Is Martin Luther in Hell?

[Magickly_Delicious]

My copy of Why do Catholics Do That?, by Kevin Orlin Johnson, says

…the Church has never condemned anybody, never said solemnly that so-and-so is in Hell. She can’t, because that would be contrary to her mission. …The Church can excommunicate somebody…It means announcing publicly…that he cannot receive the sacraments; this allows-even calls for-reconciliation.

I recommend this book for other similar questions, as it is an easier read than the Catechism.

To address indulgences, the book says that an indulgence can take away a “temporal punishment” for sin, but only as long as the sin has been forgiven. Meaning, that you’ve already been to Reconciliation and done your penance asked of you.

[BrainGlutton]

To put all this in perspective – how many Catholics, or other Christians, still take the idea of Hell seriously?

From George Orwell’s “As I Please” column in the Tribune, April 14, 1944:

Attacking Mr C.A. Smith and myself in the Malvern Torch for various remarks about the Christian religion, Mr Sidney Dark grows very angry because I have suggested that the belief in personal immortality is decaying. “I would wager,” he says, “that if a Gallup poll were taken seventy-five percent (of the British population) would confess to a vague belief in survival.” Writing elsewhere during the same week, Mr Dark puts it at eighty-five percent.

Now, I find it very rare to meet anyone, of whatever background, who admits to believing in personal immortality. Still, I think it quite likely that if you asked everyone the question and put pencil and paper in his hands, a fairly large number (I am not so free with my percentages as Mr Dark) would admit the possibility that after death there might be “something”. The point Mr Dark has missed is that the belief, such as it is, hasn’t the actuality it had for our forefathers. Never, literally never in recent years, have I met anyone who gave me the impression of believing in the next world as firmly as he believed in the existence of, for instance, Australia. Belief in the next world does not influence conduct as if it were genuine. With that endless existence beyond death to look forward to, how trivial our lives here would seem! Most Christians profess to believe in Hell. Yet have you ever met a Christian who as afraid of Hell as he was of cancer? Even very devout Christians will make jokes about Hell. They wouldn’t make jokes about leprosy, or RAF pilots with their faces burned away: the subject is too painful. Here there springs to mind a little triolet by the late G.K. Chesterton:

It’s a pity that Poppa has sold his soul,
It makes him sizzle at breakfast so.
The money was useful, but still on the whole
It’s a pity that Poppa has sold his soul
When he might have held on like the Baron de Coal,
And not cleared out when the price was low.
It’s a pity that Poppa has sold his soul,
It makes him sizzle at breakfast so.

Chesterton, a Catholic, would presumably have said that he believed in Hell. If his next-door neighbour had been burnt to death he would not have written a comic poem about it, yet he can make jokes about somebody being fried for millions of years. I say that such belief has no reality. It is a sham currency, like the money in Samuel Butler’s Musical Banks.

(A footnote from the book I’m using, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 3 (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), says, "Orwell acknowledged later that he was mistaken in attributing these verses to Chesterton and that they were by A.M. Currie and had appeared in G.K. Chesterton’s paper, G.K.'s Weekly.)

Now, Orwell was writing in Britain, where the level of religiosity has for a long time been much lower than in the United States. I recall a pair of “Harper’s Index” statistics in Harper’s Magazine from at least ten years ago:

“Percentage of Americans who believe there is a Heaven in the afterlife: 77
Percentage who believe they will enter therein: 66”

But I wonder what the figures would have been if the surveyor had asked about Americans’ belief in Hell, defined as an afterlife where the damned suffer eternal and unrelenting pain, torment and misery.