Hell exists, says the Pope, as eternal lovelessness - not as a bad day at work, writes Kate Holmquist
If you thought hell was Temple Bar on a Saturday night, or 12-hour travel delays in Heathrow in the company of small children, or a job as Britney Spears's therapist or even a corked wine after waiting an hour to be seated in your favourite restaurant, you're a wimp. Because hell isn't just a figure of speech - or even a poetic image for having had a rough day - Pope Benedict XVI declared this week.
Prepare to be kebabed in an everlasting inferno. Or did he say that? What did he actually mean? Hell "really exists and is eternal, even if nobody talks about it much any more", the Pope told an educated group of worshippers in a tiny church in a northern suburb of Rome.
Instantly, the world's media said "right-wing German hellfire conservative, here he goes again" - surely, the Pope knew that. Because you have to be a theologian familiar with the Pope's statements since 1968 to understand him in context.
Seriously, without the opaque musings of Pope Benedict XVI, eschatologists - theologians who specialise in the afterlife - would be unemployed.
Pope Benedict wasn't talking about a real place of hellfire and damnation, asserts theologian Bernadette Toal, a mother of three who teaches at the Milltown Institute, but about a state of utter lovelessness entered by people who don't know the meaning of the word. "I don't think [ hell] exists - we don't know about the afterlife, do we? The idea of hell as a place where you burn eternally is coming from a mindset that viewed God as judge and prosecutor. It's not an idea that's in the bible; it's not from Jesus."
Fr Jim Corkery, a Jesuit priest and theologian who also teaches at Milltown Institute, agrees that hell is not a physical place: "[ The Pope] is saying that if people close their hearts to love they are opening themselves to loneliness, self-isolation, a complete absence of love." And he's not talking about well-meaning Ireland coach Steve Staunton's predicament, but about the sort of complete SOB who "walks over anybody to get what he wants".
So, if hell doesn't "really exist", why did the Pope bring it up? Toal thinks he may have been referring to global warming and our desecration of the planet creating hell on earth. Fr Corkery refers to the Pope's previous references to our creation of a consumerist society.
Anyone who took the time to read the Pope's full blog would know that the Pope believes that hell is "the ultimate consequence of sin itself. Rather than a place, hell indicates the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy".
Okay, we get the point. Hell is a state of being completely without love. And no, owing €20 million to the Revenue doesn't count as long as you repent. What sort of a person goes to this hell place of total lack of love? Hitler, suggests Fr Corkery. "If the Pope were to say that Hitler wasn't going to hell, people would be outraged." So hell doesn't exist, unless you're very, very bad. There's always a loophole.
Today's first communion children aren't told about hell at all. They're told a lot about love. But lots of older people still believe in hell and damnation and spend the last few years of their lives making sure they don't go there, says Fr Corkery. Limbo is gone, but luckily, for those guilt-freaks out there, we still have purgatory. Purgatory traditionally has been seen as a sort of hell-lite, where you are punished a little bit but not too much, says Fr Corkery. For the truly spiritual Catholic, purgatory is actually a state of "spiritual rehab", where you really are trying very hard to get the programme in advance of entering heaven, an enriching experience in itself in his view.
Indulgences still exist too, so if you leave all your money to the Catholic Church and stop along the way to repent, you've got a first-class ticket to heaven. Toal says indulgences are a legacy of a feudal money-making racket, and she doesn't take them seriously.
The thing is, how seriously do we still take the statements of the Pope, when we have to get consultants in to figure out what he really means?