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“Pope Declares No Hell”
Evidently in an interview with some Italian atheist, Pope Francis declared that there is no hell and that condemned souls disappear. In response to a question about ‘where are bad souls punished?’, the head of the Roman Catholic Church said, “They are not punished, those who repent obtain the forgiveness of God and enter the rank of souls who contemplate him, but those who do not repent and cannot therefore be forgiven disappear. There is no hell, there is the disappearance of sinful souls.”
You can find the article about the interview here.
Not surprisingly, this has caused quite an uproar in the RCC. I am not here to defend Catholic Church doctrine at all. I am not Catholic. However, the pope is partially right. He is wrong that there is no hell, and that unbelievers are not punished. He is right that eventually they will just disappear and not exist.
The Bible clearly teaches that there is a hell. So the pope would be denying Scripture to say it doesn’t exist. What the pope does seem to believe, or at least align with, and what most of Christendom does not, is that the condemned souls will be destroyed at the Great White Throne judgment (Revelations 20:11-15). At that judgment, after the end of the Millennial Kingdom, they will be cast into the Lake of Fire (which is not hell) and destroyed. They WILL just disappear and not exist. They will not spend eternity in hell, in other words. Hell is just a waiting place, and it is terrible suffering while they wait.
And even if the pope does not believe there is a hell, and that condemned souls just disappear, the fact that they are not with God for eternity IS punishment. So he is wrong that they are not punished.
Hell does exist, but there is no ETERNAL hell. I won’t go into all of the Scriptural basis for this doctrine in this post. Read my earlier post “Eternal Torment or Eternal Destruction”.
Dan Baker
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