What Does the Church Actually Teach about Hell?
A pedagogy focused on avoiding Hell is not of God
There is a real problem in the Church when priests and others focus their faithful parishioners on avoiding Hell as the reason for our faith. They will teach that we must make avoiding sin our priority or we risk eternal damnation. This is not what the Church actually teaches. Instead, the mission is to live synderesis—do good and avoid evil. Jesus said that his brothers and sisters are those who do the will of God. If you focus on doing good, doing God’s will, you will avoid doing evil by default.
There are even some Catholic influencers who preach the philosophy of Massa Damnata which is the vast majority of souls go to Hell. I do not teach this and I warn against it.
One member of the Catholic discord for the podcast Uncharted Catholic Man explains how a priest told him when he was seven years old that his parents and he were going to Hell because they did not go to Church. He was seven, he could not go unless his parents took him to Church. However, this admonition by a priest has traumatized him to this day.
It is just plain wrong that Catholic leaders terrorize their faithful that the prime reason for living our faith is to avoid Hell. It is a terrible injustice.
Magisterial teaching on Hell
First, does Hell exist? Yes, as Catholics this is part of the teaching of the Church. However, before we do any further teaching, we need to understand what Hell actually is and understand who actually goes there.
Pope John Paul II gave a definitive teaching on Hell during his general audience on July 28th 1999. It is a short discourse but comprehensive. The teaching of Hell is simple.
Let’s take a look at what the Church says about Hell.
God initiates salvation not damnation
One of the greatest fears is that God will send people to Hell. Their name is not found in the Book of Life and they will be judged wanting. Think of this as the child who angers a parent and gets written out of the will. The initiation and decision is the parent’s and the child cannot change this. This goes against the Church’s teaching. God does not initiate the condemnation to Hell like a parent will exclude a child from an inheritance. One suffers damnation by their own self-initiation. Pope Saint John Paul II explains Hell as: [T]he state of those who definitively reject the Father’s mercy, even at the last moment of their life. (§ 1)
So Hell, like Heaven, is not a place but a state of being. It is the fruit of an obstinate choice to separate oneself from God caused by one’s definitive decision to the end of their life.
The sainted pontiff further explains that the Old and New Testaments give graphic images of Hell but they are symbolic.
By using images, the New Testament presents the place destined for evildoers as a fiery furnace, where people will “weep and gnash their teeth” (Mt 13:42; cf. 25:30, 41), or like Gehenna with its “unquenchable fire” (Mk 9:43). All this is narrated in the parable of the rich man, which explains that hell is a place of eternal suffering, with no possibility of return, nor of the alleviation of pain (cf. Lk 16:19-31).
The Book of Revelation also figuratively portrays in a “pool of fire” those who exclude themselves from the book of life, thus meeting with a “second death” (Rv 20:13f.). Whoever continues to be closed to the Gospel is therefore preparing for “eternal destruction and exclusion from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might” (2 Thes 1:9). (§ 2)
Notice the representations are figurative and symbolic of an eternal destruction and exclusion from the Lord. They are not literal presentations.
Hell is a state of being where one chooses to cut him/herself off from God. The person obstinately refuses the mercy of God and any contact or desire for Him.
In the words of the prophet Isaiah:
15 Woe to those who hide deep from the LORD their counsel,
whose deeds are in the dark,
and who say, “Who sees us? Who knows us?”
16 You turn things upside down!
Shall the potter be regarded as the clay;
that the thing made should say of its maker,
“He did not make me”;
or the thing formed say of him who formed it,
“He has no understanding”? (Isaiah 29:15-16)
Catholic Biblical Association (Great Britain). (1994). The Holy Bible: Revised Standard Version, Catholic edition (Is 29:15–16). National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA.
The traditional aspect of Hell seen for much of the Twentieth Century and portrayed in venues like the Baltimore Catechism is that regardless of one’s relationship with God certain sins cause one to suffer damnation by default. That is not what the Church actually teaches. Instead, she explains that God always sends his grace to us to call us to repentance and to His mercy. The souls who go to Hell reject this gracious outpouring to the end. They would put up a spiritual version of a lead wall against the gamma-like rays of God’s grace. Their rejection is reflected in their actions.
The person who is bound for Hell, by their own choice, will act in a way that reflects no desire in any way for enjoying a relationship with God, experiencing his mercy or love.
Hell is the fruit of many selfish actions
I worked for a man who exemplified this and I learned, later, many despised him. Now, is he bound for Hell? I don’t know. He is still alive. When I knew him, he was nasty and mean to anyone but his drinking buddies. He did not care whom he hurt. If he received a phone call, you had to be careful what you said because you had no idea if the caller was his wife or his mistress. He took time off from work daily to go with his employee drinking buddies for the rest of the day; so much of the organization’s work did not get done. He was a boss, so he would scream at the other employees the next morning for being behind in their work despite being the cause of the problem.
Here is someone who had no desire to have any connection to God or even the devil—just himself. Going by that behavior, would you say he was bound for Hell? Of course.
