Virtual discussions roam over many small things (e.g., the kerfuffle last spring over Harrison Butker's graduation address at Benedictine College), rather than one or two big things.

And there is no bigger question for Catholics today than this: Why should anyone become or remain Catholic?

Pre- Second Vatican Council

Before the Second Vatican Council, the answers commonly given to this question focused on individual well-being in the afterlife. As many Catholic characters in movies and novels attested, a basic reason to be Catholic was "so I won't go to hell."

The Catholic faith, in their view, is the best guarantee that they will not spend eternity suffering the excruciating flames of eternal torment. Instead, they will enjoy heavenly paradise.

Catholic teachings provide a roadmap of the best route to heaven, and the sacrament of penance was a sure way to correct course if you lose your way.

This position is easily caricatured in several ways.

First, heaven and hell are often depicted as destinations external to the soul, corresponding to external rewards and punishments. The soul is the same soul in heaven or hell—but it is happy in the former and miserable in the latter.

Second, sacraments and other religious devotions are portrayed as external sources of energy that are used by the soul, but do not change its fundamental character.

I go to Mass on Sundays in order to fill up my spiritual gas tank, so that I can drive my soul-car to heaven. But it is still the same old me that is driving the soul-car.

Third, the system is presented as both predictable and arbitrary. Suppose I commit a mortal sin on Friday and intend to go to confession on Saturday. If I am hit by a car leaving church on Saturday, I go to heaven. If I am hit by a car walking into church, I go to hell.

The sacramental system is depicted as an elaborate set of machinery, almost a soteriological Rube Goldberg machine. The rules are clear, even if they are not always fair.

The actual theology, however, has always been far richer than the caricatures.

Catholic theologians would say that the process of moral living itself transforms you, because it is an encounter with God's grace. You adopt good habits out of fear and obedience.

Then you begin to see the holiness and beauty of God, and you continue those habits, which gradually allow you to love God and want to live in God's presence in eternity.

A famous question in The Baltimore Catechism asks "Why did God make you?" The answer is that "God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next."

Heaven and hell

After Vatican II, however, the more individually oriented account of the reasons to be Catholic began to be supplemented—if not supplanted—by a different view that approached questions of salvation in a somewhat different way.

One difference was the reduced emphasis on the details of eternal punishment.

With the advent of mass media creating widespread exposure to the atrocities of war, people in the 20th century understood well the horrors of torture and suffering.

Theologians and ordinary believers alike began to question the depictions of hell found in poets like Dante and lesser writers.

How anyone with a shred of compassion could subject any creature to torture or torment, much less eternally, was beyond the grasp of many both morally and existentially.

For a divine, omnipotent being to inflict such pain on any sentient creature is monstrous; such a god might reasonably be placated, but would never be worthy of worship.

Consequently, the God who became fully human in Jesus Christ could never behave in such a fashion.

Even the more sophisticated notion of hell, as a state of the soul entirely separated from God, love, truth and light for all eternity, began to seem morally and existentially problematic.

How could a good God, who sent His only begotten Son to save us, who pursued every lost sheep, allow any of his creatures to be definitively lost?

On a more terrestrial plane, it could sometimes seem that the defenders of hell were (like Dante) too inclined to populate it with their own enemies, while reserving heaven for themselves and their friends.

Pope Francis recently critiqued this danger when he wrote that heaven is for everyone ("tutti, tutti, tutti") and warns against imagining it as a gated community for self-proclaimed upright souls.

Building the kingdom

After Vatican II, however, the chasm between heaven and hell receded from both academic theology and the popular imagination. The post-Vatican II worldview did not so much bridge the chasm as sidestep it, by reframing the issue.

Drawing upon the council's "Dogmatic Constitution on the Church" ("Lumen Gentium") and the "Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World" ("Gaudium et Spes"), many Catholics envisioned their predominant duty to be helping to build the kingdom of God.

This kingdom of God is already in our midst, inaugurated by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, but it is not yet fully complete. With the grace of Christ, who is the cornerstone, our task is to cooperate with other Christians and all people of good will in bringing it to fruition.

