An Apologetical Explanation of

Hell

How can a good and loving God send souls to Hell?

The Lord is not… wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.  (2 Pt 3:9)

God did not make death, and / he does not delight in the death of the living. / For he created all things that they might exist.  (Wis 1:13-14)

“If that wicked servant says to himself, ‘My master is delayed,’ and beings to beat his fellow servants, and eats and drinks with the drunken, the master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he does not know, and will punish him, and put him with the hypocrites; there men will weep and gnash their teeth.”  (Mt 24:48-51)

Hell is the state of eternal separation from communion with God and the blessed in Heaven.  God sends no one to Hell without that person having chosen complete separation from him.  In allowing us the freedom to choose good or evil, God necessarily allows each person to accept him or to reject him.

Those who die having willfully and definitively rejected God and his salvific grace—often by violating his Commandments in a grievous manner and then refusing repentance—place themselves in Hell, the state of eternal self-exclusion from his presence.  Thus, the souls in Hell are those who die stubbornly unrepentant of mortal sin by refusing the love and mercy of God to the end.  Jesus spoke often of Hell as “fire” and “darkness” where the damned will “weep and gnash their teeth” (Lk 13:28).  The souls in Hell continually suffer separation from God even as they wallow in hatred of him.  (Cf. CCC 1035-1036)

We cannot be united in God unless we freely choose to love him.  We cannot love God if we sin grievously against him, our neighbor, and our own selves.  “He who does not love remains in death.  Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.” (1 Jn 3:14-15)  To die in mortal sin—without repentance and without seeking refuge in the compassionate love of God—implies a willful choice to be separated from him.  God respects our freedom and will not force us to choose him or abide by his will.  (Cf. CCC 1033-1034)

God wills that all people will be saved and become one with him.  The liturgy of the Church prays that all may seek and find God and that his mercy may draw everyone into eternal life.  (Cf. CCC 1037)

The Catechism addresses this question in paragraphs 1033 and 1037.

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