The following questions and answers have been taken from the book “Hell Quizzes to a Street Preacher” by the Catholic priest Charles M. Carty, published in the 1930s.
What do you mean by Hell?
Though the modernized man jokes about Hell, scoffs at it, doubts and denies it. Hell is the eternal lot of misery awaiting those who die in a state of grave sin and at enmity with God. Before the general resurrection, the soul alone experiences this misery; after the resurrection, the body will be reunited with that soul and will share in the misery, being tormented by created elements even as the person forsook God during life for the enjoyment of created things. The chief misery will be the sense of having lost happiness of the Vision of God; the other will be the torment of fire.
No sane intellect could assimilate so horrible a doctrine.
Sane reason does not demand unbelief. Human intelligence cannot fully comprehend the mystery of eternal suffering, but that does not alter the fact that Hell exists, even as our not fully comprehending the medium of wireless transmission does not alter the fact that some such medium does exist. And if the thought of Hell is horrible, the thought that there is no Hell is still more horrible. Grave sin against the Creator is a more horrible thing than the Hell to which it leads. And that a creature could mock its Creator with impunity is more horrible than the punishment such conduct deserves.
Catholics must hate the doctrine of Hell.
They do not hate the doctrine of Hell, for they love the truth as revealed by God. Then, too, this doctrine is the vindication of God’s justice, and it is not possible to hate the doctrine that God is justice itself. Catholics dislike the state of Hell of course; and hate the thought of anyone going there. But the doctrine they gladly accept.
What is the nature of Hell?
Hell is a state of eternal misery. Death in Hell would be a great mercy, only there is no death. There is but suffering, and an unending suffering in Hell. It is a departure from all that is good, holy, and beautiful. The misery of the privation of God is in proportion to the joy of the possession of God. The lost soul goes to remorse, suffering, and despair. There will be the remorse of eternal remembrance; not repentance, but consuming regret and degradation; regret that he should have to suffer thus; the degradation of his identification with sin. He is not so much in the act of sin as in the state of sin. Sin is, as it were, humanized in him. And consciousness of sin will come into its own. First sins bring fear and remorse to the timorous, shy, and pure conscience of a child. But men grow out of their conscience, and live it down. But what if the child conscience could knock at the heart of the grown man? And what if conscience were revived, and a man could get rid of neither his sins nor his conscience for all eternity? We can at least conceive of a mental Hell based on such a consideration.
But there is also a physical Hell of fire. There is a fire of Hell. It is not fire as we know it, for it is worse. Fire as we know it was but the nearest thing Christ could find to describe the sense-pains of Hell. And the soul will go to this remorse and suffering in utter despair. Our future is attractive so long as there is hope of some sort. If hope goes, there is only the despair of suicide. Only in Hell there is no suicide. “I am lost forever,” is the conclusive cry of a soul, made for happiness, yet never to attain it.
What evidence have you that such a Hell exists?
… There is a Hell in which both the bodies and the souls of the lost will be afflicted. Thus the gentle Christ Himself warns us, “It is expedient for thee that one of thy members should perish rather than that thy whole body go into Hell.” Matt. V, 30. Remember that all shall rise some day, the good and bad alike, the body sharing in the fate of the soul. “All that are in the graves shall hear the voice of the Son of God. And they that have done good things shall come forth unto the resurrection of life; but they that have done evil unto the resurrection of judgment.” Jn. V., 29. Those who are lost will go to everlasting fire. Christ called it “Unquenchable fire.” Mk. IX., 44. He tells us of the grim sentence, “Depart from me you cursed into everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels.” Matt. XXV., 41. Such a solemn utterance of the judicial sentence demands the literal sense. Judges do not speak in metaphors at such moments. “Let him be hanged — but of course only metaphorically.” And it will be conscious sufffering. Our Lord says, “Their worm dieth not, and the fire is not extinguished.” Mk. IX., 43. And again. “There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Matt. XIII., 50. Continued conscious suffering is the fate of the lost. And reason demands such fate. When a man sins gravely, he chooses between God and a thing forbidden by God. He cannot have both, and he prefers to renounce God rather than the created good. If he dies without repentance his will is still alienated from God. He would do the same thing again if he got the chance. And as long as these dispositions last, he must do without God and happiness. These dispositions lasting forever once this probationary life is over, so will the penalty.
How can you reconcile Hell with God’s love, justice, and mercy?
