IN A supposedly Catholic country such as the Philippines, the variety of gods has continued to mushroom even among consistent Sunday Mass goers.
There’s a god who does not really mind live-in arrangements outside of marriage, there’s a god who backs “inclusivity” in every sex lifestyle, etc., there’s yet another god who is contended with occasional prayers and excuses frequent sexual dalliances, etc.
These gods are in our neighborhoods and obeyed faithfully in daily lives. They thrive well because they are creations of assorted personal conveniences and excuses, certainly not the God who is strict about the Ten Commandments, Who tells us about the narrow gate and the way of the cross.
And there are people who, living with health and abundance, think of a god whose mercy will guarantee them true remorse and thus salvation in their last moments anyway.
I am reminded of writer John Young in catholicculture.org who wrote: “What of a deathbed conversion? Surely God may move people in a state of mortal sin to repentance when they are dying. True, he may, but there is no sound reason for assuming that a person who has deliberately rejected God by remaining in a state of mortal sin will be converted just before dying. Indeed, such persons sometimes resist all pleas to have a priest before they die; they seem to have lost all desire to repent.”
It’s not infrequent to hear people say they would not go to hell because they haven’t committed serious sins as, say, Judas Iscariot or Adolf Hitler did.
Again, I see the works of John Young as being appropriate: “An associated hindrance to seeing how hell could ever be just is the failure to realize that a lost soul puts himself there, in the sense that what he becomes by his own free will leaves no option for him except hell. It is the natural consequence of his choice, the only state he is fit for. And even in hell, theologians teach, God’s mercy may ensure that the damned suffer less than they deserve.”
The last sentence is striking, saying that one doesn’t have to kill millions of Jews to qualify for hell. A lesser sinner may not be plunged into the deepest recesses of hell like Hitler, but could still deserve the eternity of hell above Hitler’s abode, but also eternally. (BTW, many exorcists believe Hitler is in hell as could be gathered from diabolically possessed people.)
Of course, there are people whose gods never even created hell, so they pursue lives of unbridled fun, run by the philosophy that it’s all okay for as long as you do not hurt any other human being. This is a philosophy totally disregarding spirituality, for harm to one’s soul (by sinning against God’s Decalogue) leads to disequilibrium to humanity that calls for retributive balancing. Something like the case of Adam and Eve’s original sin that has affected us all.
In the case of Catholics, junking belief in hell is to waste all what could be learned from the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Fatima, Portugal in 1917.
There, the Blessed Mother allowed three children to see hell. One visionary, Lucia dos Santos, described hell thus: “Plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form, like transparent burning embers, all blackened or burnished bronze, floating about in the conflagration, now raised up in the air by the flames that issued from within themselves together with great clouds of smoke, now falling back on every side like sparks in a huge fire, without weight or equilibrium, and amid shrieks and groans of pain and despair, which horrified us and made us tremble with fear.”
Again, here’s writer Young on the eternity of hell: “There is something infinite about mortal sin; not in the sense that it would be an infinite act (our acts are only finite), but in the sense that it insults an infinite being. The greatness of the offense must be seen in relation to the greatness of the one off ended. Once we grasp this, it becomes less difficult to see that even one mortal sin deserves hell.”
