After last week’s Ash Wednesday Mass, someone asked me whether I believe in the existence of hell—and whether hell is really the abode of the devil. I replied, “yes,” but I could not explain it further because many others were still lining up to greet me or receive ashes. The liturgy had been moving, almost searching. The sign of the cross was still fresh on foreheads; the ancient admonition was still ringing in the air: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Yet that question did not remain in the church. It followed me home. It sat with me in prayer. It returned in quiet moments like a visitor who refuses to be dismissed.
I remembered a homily by the cerebral preacher Father Benedict Groeschel, CFR, delivered in the days following the terrible attacks of September 11, 2001. Preaching in the shadow of unspeakable violence, he spoke about hell with unusual directness. He said that those who committed such wicked acts risked the fires of hell. But then he added something more searching: hell is not only a destiny one reaches after death because of evil acts; it is also a condition already at work in a soul that lives without God, without love, hardened by hatred and turned inward upon itself. In that sense, he suggested, one can begin to taste hell even here on earth when one’s life is emptied of charity and truth. That remark has stayed with me. It reframed the question from place to space, from geography to disposition, from location to the state of one’s relationship with God, the self, others, and nature.
“Hell is not merely a place one reaches after death; it is a condition already at work in a soul that lives without God and without love.”
When people say, then, that someone is “going through hell,” what do they mean? Do they mean a life collapsing under suffering? Or do they mean a life estranged from God and from love? And when the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in his 1944 play No Exit that “hell is other people,” was he saying something similar—or something radically different? Sartre’s line, often misunderstood, was less a theological claim than a dramatic portrayal of relational imprisonment: the torment of being locked into the gaze and judgment of others without grace, without transcendence, without the possibility of redemption. That is a far cry from Christian teaching, yet it reveals how deeply the metaphor of hell has penetrated the human imagination as we see, for instance, in Dante’s Inferno with its searing and coruscating line welcoming the reprobate at Hell’s entrance, “Abandon all hope all you who enter.” It is clear that the term hell has many metaphorical uses in everyday discourse. We speak of psychological hell, social hell, even political hell. But in this reflection, I wish to consider hell in its proper theological sense as taught by the Church—not as a rhetorical flourish, but as a truth bound up with freedom, sin, judgment, and the ultimate destiny of the human person. For the doctrine of hell is not an isolated teaching meant to terrify; it is inseparable from the Church’s proclamation of beatitude, from the moral demand placed upon human freedom, and from the horizon of hope toward which every Christian life is ordered. To speak of hell rightly is, paradoxically, to clarify what we mean by salvation, by love, and by the God who created us for communion and not for perdition.
“To speak of hell rightly is, paradoxically, to clarify what we mean by salvation, by love, and by the God who created us for communion.”
As we say in the Act of Contrition, we as Christians are moved by love of God rather than by the fear of hell:
O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins, because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell, but most of all because they offend Thee, my God,
who art all good and deserving of all my love.
Before I proceed with my own reflections, it is important to situate this conversation within the clear teaching. In 1979, the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in On Certain Questions Concerning Eschatology, summarized Catholic belief as follows: “In fidelity to the New Testament and Tradition, the Church believes in the happiness of the just who will one day be with Christ. She believes that there will be eternal punishment for the sinner, who will be deprived of the sight of God, and that this punishment will have a repercussion on the whole being of the sinner. She believes in the possibility of a purification for the elect before they see God, a purification altogether different from the punishment of the damned. This is what the Church means when speaking of hell and purgatory” (7). This articulation, repeated in various forms in the Catechism and other magisterial texts, establishes the doctrinal horizon within which any Christian reflection on hell must take place.
So I thought about that Ash Wednesday question most of last week, and I share with you now—in the spirit of Lent—a spiritual reflection on this difficult topic of hell, a topic that frightens us, sometimes embarrasses us, and often exposes what we truly believe about God, about ourselves, and about our ultimate destiny.
Hell haunted me as a child. Like many children, I carried images that were both vivid and crude—fire, darkness, demons, the screams of the condemned, and a God whose justice seemed at times harsher than any father’s anger. And even now, as a priest—after years of theology, after pastoral encounters with suffering, after hearing confessions, after burying the dead—I still wonder what hell will be for the damned souls, and why some people do not bother about hell so much these days, as if the question of judgment no longer matters.
When one sees the wickedness in the world—the cruelty people inflict on one another, betrayals done in secret, violence justified in public, corruption that devours the poor, lies told without shame, contempt for the vulnerable, the casual destruction of reputations, bodies, homes, and nations—you cannot help but wonder whether those who commit such evils, especially if they profess to be Christians, truly believe that life has an end and that the end is not simply biological death but moral reckoning—“it is appointed for mortals to die once, and after that the judgment” (Heb 9:27). Do we still believe that our choices can lead us to heaven or to damnation? Do we believe that what we do with our freedom matters not only for society but for the soul? And has the quiet disappearance of hell from our moral and cultural imagination also weakened our reverence for goodness, our sensitivity to sin, our urgency for repentance?
There may be people, however, who reject the idea of hell not because they love sin, but because the images of hell they inherited made God seem monstrous—like a tyrant who maintains an eternal chamber of torture or who creates a post-death Auschwitz! They, like theologian Origen, struggle to reconcile such a picture with the God revealed in Jesus Christ: the God who eats with sinners, heals the sick, forgives enemies, weeps at gravesides, and dies with mercy on his lips. Their question is not only, “Is there hell?” but “Who is God?” And perhaps the most spiritual way to begin is to allow that question to do its work in us—not to use hell as a weapon against others, but to receive it as a mirror that turns us inward and a warning that calls us back to the path of life.
As an African, I am always looking for ways to explain such a doctrine in African terms. In many African cultures, the deepest fear is not merely punishment; it is rupture—broken communion, wounded relationships, exclusion from the circle of life, and separation from the community’s memory and blessing. To be cut off is to suffer a kind of death even while living. If heaven is the fullness of communion—with God, with the saints, and the ancestors, with the redeemed, and with the truth of love—then hell, in an African key, can be imagined as the tragic refusal of communion: the soul’s hardening against love, the isolation of self-worship, and the loneliness of choosing darkness over light. In that sense, hell is not a theatrical story meant to frighten children; it is the ultimate consequence of rejecting the God whose very name is mercy, whose very being is communion, and whose desire is not to crush us but to save us.
“In an African key, hell can be imagined as the tragic refusal of communion—the soul’s hardening against love and the loneliness of choosing darkness over light.”
So, I return to that Ash Wednesday moment. A simple question asked in a line of worshippers. A priest answered quickly, “Yes,” because the line was long. And yet, perhaps God allowed that interruption precisely because Lent itself is a line—a line of people marked with ashes, moving toward the cross, moving toward truth, moving toward Easter. And somewhere along that line, each of us must face the question we would prefer to avoid: not only whether hell exists, but whether we are allowing anything within us—pride, resentment, hatred, greed, indifference—to become a small hell that we carry inside, and whether the God of mercy is calling us, even now, to return home.
Next week, in the second part of this Lenten reflection, I will take up these questions more directly by turning to Scripture itself. For now, let the question remain with us as an invitation to reflect on our lives and our need for conversion.