Tomorrow will
be the forty-fifth anniversary of the infamous Roe vs. Wade decision, forced
on the American people in 1973 by seven men in total denial of the founding
principle of the “inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness.” Only Byron White and William Rehnquist have the moral right to
call themselves “Justices” of the 1973 Supreme Court.
Please pray to
end every attempt to take away innocent human life from conception to
natural death!
Ordinary of the Mass
Mass Text - Latin
Mass Text - English
Chair of Unity Octave Prayer
The Reality of
Sin and Hell
“The children of the kingdom shall be cast out into the
exterior darkness,
and there shall be much weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
One of the great travesties that truth has suffered
during the past thirty years or so is the denial that there is such a thing
as sin; and the denial that unrepentant sinners will be punished eternally
in the place we call hell.
The Modernists have twisted Catholic teaching in order
to justify almost every kind of sinful behavior. They started by telling us
that there was no sin if we didn't harm anyone. Then they suggested that
sin required a positive intention to offend God. Later they informed us
that sometimes sin was allowed because of the circumstances in which we
found ourselves; that a good result would justify any kind of bad behavior.
Some of them tell us that sin is not defined in terms of God at all, but
merely represents the failure to make full use of our human potential as
individuals and, particularly, as a society.
All of these ideas, of course, are nonsense. God has
given us the ability to distinguish between right and wrong, and insists
that we do our best to avoid evil and to do good—without any excuses about
inconvenience, victim-less crimes, social development, or whatever. Our
whole purpose for being on this earth is to glorify God and later to share
His happiness in heaven—not for any of the humanist purposes advanced by the
Modernists.
The Modernists have likewise twisted Catholic teaching
about the reality and the eternity of punishment for those who repeatedly
break God's laws and who have no sorrow for their sins. Some of them will
tell you that hell was just a medieval idea, intended to scare immature
people to obey the law; that mankind is now more mature and no longer in
need of such “stories.” Others will suggest that hell is not a place, nor
is it real; that it is just a state of mind in which we punish ourselves
only temporarily. And even among those who admit the reality of hell, many
insist that God's mercy will not allow it to punish eternally—that some day
it will fade away, releasing all souls to heaven.
Once again, these ideas are nonsense. Just as sin is
real, hell is real! And as it is real, it is eternal. God is merciful, but
He is also just.
Hell was created for the fallen angels; those,
following Lucifer, that rebelled against God and insisted on being regarded
equally with Him. The nature of angels is such that their decisions are
irrevocable; they know all there is to know about the consequences of their
actions, and they never change their minds. Hell must be eternal, even if
just for these fallen angels, for they will be in eternal rebellion against
God. And certainly, a similar eternal punishment is appropriate for people
who have had a lifetime to consider their actions, yet remain impenitent
even at the moment of death.
Our Lord is quite specific about the eternity of hell
whenever He mentions it in Sacred Scripture. He speaks of “unquenchable
fire, where the worm dies not, and the fire is not quenched.”
He speaks of those who will not help their fellow man, commanding them to
“Depart into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and
his angels.
He tells us that there are sins that will “not be forgiven in
this world or in the world to come.”
We are given to understand that the punishment of hell
is twofold. The primary pain of hell is the pain of loss—of knowing both
that God is infinitely good, and simultaneously that we have lost God
forever. This, of course, compounded by the realization that “my loss is
the result of my own stupidity—no one else is to be blamed.” God extended
His graces to us abundantly—in the thousands of Masses we did not attend, in
the millions of prayers we did not say, in all the good advice we did not
take, and in all the good examples we did not imitate—God extended His
graces to us and we ignored them. All of the joy, and peace, and beauty we
should have enjoyed over eternity with God is hopelessly lost. That is the
primary pain of hell.
The secondary pain is actual punishment; pain of the
senses. It is presumably something like fire, yet obviously somewhat
different in that it inflicts pain on both the devils and the spirits of the
reprobate, and after the General Judgment, on the bodies of the damned.
Apparently it will burn without consuming, in order to last forever.
Perhaps with reference to our Lord’s words about “the
exterior darkness” it has long been conjectured that “the flames of hell
give heat but no light.”
Imagine eternal blindness added to all the rest!
I've never cared much for preaching about the awful
pains of hell, but they are a reality—a very dangerous reality, about which
the devil would like to have us confused. For the devil is envious that we
are not in hell, and would like us to be tricked into thinking that hell is
only a minor annoyance, so that we can share his misery for eternity. The
devil knows that he cannot have God, so he wants us not to have Him either.
But, as they say, “Forewarned is forearmed.” And
perhaps by knowing something of the reality of sin and the eternity of hell,
we will change our lives in whatever ways are necessary to avoid hell and to
gain heaven. We can try to cultivate faith like the centurion in today's
Gospel—the faith that set him apart from those “cast out into the exterior
darkness.”—the faith that made our Lord want to heal the leper. And we can
try to overcome the evils in our lives as St. Paul tells us in today's
epistle, “not being overcome by evil, but rather overcoming evil by doing
good.”
