A Simple Prescription for a Fatal Condition

Mundabor discusses here the very real prospect of Hell, and the power of the Rosary.


His post is well worth reading and needs no comment from me.


God bless!

YUP, WE BUGGED HELL! NOT NICE, NOT NICE AT ALL!

The lords of Pandemonium, when at dinner
Have choice of every kind of deadly sinner.
Who knows what most delights their debased palate,
The bloody tyrant, or perverted prelate?

Said Satan seated at the nightly feast,
"I'll have the Bishop, Beelzy, you the Priest."
Beelzebub replied with face downcast,
"You get the heretic, I the pederast."

From Belial, "Think how Bodily Ressurection
"Will so enhance our great House of Correction.
The shrieking soul, with cringing flesh complete,
Basted, crisped, quivering on a piping plate."

I CANNOT IMAGINE THEM IN HELL

This story is, I believe, completely true, but I do not know how it ended. I am telling it only as an footnote to my last post.

Nine years ago when I was working for a homelessness charity in central London, I was key-worker to a young Muslim resident, aged 17, from a West African country. His parents, who were dead, had been Egyptian shopkeepers in a small town and during the civil war, militia arrived at the shop and told him, "We are going to kill your family, but if you are a brave boy and don't cry, you can come with us and be a soldier."

He was 13 years old.

He said they butchered his mother, father, and sisters in front of him, he did not cry, and for the next two years, until he was 15, he was an irregular soldier, killing, raping, using drugs, living in terror at what he was doing.

The most horrible thing he told me was that when they came across a pregnant woman, they would take bets on whether the child was a boy or a girl, and disembowel the woman to settle the matter.

He cried continually while telling this.

He escaped and made his way, a long way, to Zimbabwe, where he was cared for by Protestant missionaries who arranged and paid for him to come to London.

In London, he attended a secondary school in a South London suburb, where he passed his GCSEs while living rough on the streets. I telephoned his former head teacher who confirmed this.

When I knew him, he was still smoking cannabis, and perhaps sometimes crack cocaine. Without self-pity, he talked mainly about his feelings of remorse and guilt, and how he might atone to God for his wickedness.

He would not go to a mosque, so I spoke to a helpful mullah on his behalf, who said that God would accept his sorrow and penitence and forgive him. I did not need the mullah to tell me that, but he did. I am not sure he accepted the assurance.

Unfortunately the hostel closed and I never heard what happened to him, only that he had been given a flat.

I regularly pray for him and for so many of my clients (as we called them) from 2000-2005. In some ways they were the most penitent people, always trying and (like the rest of us) often failing to be the people they wanted to be.

And I cannot imagine them in Hell.

HELL? ARE YOU SERIOUS?

Caveat: this is an inquiry, not dogmatic assertion. I am no theologian. Please don't get angry.

Long ago I read somewhere that St Augustine said or wrote that the Blessed in Heaven wouls be allowed a pain-free visit to Hell to witness for themselves the Justice of God. I can nowhere find any reference to this, but the idea has stayed with me for 40 years.

Hell certainly terrifies me, sometimes to the point of insomnia, not as a horror film adddict is pleasantly scared, but as the prospect of nuclear war scared most people during the Cuban missile crisis: as a terrible possibility which we know will happen to some people at some future time.

It's been fashionable (and not necessarily incorrect) for a long time now to picture Hell as a state of denial of the Beatific Vision, with the inevitable terrible grief and longing which that state would entail. Such an unassuageable spiritual hunger and thirst is both imaginable and terrifying.

The older picture is of fire, ice, unspeakable filth, and tormenting devils, as depicted by St Alphonsus Liguori, and if we accept, as we must, the Resurrection of the Body, it seems that physical torment will be part of the punishment in Hell.

Polish friends assert that St Faustina was a universalist and believed that, ultimately, everyone will be saved. Julian of Norwich seems to be of the same mind, asserting that "all shall be well". If St Faustina was right, the suffering will be terrible, but only temporary, perhaps only a few million years. Some Poles say that the canonisation of St Faustina may have put the Church's seal of approval on universalism.

The questions that exercise my mind are:

1. Would you or I wish such horror on the worst person who ever lived? I have to admit that, as to people whose sufferings I would like to witness on a Heavenly excursion to Hell, I might have a little list. But then, I am an unworthy, nasty, angry man.

2. Does God will such horror?

3. If not, why does He not prevent it, and allow for the ultimate presence in Heaven of everyone, however wicked? Jesus said ,"Their fire is not quenched", and I suppose He meant that it will last forever.

4. If He does will it, should we not rejoice in His will, and so in the triumph of Divine Justice, and so in the existence of Hell?

And therefore, should we not look forward to such an excursion as a chance to further understand and rejoice in God's Perfect Justice?