conception of what the law, in the service of his ideology, can do. But by his own chronological logic, if states finally succeed in limiting or forbidding abortion, since that would take place after the time when it was available to everyone, it should be accepted as up-to-date, and the abortion position as outdated.

Mr. Obama is a clever rhetorician but not a careful thinker. Hitler and Stalin were once up-to-date. One needs more than chronology to challenge them. Perhaps this is the reason the Declaration of Independence was not cited during the Planned Parenthood meeting.

The final point that needs to be made concerns the starting point of the so-called “right to choose” rhetoric. What should govern this whole question is not the woman or the man but the child. Neither a woman nor a man by him or herself has any “right” to choose to have or not have a child. What they have is a freedom to marry. If a child is begotten of them in this relationship, it is their duty to bring it to birth and care for it in a home.

A child is always a gift, not a “right,” nor the product of a contract or a scientific process. The primary focus is the child, not the parent. The logic works in exactly the opposite manner from the way we insist on thinking of children. Every child thus has the right to have both a mother and a father (not one mother or one father or two mother s or two fathers) bound together in an exclusive relationship in which the family is formed. We should be speaking not of a “woman’s right to choose” but of a “man and a woman’s duty” to accept and care for what they beget as a gift in their personal relationship. This arrangement is what is best and normative for the child and its parents and the society in which they live. When this principle is violated, everything in the society itself begins to unravel.

Thus, in answer to the initial query, “Why was this the most evil speech of an American president?,” in my opinion, it is because the speech systematically lies to us about what is really happening when the “right to choose” or “contraceptive services” are put into practice.

The words are chosen carefully with full knowledge of what they are intended to convey and full knowledge of what actually happens. C. S. Lewis, following the Socratic tradition, said that evil is to call what is good evil and what is evil good. This is basically what Genesis said of the sin of the First Parents who wanted to place the distinction of good and evil in their own hands, not God’s.

Stripped of all the rhetoric and masked words, this address told the American people, probably too ready to listen, that what was evil was really good, a “right” in fact. Why this speech is particularly heinous is not that it was spoken by some professor or distraught lady, but by a president pursing public policy. He maintained that what was proposed was worthy of God’s blessing. It was right, not wrong. These are not ordinary confusions. They follow, knowingly or not, a logic and force determined to overturn, in the name of progress and being up-to-date, all the proper relations of man, woman, child, family, and society.

The second century Epistle to Diognetus, cited in the beginning, already affirmed that Christians marry like other men, have children, but, it added, do not “expose,” that is, abort, them. This criterion is still what defines a human being and a Christian. We are told that such “teaching” is backward and not current. We are asked not to think about what we are doing but only to ask about our “right to choose.” But we all know what we choose when we exercise this oft-cited “right.” We do not have the courage to call evil what it is.

We must hide our evil in obscure language. This hiding tells us better than anything else that, when we so lie to ourselves, we know that we do so lie. We prefer the power that this lie gives us to the truth of what happens when we exercise this very strange “right,” with no acknowledged object. We are asked officially to deceive ourselves about the most innocent and wondrous act in human reality—the conception and birth of a human child. We are asked to do this so that we will be “up to date,” because our only criterion of truth is what we choose, not the proper question, of whether what we choose is good or evil.

The Brighter Side of Hell - by Fr. James Schall, S. J.

In CREC

Hell has gotten a bad name. I am sorry to hear it.

I.

 

 If rightly understood, it is rather a positive teaching, even a freeing one. Hell has too few defenders. We are told, by learned scholars and other unsympathetic souls, that Hell is '"old-fashioned.'" It is '"out-of-date.'" No one, especially no one important or smart, is said to hold it any more. Therefore, it cannot be significant. If anyone has heard a sermon on Hell in his local parish in recent decades, he probably cannot remember it. No '"fire and brimstone'" is to be heard in the land. Or if something on the topic of Hell was heard, it was undoubtedly some reassuring preachment guaranteeing that this unpleasant topic was really nothing to worry about, even if we are inveterate sinners, especially if we are inveterate sinners. Obviously such inveterate sinners have the most to lose in case this curious doctrine is true. 

