Catholic Dogma on Hell (I)

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JMJ

Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

I have loved thee with an everlasting love… (Jer. 31.3) And so God destined us to a life of eternal happiness with Him beyond the grave. But to spurn God and His claim to our first love and charity (cf., Apoc. 2.4), this loss of what consists our eternal good and happiness is only logically made palpable by the most excruciating pain in the eternal fires of hell – originally prepared for the devil and his angels (Mt. 25.41). “Eternal woe is due to him who destroys in himself eternal good,” says St. Augustine, and this same great Saint and Doctor of the Church adds, “It is right that he who rejects God should be rejected by God” (in Frs. Spirago-Clarke, The Catechism Explained). “Thus,” says St. John Damascene, “the pains of hell are due not so much to God as to man himself” (in ibid.). St. John Chrysostom applies the words of St. Paul to the kind of everlasting pain and torments that await sinners in hell: Neither eye hath seen nor ear heard, nor hath it entered the heart of man to conceive what God has prepared for them that love Him not (1 Cor. 2.9).

Our Lord Jesus Christ exhorts us to fear God, Who can destroy both soul and body in hell (Mt. 10.28). Thus, the Good and Tender Shepherd Himself teaches us, contrary to what the Neo-Catholic hierarchy subtly projects or at times unequivocally presents (cf., our post “The Ultimate Delusion of VaticanII ‘Catholicism’”) to suit the perverted mentality of the modern age, that mercy and wrath are with Him (Ecclus. 16.12), that being the true God of BOTH mercy AND justice He is mighty to forgive, and to pour out indignation (ibid.). Hence the true Catholic Church teaches that “God is infinitely just, i.e., He rewards all good and [rigorously] punishes all evil deeds” – a truth which cannot be "rendered obsolete with the passing of the times," as is the anathematized delusive pretention of the perverted Modernists.

Sacred Scripture tells us “that on account of one single sin, that of our first parents, [billions] of men have to suffer pain and death; and countless numbers will be miserable forever. Thence we gather how God hates sin. The same conclusion follows from the fact that Our Lord had to die an agonizing death to atone for sin [as demanded by the rigors of divine justice]. But our fear of God must be filial [a special gift of the Holy Ghost] not a servile fear, that is, we must fear not so much the punishment of sin, as the offence against so good, loving, compassionate, and most generous Divine Being [– the result of a great Christian charity]. Yet we must try and avoid, from fear of punishment, those sins from which the yet imperfect love of God is not sufficient to deter us" (Fr. Spirago, The Catechism Explained).


Related post: "The Blessed Virgin Mary at Fatima: Hell exists"