My dear friends,
Pope John Paul II is not mistaken. He is not contradicting centuries of Church teaching. So why are two short paragraphs, read at two general audiences in late July, 2001 still generating controversy?
I am speaking, of course, about the Holy Father's pronouncements on heaven and hell. Media coverage made it seem as if the pope was re-writing theology.
While I would expect the media to over-simplify, due to the limitations of time, space and deadlines, or simply because of theological ignorance, I cannot fathom why life-long Catholics are disturbed by the pope's words.
He has said nothing that cannot be found in the Church's Catechism:
“This perfect life with the Most Holy Trinity … is called Heaven. Heaven is the ultimate end and fulfillment of the deepest human longings, the state of supreme, definitive happiness.” (#1024)
“To die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God's merciful love means remaining separated from him forever by our own free choice. This state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed is called hell.” (#1033)
Note the words “state of being”, one in the presence of God, the other outside it. This has been the constant teaching of the Church for centuries. This is what the pope reiterated at his general audiences. So why the furor?
Because the pope did not say that heaven was an actual place in the sky, among the clouds. Because he did not say that hell was a fiery furnace somewhere below us. And because people who want their theology to be literal and concrete jump to the erroneous conclusion that, therefore, the pope was denying the existence of heaven and hell.
But we're talking about faith here, and faith, by its very nature, is not concrete. If we could pinpoint the location of heaven and view it through a telescope, its existence would be a fact of science, not a tenet of faith.
“Eye has not seen, ear has not heard … what God has prepared for those who love him,” wrote St. Paul to the Corinthians (1Cor 2:9)
How can humans envision what “eye has not seen”? How can heaven be painted on a canvas, or described in words? Artists over the centuries have done so by depicting cherubs and clouds surrounding a white-bearded man sitting on a throne. Jesus himself described heaven as “my Father's house,” a place with “many mansions.”
Are we to take those words literally? Are we to assume that a Medieval artist saw what St. Paul did not? Are we to believe that God has a white beard? Of course not. The same is true of hell. No one has come back from the dead to describe it, although the poet Dante's depiction is frighteningly memorable.
True, the Bible speaks of Gehenna as a place of “unquenchable fire”. And the Book of Revelation describes the Son of Man as “coming amid the clouds.” But those are literary tools, figures of speech, to convey the endless torment of hell and the majesty and power of God.
Just as truths are conveyed to children in story form, so the Bible conveys God's truths in ways that human beings can comprehend. It cannot be taken literally. We must look beyond the words themselves to the message they convey. We must move beyond childhood in our spiritual lives.
And so Pope John Paul II correctly communicated the Church's centuries-old teaching on heaven and hell. Each is a state of being — one of eternal happiness, because our souls were created for union with God; the other of eternal suffering, because we chose to reject God's love.
The point is that the choice is ours. We make it by the way we live our lives.
I suggest, then, that we stop agonizing over their appearance — either way, we will see for ourselves soon enough — and start making strides in our personal life toward the celestial dwelling.