 

All is forgiven, But if anything perchance needs to be forgiven, we are assured, furthermore, that '"all is forgiven'" by a compassionate Maker. Most funerals these days, as far as I can tell, operate on this assumption. We give eulogies. We do not remind ourselves that we too are to follow. Not to worry, in any case. Forgiveness in theory becomes not sacramental but sociological. Poverty, ignorance, prejudice, compassion — these excuses, these exterior forces, rule our internal order to explain why we must do what we did. The internal order it not responsible to rule itself, as in the classical tradition. 

Hell has been depopulated by other enterprising thinkers. Terrible place, no doubt, but no one is in it. Even if it exists, which is improbable, it is likely that no one is in it actually suffering its famous pains and pangs. We even find proposals to save those said definitely to be roasting or freezing there, depending on one's theory of which is worse. Lucifer, for instance. The famous philosopher Jacques Maritain once wondered (and there is nothing wrong with speculations) if it would not be possible, in the divine mercy, to lift Satan out of Hell and deposit him in Limbo. The only trouble with that thesis is that Limbo is even less believed than Hell. Limbo was a place for those unbaptized souls who did not sin but who were also not redeemed. Hell was a place for those redeemed in the blood of the Lamb but who rejected its dimensions in their personal lives. In any case, it appears that to put anyone in Hell for whatever reason, however horrendous, is downright unseemly. It is against '"human rights.'" A '"good'" God, it is said, simply would not do such a nasty thing as put someone in Hell.

What are we to make of all of this confused thinking on a doctrine that is even found in Plato, not to mention rather prominently in divine revelation? Is it all that absurd or outlandish or unthinkable? Is Hell really a sign of God's impotence? Of His cruelty? We love to imagine that if we were God — which, to be sure, we are not — we would certainly not concoct such a place from which, evidently, no turning back can be discovered, no possibility of escape. The trouble with this hypothesis is that it is pretty difficult to find an alternative that is really better than the one we are given. Every alternative that I have ever seen ends up, finally, by removing our freedom, our happiness, or our minds.

We like, no doubt, to put ourselves in a position whereby we can judge God to have been at fault for coming up with such an absurd and cruel position. Hell, it is said, is a problem of God, not us. Any threat of Hell causes us all sorts of discomfort, especially now that many of what were formerly called '"sins'" are now called '"human rights.'" We presume to define what was evil to be good. We actually legislate what is good and evil. The list gets longer daily. Surely, we think, the Divinity could have figured out a better way? God seems to have had limited imagination not to have created a world in which Hell was no possibility for anyone actually existing in it. 

The fact, of course, is that God did come up with such a world '"in the beginning.'" Hell was not first invented by God and then, later on, seeing the mess human beings made of things, He decided to send human beings and angels there for safe keeping. It was the other way around. God first intended and created a world in which Hell did not exist, except maybe potentially. But He did intend a world in which real, finite human beings and angels existed and were destined for eternal happiness if they so chose. 

This situation of initially creating man for eternal life is that from whence God's problems with human beings arose. He could not create free creatures who were called to participate in His inner life unless they were, at the same time, actually free so to choose Him. Otherwise, they would have been — not free human beings or angels — but automata. Heaven, if it existed (or Hell for that matter) was not designed as a place for robots. Such latter beings, for whatever their worth, are not really capable of loving God by virtue of their own inner understanding and freedom.

Hell is simply the direct and necessary consequence of really free creatures refusing to choose God rather than themselves. They chose or preferred a world they thought they could make for themselves. Put in positive way, the doctrine of Hell is the guarantee of our individual and personal dignity. Without what it stands for — namely the basic seriousness and importance of our lives — we evaporate all concrete meaning from our existence. How so? 

But before we go into this question, it is first advisable to remind ourselves of just what the Church itself had historically taught on this often, to many people, unsettling doctrine. Various doctrines are emphasized or sometimes overemphasized in given eras of Church history. We can certainly say that Hell has been '"under-emphasized'" in the past century or so; probably overemphasized at other times. But there is a difference between what Christianity universally holds on a subject it finds in its sources of revelation and those doctrines that are popularly attended to or emphasized. What is ignored or neglected still remains within the doctrinal deposit of things to be known and held.