The focus on building the kingdom of God displaces the heaven-hell chasm in two ways. Read more

• M. Cathleen Kaveny is the Darald and Juliet Libby Professor of Law and Theology at Boston College.

Located on Poland's Baltic coast, Hel is a well-loved tourist destination. However, certain groups of Christian conservatives have expressed their disapproval of the number on a bus that leads to a location whose name resembles the word "hell" in English. In response, the final numeral was changed to 9.

According to a local news portal, the bus line had operated under the number 666 since 2006, initially as a local joke. But it gained popularity among riders from both Poland and abroad. Many people simply rode the bus to be able to say that they had taken the 666 bus to Hel. Read more

Despite numerous stories about the cavern, most people who recount them have never seen it firsthand. According to one legend passed down through generations, two elderly villagers lost their way in the cave and barely escaped with their lives.

A large sign with the words "Do Not Enter" stands outside the cave, which Seiji respected by not going inside. However, upon inspection, he found a solid rock wall at the back of the cave, suggesting that the only possible direction the cave could lead was down. Read more

It seeks spiritual food.

In the early stages, most of us seek sweetness - what I sometimes call "Spiritual Pavlova."

I fed on righteousness, beauty, goodness, affirmation holiness. The amazing grace I sought was very sweet indeed.

I read positive verses of Scripture, sang positive hymns, and considered all this to be heavenly.

Hell was something I pushed away.

It was a long time before I discovered that while I needed the comfort of the heavenly, it was the hellish things in my life that were the best spiritual teachers.

We all have our "Hell" list.

Here are a few that are part of my history.

1. Someone I trusted betrayed me.
2. There has been unaccountable loss.
3. People are saying things about me that are not true.
4. My best efforts have gone unrewarded.
5. I've tried to be a good person, so why did this illness/accident happen to me?

It took a long time for me to come close to an undivided faith, and I'm not there yet.

The first steps were to realise that my hell list was actually about "poor me." The prison of my ego was being attacked.

Was this needed for spiritual growth?

Then came the awareness that many of the judgements I made about other people, could also be applied to me.

I tell you, it was quite a journey and not without resistance.

Discovering that heaven and hell are both food for spiritual growth, a balanced diet of comfort and teaching, is difficult.

It demands truthfulness and a sense of humour, and without prayer, these can be hard to find.

In this season of Lent, we are invited to deal with the divided self. How do we understand the shadow as light waiting to be born?

At the same time, we realise that the outcome is all blessing.

That's how Jesus describes it in the Beatitudes.

• Joy Cowley is a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator.

These Sufi parables of Jesus are not the parables we have in the gospels. Rather, they are stories written to illustrate Jesus' teachings.

The one I like that is simple and yet powerful in its wisdom. It goes like this:

Jesus, son of Mary, was walking down the road when he came to a group of people who were huddled together, shaking with fear.

"What is your affliction?" Jesus asked.

A man said, "We are very afraid that we will go to Hell."

Jesus walked on and further down the road, and he saw another group with mournful faces, lying back listless, unaware of their surroundings.

Jesus asked them, "What is your affliction?"

One of then answered, "We are longing for Paradise."

Jesus continued on his way, and eventually he came to a group of people working at the side of the road. They looked as though they'd had hard lives, and yet they were alive with enthusiasm, and their faces shone with happiness.

Jesus stopped. "Who made you like this?" he asked.

"The Spirit of Truth," they said, and one added. "When you know the Spirit of Truth, nothing else matters."

For me, this parable encapsulates Jesus' words in the gospels: "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life." All three, and my occasional resistance to them are portrayed in the parable.

I've grown beyond a belief in Hell, but I can still become paralysed by fears that sneak in from childhood. Isn't amazing how childhood fears will crop up like weeds in an old established garden?

Then there are times when I think retirement would be nice, a passive life until I go home to God.

But what would I do? Aren't we already at home with God?

And aren't we, in maturity, aware that we have done the hard stuff that has rendered down to become wisdom?

As a child, I learned the Biblical descriptions of Heaven: pearly gates, golden streets, harps, angels singing all day, no darkness, no cold, no sin. This for all eternity.

