From: "_ Prof. Jonez _" 

POPE PROCLAIMS HELL 'EXISTS AND IS ETERNAL' Post Wire Services

March 26, 2007 -- ROME - Hell is a place where sinners burn in an eternal
fire, and not just a religious symbol designed to galvanise the faithful,
the Pope has
said.
God's mercy and love are great, but those who reject him should know that
hell "exists and is eternal, even if nobody talks about it much any
more," Pope Benedict XVI proclaimed during a weekend visit to a Rome
parish.

The Pope, who as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was head of Catholic doctrine,
noted that "forgiveness of sins" for those who repent 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."

As a theologian, the pope wrote about hell on several occasions. In the
1968 book, Introduction to Christianity, he described hell as a state of
existential abandonment, "the loneliness into which love can no longer
reach."

In "God and the World," a book-length interview in 2000, he said
the church reminds people of heaven and hell in order to underline that
"there is a responsibility before God, that there is a judgment, that
human life can either turn out right or come to disaster."

Vatican officials said that the Pope - who is also the Bishop of Rome - had been
speaking in "straightfoward" 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."

According to historians, Hell was misused in the Middle Ages to scare the
impressionable with "horrific visions" of damnation, as described
in Dante's Inferno. It's pedigree, however, went back to Ancient Egypt and
the Greek idea of Hades, and was described by St Matthew as a place of
"everlasting fire" (Matthew xxv, 41).

The problem historians say they find, is not only that our sense of sin has
declined, but also that the world wars of the 20th century created a Hell
on Earth as bad as anything imaginable.

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."

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