Thursday, March 29, 2007

Forgiveness of Sins - Time to Repent


Pope says hell and damnation are real and eternal
By Richard Owen in Rome
March 28, 2007 12:00am

HELL is a place where sinners really do burn in an everlasting fire, and not just a religious symbol designed to galvanise the faithful, Pope Benedict XVI has said.
Addressing a parish gathering in a northern suburb of Rome, the Pope said that in the modern world many people, including some believers, had forgotten that if they failed to "admit blame and promise to sin no more", they risked "eternal damnation - the inferno". Hell "really exists and is eternal, even if nobody talks about it much any more".
The Pope, who as cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was head of Catholic doctrine, noted that "forgiveness of sins" for those who repented was a cornerstone of Christian belief. He recalled that Jesus had forgiven the "woman taken in adultery" and prevented her from being stoned to death, observing:
"He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her."
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".
Vatican officials said the Pope - who is also the Bishop of Rome - had been speaking in "straightforward" language "like a parish priest".
He had wanted to reinforce the new Catholic catechism, which holds that hell is a "state of eternal separation from God", to be understood "symbolically rather than physically".
Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, a church historian, said the Pope was "right to remind us that hell is not something to be put on one side" as an inconvenient or embarrassing aspect of belief. It was described by St Matthew as a place of "everlasting fire" (Matthew xxv, 41).
"The problem is not only that our sense of sin has declined, but also that the world wars and totalitarianisms of the 20th century created a hell on earth as bad as anything we can imagine in the afterlife," Professor Bagliani said.
In 1999, pope John Paul II said 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".
In October, the Pope indicated that limbo, supposed since medieval times to be a "halfway house" between heaven and hell, was "only a theological hypothesis" and not a "definitive truth of the faith".
The Times, London, in The Australian

11 Comments:

Blogger MathewK said...

10men, did you watch the movie Constantine. That movie really shook me, about hell that is.

I like the way they explain what 'eternity' really means

12:39 PM  
Blogger Dee said...

10men, some really great posts and I plan to come back later today and comb through them all!

12:53 PM  
Blogger Dee said...

MK...I accidentally saw the first part of that movie, thinking it was going to be a historical drama on the Emperor Constantine. As I had my three-year-old with me, you can imagine that I made a mad dash for the door with my hands over her eyes and her straining furiously to see 'Why that lady was screaming' in the second scene...LOL Interesting that it contained a 'spiritual' message though :)

12:55 PM  
Blogger 10 men said...

Constantine, I've seen it about 5 times. Great special effects of hell- makes you not want to go there & quit smoking.

Eternity is a loooong time.

4:15 PM  
Blogger Brooke said...

Go new Pope! The 'feel-good' modern notion that there is no Hell is b.s.

3:15 AM  
Blogger MathewK said...

I don't know who said it or where i first heard it, but apparently the devil's biggest stunt was to decieve us into believing he doesn't exist.

And many of us today go our own ways because now that there is no hell or satan, there will be no one to punish us even if we are judged to have sinned.

8:41 AM  
Blogger Dee said...

Although I'm not a Catholic but an evangelical Protestant, I actually like this Pope a lot. (He's the first one that's actually made me sit up and take notice). He's quite gutsy and uncompromising. Let us see what will eventuate with him as I don't think he fits in with current political agendas.

6:38 PM  
Blogger 10 men said...

Satan is indeed the great deciever.
(if global warming isn't the work of the devil I don't know what is).

I was a fence sitter until 1999 when I made a stand and found my Lord Jesus Christ. I love the Pope too; he has great direct moral strengh in telling it like it is.

7:14 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Pope Benedict is a great antidote to the.... novel approach of his predecessor. One article on Benedict's moves to re-allow the latin Mass spoke of the bishops who electing him thinking they'd only be getting a 'transitional' pope (presumably due to his age?) but he's really a very surprising chap. (If you try reading his stuff, you'll see what I mean.)

If you like things like Constantine, may I recommend the works of the painter Hieronymous Bosch? It really sticks in the mind. Interestingly, psych teachers and lecturers have mentioned (often) that schizophrenics, when painting and drawing, often draw stuff very similar indeed to Bosch's works. I wonder if insanity really is a kind of hell.

MK, are you thinking of the film Se7evn, I wonder?

Btw, anyone who likes this statement by the Pope might enjoy looking at the words and exhortations of Josemaria Escriva, who's similarly loving and stern.

9:10 PM  
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2:43 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The only good christian is a DEAD ONE. Pass the ammo, I've got some jesusfreaks to kill!!!!

3:29 PM  

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