• The Vatican Rekindles Hell
    Awake!—1980 | June 8

    • The Vatican Rekindles Hell

      BY “AWAKE!” CORRESPONDENT IN FRANCE

      “FIRM Reminder from Vatican.” “Hell Revisited.” “Has Hell Misfired?” “The Teachings of the Church on the Hereafter Must Be Safeguarded​—Christians Distressed.”

      Those are just a few of the newspaper and magazine headlines that greeted the letter relating to hell published last year by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It was duly approved by Pope John Paul II.

      This official letter reminded all Catholic prelates and theologians of the “need for perfect faithfulness to the fundamental truths of the faith.” Among these it included the survival after death of the “soul,” “bliss for the just” and “punishment for the damned” in “hell” throughout eternity.

      Commenting on this pope-approved Vatican document, the Paris daily Le Monde wrote: “Concerning hell, the Roman Congregation gives a reminder that such punishment is real and that it lasts ‘forever.’ This dogma is undoubtedly the one that raises the most problems in the modern mind. . . . It is the most depressing and improbable of all dogmas. The Roman Congregation that has replaced the Holy Office has brutally reminded us of it, with no commentary and without the slightest effort to explain it.”

  • The Vatican Rekindles Hell
    Awake!—1980 | June 8

    • Middle-Ages Scarecrow or Current Dogma?

      “All hope abandon, ye who enter here.” Such was the inscription placed over the gates of hell in Dante’s Inferno. This 14th-century poem depicts hell as a deep pit divided into nine circles going down to the center of the earth where Satan dwells. Each circle represented a greater degree of suffering and punishment.

      That medieval Italian poet made an imaginary word picture of what was then current Catholic dogma and had been ever since earliest times of the Roman Church. The horrible sufferings of hell have also been depicted over the centuries by artists. “Last judgment” paintings are to be seen in many Catholic churches and in museums all over the world. The most famous one likely is Michelangelo’s huge fresco in the Vatican’s Sistine chapel, said to have scared the wits out of Paul III, one of the popes who had commissioned the painting.

      Frightening too are the sculptured portals of many Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals in Europe. For example, millions of tourists visiting Paris feel a shudder when they gaze at the terrifying “last judgment” scenes carved into the stonework above the central doorway of Notre Dame Cathedral. There is no gainsaying that what is depicted in these various works of art is excruciating physical torment of a literal kind.

      “Oh, yes,” the modern educated Catholic will reply, “but these artistic representations merely show that the hellfire dogma was used in the Middle Ages to scare ‘simple souls’ into serving God. These days, enlightened Catholics know that these ‘last judgment’ scenes symbolize the mental anguish of the damned who are deprived of being in God’s presence.”

      But this loophole places the Catholic Church in a dilemma. If all these artistic works depicting hell are a misrepresentation, why was the most famous of them, located right in the Vatican, commissioned by two popes (Clement VII and Paul III)? If, on the other hand, they give a true picture of official Church dogma, then why have Catholic priests been allowed to soft-pedal such a vital doctrine for so long?