II.

 

First, then, I want simply to recall the brief paragraphs that the General Catechism of the Catholic Church devotes to Hell (#1033-37). These paragraphs in turn recall the passages in Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium in which this doctrine is indicated and explained. The discussion begins with the point made above, that is, '"We cannot be united with God unless we freely choose to love him.'" The doctrine of Hell, like the New Testament itself, is primarily an aspect of love, not of justice. The question of justice comes in only after the question of love has failed. Hell is directly related to our own choices, to the choices of what we choose to love in the concrete decisions of our lives.

'"To die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God's merciful love means remaining separated from Him forever by our own free choice.'" In this sense, we create or put ourselves in Hell. Mortal '"sins'" do exist. They must be acknowledged as our own acts put into effect against the rightness of our own natures. '"This state of definitive self-exclusion from community with God and the blesseds is called 'Hell.'" Thus, initially, we cannot really understand Hell if we cannot or will not understand love, including divine love. God Himself is, as it were, bound to what this reality of love is, since He is bound by what He is. We would not have it otherwise.

Recalling what is known as the '"Last Judgment,'" the Catechism refers to the fires and punishments for those who persistently do evil. While Hell may be primarily a spiritual thing, it is depicted also in terms of physical punishment, almost out of respect to the wholeness that we are, body and soul. We may not like this physical description, but it is not simply made up by the Church. Rather what Christ actually said on this topic is preserved in the Church, which cannot forget its own foundations. But the same Church never doubts that whatever physical punishment there may be, the spiritual suffering — the realization that we have rejected what we are — is always more serious. 

But just knowing what Hell is does incite us to ask, '"Why are we told these things?'" Obviously, we are told these things for our own good and for our own aid, indeed for our own illumination about what is. Thus man is asked to '"make use of his freedom in view of his eternal destiny.'" We often neglect to think of Hell or live as if it existed. Still it seems merciful on the part of God to let us know as best He can, that is, within the limits both of our freedom and of His, what happiness or punishment is in store for us as a result of our choices. God is not Himself, as some religious and philosophic theories hold, pure will who cam make right wrong and wrong right. He follows the goodness of what He is. Thus, this teaching on Hell becomes a '"call to conversion,'" if we need it, as we often do. We are reminded again that '"we know not the day nor the hour,'" so that this very uncertainty is an incentive to prepare ourselves for what we as mortals are about in this world.

Finally, the much misunderstood teaching about '"predestination'" is mentioned. '"God predestines no one to go to Hell.'" Predestination does not make us do what we do by some necessity outside ourselves. It is not a denial but an affirmation of free will, both God's and ours. Simply because God knows our free acts, it does not follow that He is doing the acting, not ourselves. If I see someone get up and walk away, my knowledge of his getting up does not make him determined to do so. Knowledge of a free action and cause of that free action are not the same. My knowledge of a free act includes the awareness of its freedom, otherwise, I do not know what really is. 

Moreover, we are to '"persist'" to the end. The fact that we sin is not fatal unless we choose to make it fatal. That is, it is our whole life and its orientation that interests God. Sinners can repent. Many do. The whole point of the Incarnation was the divine awareness that men sin but cannot save themselves by their own efforts because sin itself reaches the Godhead's love of us and others. That some pretty horrendous things happen among us by our own choices means that we need, at all times, a way to save ourselves from ourselves. This is the whole purpose of our redemption, to restore to us the possibility. But once a way of redemption is given to us, we still must avail ourselves of it. We still must choose to use it. Our personal salvation cannot take place without our freedom. Even God cannot make it otherwise because God too respects the dignity of His own creation of a free being.

III.

Let us grant that, in its origins, Hell is a teaching of both philosophy and religion. It is something we are not merely asked to know but also to think about. What positive meaning can it have? I would say, paradoxically, that no doctrine more vividly states or restates the importance of our daily lives and the choices therein than this doctrine. Ironically, its denial is not a formula for human liberation but a guarantee of ultimate human meaninglessness and insignificance. Why?

