[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"?

[pgyanke]

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

This language of place is, according to the Pope, inadequate to describe the realities involved, since it is tied to the temporal order in which this world and we exist. In this he is applying the philosophical categories used by the Church in her theology and saying what St. Thomas Aquinas said long before him.

"Incorporeal things are not in place after a manner known and familiar to us, in which way we say that bodies are properly in place; but they are in place after a manner befitting spiritual substances, a manner that cannot be fully manifest to us." [St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Supplement, Q69, a1, reply 1]

Source

[Campion]

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

That was a mistranslation. The Italian word JP2 used was piu, which is sometimes translated "rather," but more often translated "more". "More than a place, hell is ..."

The Pope's point was that hell is as much a state of being, a state of separation from God, which begins for some here on earth. He wasn't denying its reality, physical or otherwise.

[pissant]

Yes, he is.

[napscoordinator]

He better not be. Pope John Paul II was the best of the best. This Pope will be average at best.