If I could not, that would but prove something wrong with my own ideas on the subject. For it is certain that God is loving, just, and merciful; and He has revealed that there is a Hell. So the ideas cannot be repugnant. However God’s love, justice, and mercy demand that there be a Hell. His love demands a Hell, for the more He loves the more He must hate sin. To the man who says that God loves too much to send a man to Hell, I simply reply that He sends no man there; men go there. And God has loved too much not to let them go there if they scorn, reject, and throw God’s love back in His face. Again, His justice demands that if a man dies rejecting an infinite goodness he should endure a penalty of a never-ending nature. If there were no eternal punishment, a man could cry to God, “You say, ‘Thou shalt not.’ I say, ‘I shall.’ Do Your worst. You cannot punish me forever. What care I for Your commandments or for Yourself! You must either make me happy in the end, or annihilate me, when I shall have escaped Your power.” It is impossible for the drama of iniquity to end like that. That would not be justice. And as for God’s mercy, already it is a mercy that man has the thought of Hell as an emergency brake to stop his headlong rush into vice. The truth that there is a Hell has mercifully saved many a soul from a life of blasphemy and sin, and still more often from death in a state of sin. And remember that God’s mercy is offered to every man over and over again during life. Mercy is asked for, not forced upon people. […] But men cannot have God’s mercy and reject it at one and the same time.
But Christ who came as the Revelation of God, was so kind and gentle!
That intensifies the force of the arguments for Hell. Only a grim reality could have forced Him to speak as He did. He taught Heaven and Hell equally. You cannot have Heaven because you like it and reject a Hell taught by the same authority because you do not like it. Think of His passion and death. If there were no Hell to save us from; if we all had to go to Heaven whether He were crucified or not, then His sufferings and death were foolish. Men wish to abolish Hell. There is but one way to do so. Let each man abolish his own Hell by repenting of his sins and endeavoring to serve God.
Your Hell is full of non-Catholics, who commit grave sin and do not know how to make an act of perfect contrition.
We do not know how far they understand the gravity of sin. As for the act of contrition, you are leaving out the greatest factor of all — God’s grace. In a flash God can enlighten the mind and move the will to a purely interior act of contrition of which the onlookers know nothing. And God alone knows how many are thus saved.
How could a mother be happy in Heaven with her child in Hell?
She could not, were her view of things limited by her present inadequate ideas. But with an unclouded view of what really constitutes goodness and of what really constitutes evil, she will have very different estimates in Heaven which will render happiness not only possible but a fact. Let us try to grasp it. Hell being a fact, our lack of understanding makes no difference. And in any case, Christ loved the child more than did the mother herself, yet He is happy in Heaven. So there must be some way out. You see, we cannot interpret Heaven in terms of this life. Here we are natural beings, our natural love directly awakened by our fellow beings. But in Heaven God Himself will be the direct object of our love. We shall love God, what God loves, and as God loves. All other beings will be loved in God. Thus Christ said concerning the difference of human love in Heaven that marriage shall not exist, but that men will be “as the angels of God in Heaven.” Matt, xxii., 30. Merely natural love will change to supernatural love in and through God, and people will be lovable insofar as they resemble God. If a son dies unrepentant, having identified himself with wickedness, then he will be the opposite of God. The mother will experience an absolute necessity to love God who is pure, just, holy, and truth itself. And she will find complete happiness in doing so. Her natural love for her son gives way to a supernatural love for him if he is pure, just, holy and truthful. But it gives way to her love for God if her child is impure, unjust, wicked and essentially a liar, as is the father of lies himself. Her transfer to Heaven has changed her reasons for loving her son, and if he dies in such evil dispositions she has no supernatural reason to love him.
All her happiness is in God, and that happiness cannot be disturbed. This may sound difficult. It must. For we are trying to explain conditions of Heaven by ideas drawn from our earthly experience, ideas which do not go far enough. The explanation gives a solution as far as the limited mind of man can go. And if it astonishes human reason, we should be more astonished still if our limited powers could fully grasp the matter.
He who sentences even the vilest creature to eternal torture is more cruel than the most cruel of men.
Cruelty is the infliction of punishment upon the innocent or beyond due measure upon the guilty. God is not cruel. He is just. When you mention cruelty, you unconsciously make appeal to the sentiment of human pity. Now, we pity involuntary evils. We pity the one who suffers involuntarily. We pity criminals who repent and try to make good. We pity them even before they repent if we feel that there is yet hope that they may do so. But we do not pity the man who hardens himself in his evil intentions — won’t repent, but tells us that he is going on with his malicious practices, no matter what we say, A mother who does not know how to punish does not know how to pity her child. Weakness leads to impunity. And remember that God sends no one to Hell. Men go there. God does not want them to go there, otherwise His warning us that there is a Hell would be absurd.
But how could a merciful God send anyone to Hell?
God sends no one to Hell. Fools go there. God warns us against Hell very seriously. If He wished us to go there, the last thing He would do would be to warn us against it. But none of these difficulties can avail against the fact. As surely as good and evil exist in this world, so do their counterparts in eternity — Heaven and Hell. And, above all, since God has said that there is a Hell, there is no use in urging our ideas as to whether there should be one or not. It is better to give our attention to the living of a life which cannot end in Hell. As Fr. Rickaby has pointed out, “There is only one way to abolish Hell; abolish your own by a good life.”
St. Michael the Archangel defeats the devils. Painting in the Jesuit church of Rome. Photo taken by Lawrence Lew OP in 2022, CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0, here.