A BURNING QUESTION
Pope quoted as saying there’s no hell
Few would be shocked to learn Pope Francis eschews a fire-and-brimstone view of the hell where pointy-eared demons eternally torture masses of broiling sinners.
But the pope’s reported declaration in an Italian newspaper this week reinterpreted the Catholic understanding of hell in a way that’s raising the hackles of theologians and leaving churchgoers scratching their heads.
“There is no hell,” Pope Francis was quoted as saying in an interview published this week with La Repubblica founder Eugenio Scalfari — an atheist friend of the pontiff. “There is the disappearance of sinful souls.”
Francis’s reply answered the kind of question asked by many coming up in the faith: “What about bad souls? Where are they punished?”
In the article titled “It is an honor to be called a revolutionary,” the pope is quoted as saying: “They are not punished, those who repent obtain the forgiveness of God and enter the rank of souls who contemplate him, but those who do not repent and cannot therefore be forgiven disappear.”
It’s not the first time Francis and Scalfari have taken up the subject. The author wrote in October 2017, “Francis has abolished the places where souls were supposed to go after death: hell, purgatory, heaven. The idea he holds is that souls dominated by evil and unrepentant cease to exist, while those that have been redeemed from evil will be taken up into beatitude, contemplating God.”
While the Catholic Church’s position on hell does not exactly spell out a ZIP code for the fiery furnace, it does “affirm the existence of hell and its eternity” and explains it’s where sinners descend after they pass on.
In response to the Francis interview, the Vatican scrambled to explain the statement was “not a faithful transcript” of the exchange between Francis and Scalfari, who is known to recreate his interviews from memory rather than notes or an audio recording.
The pope’s weighty position on hell prompted Peter Kreeft, a renowned Boston College theologian, to question the interview’s veracity.
“I doubt he said that, because it’s heresy outright,” Kreeft said, explaining hell’s existence had been doctrine since the 7th century.
The importance of hell, Kreeft added, is more than the eternal fire.
“If there’s no hell, then heaven is no big deal. If there’s no valley, the mountain isn’t very high.” Kreeft said. “If it doesn’t exist, then ultimately we don’t have free will. … Scratch the doctrine of hell and you find the possibility of free will underneath it. The details are not important: You don’t need to believe in fiery demons inserting hot pitchforks into unrepentant posteriors.”
Francis’s reported views of hell and the limited response from the Vatican kicked up a firestorm among some conservative Catholics.
“Nine hours to deny a clamorous heresy attributed to the Pope: it beggars belief, a thing that would merit the firing en bloc of all those responsible for Vatican communications,” Riccardo Cascioli wrote on the Catholic blog Rorate Caeli.
But the pope’s questioning lands him in good company.
In 1999, Pope John Paul II similarly rattled Catholics when he emphasized the eternal punishment was less about geography than separation from God.
“Rather than a place,” the Polish pope said, “Hell indicates the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy.”