Even to a child, this sounded more like Hell.

So Heaven for me is living in the present with Jesus the Way, Truth and Life and now and then pausing to hear Mary's words, "Do whatever he tells you."

I do not want a Heaven without pain and hard work.

So how can I describe Heaven?

With my roots firmly planted in the mud of life, may my face grow towards the light.

Give me the beauty and agony of storms; the Golgotha that becomes the place of resurrection.

Let my aching feet measure the journey. Let my empty hands show true riches.

And may my heart burst with love for all creation.

This is Jesus's Way, Truth and Life.

For me, it is Heaven, and I think it is now.

• Joy Cowley is a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator.

Apology

If you've been told that God is some kind of punishing, capricious, angry bastard with a killer surveillance system, who is basically always disappointed with you for being a human being, then you have been lied to. The church has failed you.

We are so sorry…

This didn't connect with my experience of God in the Catholic church. I was a convert in 1982, when the church was teaching a God of Unconditional Love. It was all celebration.

Yet I know a few people my age, cradle Catholics, who can't accept a God who loves without conditions.

They want to believe in a punishing God who will cast evil-doers into hell. For them "the fear of God" is not about awe and wonder, but grim anxiety.

Where does this come from?

I'm told it was old church stuff, but I can't find it in the writings of the early Catholic mystics. As far back as the 3rd century Origen was describing a spirituality that fits well with Vatican II.

According to Origen there are three stages of spiritual growth: ethics, physics and enoptics. The first stage is about the seeking the virtues in active life. The second stage, physics, was about seeing God in all things and all things in God. Enoptics, the third stage was direct experience of God.

Similar teachings flowed through church history. Read St Augustine of Hippo, St Francis, Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, St Benedict, Teresa of Avila, Ignatius of Loyola, Frank Herbert.

Read modern mystics Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, Ronald Rohlheiser, Richard Rohr.

For all of these people of prayer, the shifting sands of human existence have been overwhelmed by divine love that is far beyond our images. We are made for this love.

So why are there people who want to believe in a small punishing God?

I don't know.

And I don't know how to connect with those who try to convince me that a small punishing God is the greater reality.

Given a chance to respond, here are some thoughts I'd like to share:

1. Of the three Abrahamic religions, Christianity is the only one that believes in "The Fall" and "Original Sin."
2. In Judaism the garden of Eden story is parable. Jewish teachers say that expulsion from the garden is our birth, the pure soul leaving God to come into incarnation.
3. The Jewish tradition is that all souls come from God and return to God.
4. There is no mention of hell in the Jewish Bible.
5. Jesus' parables mentioned Gehenna which was translated as Hell. Gehenna was actual, the rubbish dump in a valley outside Jerusalem, burning day and night. Bodies were thrown on it, and sometimes the living. It became the metaphor for the misery caused by selfish living.
6. The gospels remind us several times that Jesus spoke all things in parables. That is how we should read them.
7. Negative thinking may have a personal source. It could be difficult to believe in a God of unconditional love if we've known little of human love.
8. When we talk about the evil in the world we are usually talking about other people.
9. The people who cause suffering to others, are convinced they are absolutely right,
10. A divided faith is part of Origen's first stage of faith when we learn how to choose right from wrong in all decision making. This is a ‘head' journey.
11. When we grow into the experience of God in everything, and everything in God, we
12. let go of divided thoughts and images. We have a "heart" experience of God.
13. For me, human belief in hell, judgement and a small punishing God is, in effect, blasphemy.
14. I believe there is nothing outside the immensity of God's love for us.

• Joy Cowley is a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator.
• Image: Stuff

That odd declaration came after the newspaper La Repubblica published a front-page article on Thursday by an atheist, left-wing and anticlerical giant of Italian journalism, who reported that during a recent meeting the pope had said that hell did not exist.

Bad souls are "not punished," the journalist, Eugenio Scalfari, 93, reported the pope as saying. "A hell doesn't exist."

Nor, for Mr Scalfari, does a tape recorder or notebook or the orthodoxy of quotation marks.

