Don’t worry everyone, Hell still exists
Mar 30, 2018, 7:15 AM
The Vatican denied a story that misquoted Pope Francis. The story claimed the Pope said there was no hell. (File, Associated Press)
(File, Associated Press)
It was one of those headlines that’s too dramatic to be true, but you click anyway.
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The headline was on a Conservative news website and it read “Pope Francis: ‘There Is No Hell’.”
It referenced an article in which the Pope was asked “where are bad souls punished,” and he replied, they’re not punished, they simply disappear. The exact quote, translated from Italian was, “There is no hell, there is the disappearance of sinful souls.”
That the Pope would upend approximately 2,000 years of Catholic teaching right before Easter seemed implausible. Yet, I will admit, given that Pope Francis does like to shake things up, I thought, well, maybe he concluded Hell has had its day. Eternal damnation is a pretty stiff sentence. We’ve seen a wave of sentencing reform; some states are even re-thinking their three-strikes laws.
You can imagine the crowding situation in Hell.
Or, maybe after the news this past week, the Almighty decided that spending a lifetime on Earth tracked by social media was punishment enough. Hell would just be piling on.
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But then I thought, no way! You have to have Hell. Where would you put all the robocallers?
And sure enough, the Vatican quickly denied the story and assured everyone that Hell is still there, and the article in question was “not a faithful transcription of the Holy Father’s words.”
So, as you were.
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