We can learn much about what is at issue from Plato, that is, from a pre-Christian philosopher, in many ways the greatest. Plato's whole philosophy was designed to direct our love and actions to the Good for its own sake, not for any motivation of reward and punishment. There is nothing wrong with doing many things for a motivation of reward or avoiding them for a motivation of fear or punishment. On the other hand, as Socrates saw at the end of The Republic, we did need to talk of rewards and punishments because it was quite clear that the best men are often killed, even by the state, and evil men are rewarded with great wealth and honor in the cities of this world. This situation is simply a fact that disturbs our sense of fairness. It seems to indicate that the world is very poorly made.

Hell, in other words, is a philosophic response to our sense of violated justice, a sense we all have on the hypothesis that the wicked are not really punished and the good not rewarded. Without an ultimate reckoning, beyond this life, many, if not most, evils and crimes performed in this world by individuals on others would go unpunished. Rewards would be wrongly distributed. If this ultimate reestablishment of order, in the form of a Hell or a Heaven, is not in effect, the world is made in vain. It is clear that there is a contradiction at the very heart of the world between what is right and what is carried out. So, without ever going into the question of religion on this topic, there is a case for Hell that flows from any basic insight into the human condition and its actual record over time. Not all crimes are punished, not all good deeds rewarded. The world, on this view, is simply unjust at its core. 

Let us take this argument a step further. Let us, for the sake of discussion, accept the proposition that there is no Hell. What follows from this denial? First, no ultimate requital of rewards and punishments in terms of deeds done takes place. What is wrong is not punished and what is right is not rewarded. Secondly, what follows, on the basis of this hypothesis that Hell does not exist, is that no human action really makes any difference for good or bad. The acts of the worst sinner or tyrant and the greatest saint become equivalent. Both end up the same way no matter what anyone does. Any effort to distinguish a noble and ignoble life falls apart if ultimately it makes no difference what we do. To be sure, we can introduce some taste criterion that would say that I prefer what are now called just deeds. But no ultimate reason exists why my deed or yours are preferable. Thus, in logic, the denial of Hell is not at all a neutral proposition. 

It is this consequence that inclines me to affirm that Hell is a very positive doctrine. More almost than any other teaching, it, indirectly perhaps, established the worth of my daily actions. At any moment, I can perform an act worthy of damnation, or one worthy of transcendent dignity. These actions do not take place in the clouds, but right here in my daily relationship with others and with myself. This realization is what it means '"when you did this to the least of my brothers.'" And this consequence is both for good and for evil. The ultimate dramas of existence take place everywhere, among the rich, the poor, the ordinary, the unusual. No one is in a privileged place where this drama, with its consequences, does not regularly take place. 

Obviously, this is not to maintain that such ultimate things happen every day as we brush our teeth or greet our neighbor. But they can and often do take on, through what the Catechism calls '"mortal sins'" or through acts of charity, transcendent meaning, They become a part of the free life and character we make of ourselves. Thus, Hell has the paradoxical function of enhancing our awareness of the meaning of our daily lives. This effect is not something morbid or upsetting, but something reassuring. Our lives are so ultimately important that we can lose them. But this possibility is placed before us so that we do not lose them. And we are not supposed to lose them. Hell exists to help us achieve what we are given in the first place, the promise of eternal life. But this life cannot just be automatically structured into our being so that we have nothing to do with its coming to be. 

In the end, Hell too exists that we might be free, free of what is most likely to prevent us from achieving the purpose of our existence. But freedom itself does not exist for its own sake. We are not free just to be free. We are free so that what we choose is something that is really worthy, really good, really existing. In short, we are free to reject what we are created for. That is, we are free to make ourselves the definition of our own happiness. If we do this, we are, by definition, in Hell — that is, we reject, by our own freedom, the purpose of our being. We can reject this. Both reason and revelation exist to advise and direct us to that end which is more glorious than any we might choose or make for ourselves. 

Thus, Hell is not such a bad doctrine. It has a lot of positive things about it if we take the trouble to think about it. Like all Christian truths, it is given to us to think about. In so doing, we can come to see that these doctrines contain a core understanding that directs us to what is Truth in itself. '"The road to Hell,'" it is said, '"is paved with good intentions.'" It is also paved with many insights into the very nature of our being that guide us to the truth of things and the importance of our existence.