The Vatican characterized the remarks as misquotations.

In the past, Mr Scalfari, the founder of La Repubblica, a bible of the Italian left that he edited for decades, has admitted to sometimes putting words in the papal mouth.

But the infernal remarks, especially as the pope prepared for Easter Sunday celebrations, proved too tempting for international tabloids, conservative websites antagonistic to the pope and many others to let go.

"Pope Declares No Hell," read a screaming headline across the Drudge Report website.

"Does the Pope Believe in Hell?" asked Patrick J Buchanan in an online column.

"Vatican literally falls apart after Pope Francis says ‘Hell doesn't exist,'" read a headline in Metro UK, a British newspaper.

The pope, in fact, has often talked about hell as a very real final destination for the wicked, and the Vatican made clear that the "literal words pronounced by the pope are not quoted" and that "no quotation of the article should be considered as a faithful transcription of the words of the Holy Father."

Mr Scalfari agreed.

"They are perfectly right," said Mr Scalfari in an interview on Friday night, as the pope prepared for a ceremonial leading of the stations of the cross on Good Friday. "These are not interviews, these are meetings, I don't take notes. It's a chat."

While Mr Scalfari said he remembered the pope saying hell did not exist, he allowed that "I can also make mistakes."

He said he had committed an error of omission by failing to fully explain the pope's answer on the need for a stronger Europe.

"At my age," Mr Scalfari said, he was more used to being interviewed than interviewing.

The editor of La Repubblica, Mario Calabresi, said the paper had not labeled Mr Scalfari's piece as an interview.

It was, Mr Calabresi said, the fruit of a "cultural exchange and dialogue out of the 19th century between a Jesuit believer and a man of the enlightenment fascinated by religion."

Sophisticated readers of Italian journalism understand how to read Mr Scalfari, which is to say, with a grain of salt when it comes to papal quotations.

To many here, Mr Scalfari personifies an impressionistic style of Italian journalism, prevalent in its coverage of the Vatican, politics and much else, in which the gist is more important than the verbatim, and the spirit greater than the letter.

And yet, despite the public relations headaches Mr Scalfari has caused, Francis, 81, seems to like talking to him.

The pope, Mr Scalfari said, has a "need to talk with a nonbeliever who stimulates him." This month's meeting was their fifth. Continue reading

• Image: NYT

Toaipuapuaga Opapo Soana'i, 23, spoke during a Mass at the Catholic cathedral at Apia last week, the Samoa Observer reported.

She delivered a message that heaven and hell are real.

The young woman spoke of a vision she had on Good Friday, which came after several other visions in preceding days.

On Good Friday, she passed out while suffering the ordeal that saw the wounds appear.

She said God took her through hell and let her see the suffering people will endure if they don't change their ways.

"People in hell are calling out for help, begging Jesus to save them, but there is nothing that can be done," said Ms Opapo.

"God also took me to heaven, he let me see how magnificent that place is."

She said she saw a gate guarded by angels with the book of life.

"I hear angels singing, there was laughter, there was happiness everywhere, children sitting on clouds, everything was white," she claimed.

"I cried and thought to myself I am not ready to leave my family."

It was at that point that she regained consciousness.

Ms Opapo is the daughter of a Congregational Church pastor.

A New Zealand religious expert said rapid social change and the challenge of new religious movements to mainstream Christianity in Samoa may have played a role in Ms Opapo's wounds.

Professor Paul Morris of Victoria University told the ABC that the Congregational Church — the largest in Samoa — has undergone tremendous pressure over the last 15 to 20 years from other churches.

"In the history of stigmata incidents, they arise in a particular social reality and context and call those who are ebbing away from faith, back to faith," Professor Morris said.

He allowed for the possibility that Ms Opapo's wounds were psycho-somatic, "that intensity of identification . . . where a young woman or man identifies with Jesus to an extreme degree".

"This auto-suggestibility [can] lead to this physical transformation."

Professor Morris said it is very unusual, but not unheard of, for stigmata cases to occur outside the Roman Catholic Church.