That is a far cry from the person who oversleeps some Sunday morning and chooses not to go to Mass that day. Is that serious sin? Yes, because it opens one to the possibility of walking away from God altogether. Will someone end up in Hell because they missed Mass some Sunday after oversleeping? No, even by taking every jot and tittle of Magisterial teaching, this person did not reject a relationship with God. He or she just overslept and chose at that point it was not practical to go to Church.
Of course, this practice can become habitual which can then lead one away from God. That one act does not fulfill the criteria by any stretch of the imagination. It would be a serious warning, if it happened the following weekend as well.
The practice of teaching that we are bound for Hell and must work hard to avoid it without any reference to the salvation Jesus won for us on the Cross, is not only wrong, but the pope also proscribes it in his support of the teaching itself.
The thought of hell — and even less the improper use of biblical images — must not create anxiety or despair, but is a necessary and healthy reminder of freedom within the proclamation that the risen Jesus has conquered Satan, giving us the Spirit of God who makes us cry “Abba, Father!” (Rm 8:15; Gal 4:6).
This prospect, rich in hope, prevails in Christian proclamation. It is effectively reflected in the liturgical tradition of the Church, as the words of the Roman Canon attest: “Father, accept this offering from your whole family ... save us from final damnation, and count us among those you have chosen”. (§ 4)
Those who fill innocent Catholics with the fear of Hell leading them to leave the Church or focus away from Christ truly do a great disservice to the Church and must be avoided at all costs. In fact, I believe God will hold them accountable for their actions on judgement day.
The commandment is to love God and neighbor, not to avoid Hell. If you seek to live God’s will, you will not go to Hell. If you seek to avoid Hell first, you may do so without ever obeying God’s will and that is not the mission of the faithful Catholic.
Fr. Robert J Carr is pastor of St. Anthony Parish in Allston, MA
The parish podcast is at CatholicAudioMedia.com
The newest edition of Fr Robert J Carr's latest book is now available. Christ in Our Humanity. You can find it here.
I hear you, and I'm with you. But...(You knew that was coming, right?)
-It's not good spirituality, or good psychology to focus on running an away from something. And it's not good catechesis to make people run AWAY from Hell rather than encourage and inspire them to run TOWARD God. We have to be motivated by Love—even perhaps mystery—but not by fear.
-But I'd rather people be terrified of hell than to think Heaven is automatic, no matter what. The Church does not teach that either, yet that is people's default frame of mind. I think there needs to be a better balance.
-I have never in my life experienced the Hell-shaming or Hell-threatening you mention here. I keep hearing about these awful, evil wizards of the Church but I have yet to meet one in my entire life as a very active Catholic.
-Maybe repeating myself a bit, but I want to re-cap. Hell is real, people can actually wind up there. Many are on the road to perdition, few find the road to salvation, etc. etc. But hell should absolutely not be the main focus of any catechesis. It's limiting, it's boring, it's upside-down catechesis. "HELL, HELL, HELL" is the best a catechist or evangelizer has to offer, they're in the wrong business.
God bless and be with you. Thanks for great posts.
Father, the Priest telling the boy he and his family are going to hell is misguided, I believe your example of oversleeping and choosing to not go to mass being not a grave sin is equally problematic.
It is my understanding that there are three components to a mortal sin: grave matter, full knowledge, and full consent of the will. CCC 1857-61.
I believe it would be agreed that missing mass is a grave matter. (CCC 2192) Would understanding that be considered full knowledge? And I would think choosing then (upon waking) to not go to mass would be full consent of the will, no?
“The whole of man's history has been the story of our combat with the powers of evil, stretching, so our Lord tells us, from the very dawn of history until the last day. Finding himself in the midst of the battlefield man has to struggle to do what is right, and it is at great cost to himself, and aided by God's grace, that he succeeds in achieving his own inner integrity.” CCC 409
Overall I think your point of not scaring people to do good but doing good because of the Love of God should be the message. Yet what is done has to be directed to God to be a good.
“Things are only good only so far as they participate in God.” St. Catherine of Genoa, The Treatise on Purgatory.
Certainly we must fear the choices we make.
“Since we know neither the day nor the hour, we should follow the advice of the Lord and watch constantly so that, when the single course of our earthly life is completed, we may merit to enter with him into the marriage feast and be numbered among the blessed, and not, like the wicked and slothful servants, be ordered to depart into the eternal fire, into the outer darkness where "men will weep and gnash their teeth.” CCC 1036
St. Catherine of Genoa also writes “In passing out of this life the soul is fixed for good or evil, according to its deliberate purpose at the time… because after death the will can never be free, but must remain fixed in the condition in which it was found at the moment of death.”
What would happen to that man who overslept then chose not to go to mass if he died at that point after making the decision not to go having no time to repent?
We have moved 3 times since I joined The Church in 2018. In the 3 parishes as well as many more Masses I’ve attended while traveling I have maybe heard hell spoken about once or twice and not in any way that left the “fear” of hell in my mind. Yet that may have been to my detriment. Certainly Love should be the central message yet hell is very real and should be taught (more frequently than 0?) as well.