A reader writes:
Hi Mark, I shared your post with the reader’s remarks about Trump, Heaven and Hell, with my SSPX sister. Here is her reply:
I don’t know how to respond to this, or even if I should. Huh? What to say?
Tell her my reader and I are both Catholics and that
a) we both believe all that the Catholic Church teaches,
b) nothing we said conflicts with the Church’s teaching and
c) the Catechism defines Hell this way:
CCC 1033 We cannot be united with God unless we freely choose to love him. But we cannot love God if we sin gravely against him, against our neighbor or against ourselves: “He who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.” Our Lord warns us that we shall be separated from him if we fail to meet the serious needs of the poor and the little ones who are his brethren. To die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God’s merciful love means remaining separated from him for ever by our own free choice. This state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed is called “hell.”
“Self-exclusion” means the gates of Hell are barred from the inside, according to the Church. And, by the way, the Church teaches that damnation is a possibility for anybody, but it has never defined whether anybody has chosen it. So it is within the pale of orthodoxy to hope, not know, that all will be saved as SAINT Gregory of Nyssa most certainly did.
My reader continues:
This is great, Mark- thanks! I think it is almost a ‘tenet’ of the SSPX to believe that most people go to Hell, then a smaller group in Purgatory, and very few go straight to Heaven. Numbers seemed like a funny thing to fixate on, but I think it originated in an apparition or a certain saint or something.
They also believe in a strict interpretation of ‘no salvation outside the Church,’ which is ironic, bc they’ve separated themselves from the Catholic hierarchy. But they justify with ‘we live in a time of emergency’
Traddery habitually sees Jesus as saving us, not from sin, but from his Father, as well as seeing the sacraments, not has sure encounters with the love and grace of God, but as reducing valves specifically designed to keep as many people as possible away from that love and grace. It regards the prospect of all being saved as a failure of the gospel. It’s bizarre.
And yeah. Having a strict and urgent will to understand “no salvation outside the Church” as rigorously as possible while also rejecting the Church as “liberal” and hiving off to form little Catholic Puritan sects is particularly weird.
Of which more tomorrow.
Advertisement
4 Responses
Christ saves us from ourselves. He helps us be better people. With regards to Hell, we put ourselves in Hell with hatred of others.
Frightening to consider the possibility of locking the door from the inside, but I can see it’s possible to resist to that degree. I hope and pray that no one does.
On the topic of traddery and Jesus saving us from the Father (and let’s not forget Mary saving us from her Son, in effect, as well)…. It’s really bizarre, but it seems it’s fairly widespread. I personally think it stems from a Catholic version of Penal Substitutionary Atonement.
The Church teaches that (1) there are people in Hell; and (2) we don’t know who in particular is in Hell with perhaps Judas. I can “hope” that everyone avoids hell just like I can hope and pray that no one gets cancer but for the foreeaabke future we know that every year people will get cancer. See older books on theology such as Ott.
The Church teaches no such thing.