Sources

• Samoa Observer
• ABC
• Image: New Zealand Herald

The Pope's message for Lent 2016 warned about the corrupting influence of money and power.

And it pointing out that caring for the poor, and not just praying for them, is the path to genuine conversion.

"The corporal and spiritual works of mercy must never be separated," the Pope wrote.

"By touching the flesh of the crucified Jesus in the suffering, sinners can receive the gift of realising that they too are poor and in need."

Too often, he stated, "the real poor are revealed as those who refuse to see themselves as such . . . . This is because they are slaves to sin, which leads them to use wealth and power not for the service of God and others, but to stifle within their hearts the profound sense that they too are only poor beggars".

The Pope counselled against the "illusion of omnipotence", "which reflects in a sinister way the diabolical ‘you will be like God' (Gen 3:5) which is the root of all sin".

This illusion can take social and political forms, as in past totalitarian systems, and more recently "by the ideologies of monopolising thought and technoscience, which would make God irrelevant and reduce man to raw material to be exploited".

The Pope sounded a warning to "wealthier individuals and societies", which refuse to even see the poor.

"Yet the danger always remains that by a constant refusal to open the doors of their hearts to Christ who knocks on them in the poor, the proud, rich and powerful will end up condemning themselves and plunging into the eternal abyss of solitude which is hell.

"The pointed words of Abraham apply to them and to all of us: ‘They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them' (Luke 16:29)"

Sources

• Religion News Service
• Pope's 2016 Lenten Message
• Image: DICI

He made these remarks during a prayer vigil in Rome for victims of the Mafia.

"Men and women of the Mafia, please change your lives, convert, stop doing evil," the Pope said.

"I ask on my knees and for your own good."

"This life you have now, it will not give you pleasure, it will not give you joy, it will not give you happiness," the Pope said.

"The power, the money you have now from so many dirty deals, from so many Mafia crimes, blood-stained money, blood-stained power - you will not be able to take that with you to the other life."

"There is still time not to end up in hell, which awaits you if you continue on this road," Pope Francis continued.

"You had a papa and a mamma. Think of them, weep a little and convert."

Every year since 1996, the Italian anti-Mafia group Libera has observed March 21, in memory of innocent victims of organised crime.

This was the first time a pope has participated in this event.

According to the group, the approximately 700 people gathered with Pope Francis in a Rome church this year represented the families of an estimated 15,000 victims across Italy.

The Pope listened for about 45 minutes, head bowed and hands folded in prayer, as members of the congregation recited the names of people killed by the Mafia.

Francis made special reference to a recent attack near Taranto, in which three people - two adults and a toddler - were shot dead in an apparent Mafia hit.

"Let us pray together to ask the strength to move ahead," the Pope said, "to be not discouraged but to continue to struggle against corruption."

In 1993, Pope John Paul II urged the Mafia to "convert" and warned them that judgment day was coming.

Two months later, two Roman churches were damaged in bomb attacks amid a wave of violence.

Sources:

• Catholic News Service
• The Guardian
• The Daily Mail
• Image: Catholic News Service

So concludes a study by by Azim Shiraf at the University of Oregon and Mijke Rhemtulla at the University of Kansas who compared rates of crime with rates of believe in heaven and hell in 67 countries.

The study acknowledged that religion has generally shown to have positive effects on society behaviour but suggests that these effects may be driven by supernatural punishment rather than belief in the forgiveness of sins and a compassionate God.

The study also showed belief in heaven increased the likelihood of higher crime rates.

In reporting the study's results, the economist opined that since researchers also noted that the proportion of people believing in heaven almost always outweighed the proportion of those believing in hell, that "a little more preaching on the fiery furnace might be beneficial in this life, if not also in the next."

Sources

• PLOS One Journal
• The Economist
• Image: The Economist

"It seems like there is a case to be made for the causal direction that religious punishment does actually lower unethical behaviour, whereas forgiveness does seem to license people," Azim F. Shariff, professor of psychology and director of the Culture and Morality Lab at the University of Oregon, told KEZI 9 News.

The study, published in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE, took a sample survey from 143,197 people in 67 countries over a span of 26 years.

Continue reading