The fires of Hell are real and eternal, Pope warns

The Times (UK) ^ | March 27, 2007 | Richard Owen

[lexington minuteman 1775]

Wow, I really like this Pope! You go dude!

[JeeperFreeper]

Hell and Satan exist.

[ElkGroveDan]

This news won't go over well in the bathhouses.

[Bosco]

Jesus talked about hell a lot...

[chadwimc]

God had given men and women free will to choose whether “spontaneously to accept salvation . . . the Christian faith is not imposed on anyone, it is a gift, an offer to mankind”.

How does the pope reconcile this teaching with infant baptism?

[therut]

Many churches talk about Satan and hell. Everyone I ever went to does and did. MSNBC had a blip about this amazing thing that the POPE I tell you the POPE says there really is a HELL. IMAGINE THAT. They were shocked.

[nhoward14]

Well... this ought to make a few liberal Catholic priests start squirming in their vestments.

[GSlob]

"Who of you died, let him appear at the Corps Headquarters within three days so that his corpse may be besprinkled with holy water..." [Chaplain Otto Katz, per Yaroslav Hasek]

[Jack Wilson]

Worse than global warming?

[tranzorZ]

Even though I am not Catholic, I like this Pope. He is a good Christian and is seems to be Europe's secular conscience.

But I have a very serious question: does Jesus ever use grim reaper samurai to collect good ghost and eliminate the bad? A friend who I asked looked at me as if I were out of my mind and told me I was watching to much TV. I still think it is possible.

[HaveHadEnough]

Hell is a place where sinners really do burn in an everlasting fire, and not just a religious symbol designed to galvanize the faithful, the Pope has said.

In 1999 Pope John Paul II declared that Heaven was “neither an abstraction nor a physical place in the clouds, but that fullness of communion with God which is the goal of human life.” Hell, by contrast, was “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”.

Is the current Pope saying that the last Pope was mistaken in thinking that hell was not a "place"?

[Maceman]

[pleikumud]

I wonder if the Pope believes that Islamic terrorists are going to burn in hell. How about Saddam Hussein and his henchmen, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Kim, Chavez, Castro, and the Democrats?

[Tolkien]

Well duh!!

Jesus said it first. The debate is over!!

[shekkian]

In October the Pope indicated that limbo, supposed since medieval times to be a “halfway house” between Heaven and Hell, inhabited by unbaptised infants and holy men and women who lived before Christ, was “only a theological hypothesis” and not a “definitive truth of the faith”.

Is this the same thing as "Purgatory"?

[Revelation 911]

Hell is a place where sinners really do burn in an everlasting fire

as anyone who has drank the water in cozumel can attest

[blaquebyrd]

"Well... this ought to make a few liberal Catholic priests start squirming in their vestments."

Yeah, like all of the priests who raped little boys for decades while the church covered it up. I'm thinking there's a special place in hell for them.

[RoadTest]

""God had given men and women free will to choose whether “spontaneously to accept salvation . . . the Christian faith is not imposed on anyone, it is a gift, an offer to mankind”.

How does the pope reconcile this teaching with infant baptism?""

Good question.

[bigbob]

Worse than Algore droning on about global warming for all Eternity?

OK, I think I get the point!