Virtual discussions roam over many small things (e.g., the kerfuffle last spring over Harrison Butker's graduation address at Benedictine College), rather than one or two big things.

And there is no bigger question for Catholics today than this: Why should anyone become or remain Catholic?

Pre- Second Vatican Council

Before the Second Vatican Council, the answers commonly given to this question focused on individual well-being in the afterlife. As many Catholic characters in movies and novels attested, a basic reason to be Catholic was "so I won't go to hell."

The Catholic faith, in their view, is the best guarantee that they will not spend eternity suffering the excruciating flames of eternal torment. Instead, they will enjoy heavenly paradise.

Catholic teachings provide a roadmap of the best route to heaven, and the sacrament of penance was a sure way to correct course if you lose your way.

This position is easily caricatured in several ways.

First, heaven and hell are often depicted as destinations external to the soul, corresponding to external rewards and punishments. The soul is the same soul in heaven or hell—but it is happy in the former and miserable in the latter.

Second, sacraments and other religious devotions are portrayed as external sources of energy that are used by the soul, but do not change its fundamental character.

I go to Mass on Sundays in order to fill up my spiritual gas tank, so that I can drive my soul-car to heaven. But it is still the same old me that is driving the soul-car.

Third, the system is presented as both predictable and arbitrary. Suppose I commit a mortal sin on Friday and intend to go to confession on Saturday. If I am hit by a car leaving church on Saturday, I go to heaven. If I am hit by a car walking into church, I go to hell.

The sacramental system is depicted as an elaborate set of machinery, almost a soteriological Rube Goldberg machine. The rules are clear, even if they are not always fair.

The actual theology, however, has always been far richer than the caricatures.

Catholic theologians would say that the process of moral living itself transforms you, because it is an encounter with God's grace. You adopt good habits out of fear and obedience.

Then you begin to see the holiness and beauty of God, and you continue those habits, which gradually allow you to love God and want to live in God's presence in eternity.

A famous question in The Baltimore Catechism asks "Why did God make you?" The answer is that "God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next."

Heaven and hell

After Vatican II, however, the more individually oriented account of the reasons to be Catholic began to be supplemented—if not supplanted—by a different view that approached questions of salvation in a somewhat different way.

One difference was the reduced emphasis on the details of eternal punishment.

With the advent of mass media creating widespread exposure to the atrocities of war, people in the 20th century understood well the horrors of torture and suffering.

Theologians and ordinary believers alike began to question the depictions of hell found in poets like Dante and lesser writers.

How anyone with a shred of compassion could subject any creature to torture or torment, much less eternally, was beyond the grasp of many both morally and existentially.

For a divine, omnipotent being to inflict such pain on any sentient creature is monstrous; such a god might reasonably be placated, but would never be worthy of worship.

Consequently, the God who became fully human in Jesus Christ could never behave in such a fashion.

Even the more sophisticated notion of hell, as a state of the soul entirely separated from God, love, truth and light for all eternity, began to seem morally and existentially problematic.

How could a good God, who sent His only begotten Son to save us, who pursued every lost sheep, allow any of his creatures to be definitively lost?

On a more terrestrial plane, it could sometimes seem that the defenders of hell were (like Dante) too inclined to populate it with their own enemies, while reserving heaven for themselves and their friends.

Pope Francis recently critiqued this danger when he wrote that heaven is for everyone ("tutti, tutti, tutti") and warns against imagining it as a gated community for self-proclaimed upright souls.

Building the kingdom

After Vatican II, however, the chasm between heaven and hell receded from both academic theology and the popular imagination. The post-Vatican II worldview did not so much bridge the chasm as sidestep it, by reframing the issue.

Drawing upon the council's "Dogmatic Constitution on the Church" ("Lumen Gentium") and the "Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World" ("Gaudium et Spes"), many Catholics envisioned their predominant duty to be helping to build the kingdom of God.

This kingdom of God is already in our midst, inaugurated by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, but it is not yet fully complete. With the grace of Christ, who is the cornerstone, our task is to cooperate with other Christians and all people of good will in bringing it to fruition.

The focus on building the kingdom of God displaces the heaven-hell chasm in two ways. Read more

• M. Cathleen Kaveny is the Darald and Juliet Libby Professor of Law and Theology at Boston College.

It seeks spiritual food.

In the early stages, most of us seek sweetness - what I sometimes call "Spiritual Pavlova."

I fed on righteousness, beauty, goodness, affirmation holiness. The amazing grace I sought was very sweet indeed.

I read positive verses of Scripture, sang positive hymns, and considered all this to be heavenly.

Hell was something I pushed away.

It was a long time before I discovered that while I needed the comfort of the heavenly, it was the hellish things in my life that were the best spiritual teachers.

We all have our "Hell" list.

Here are a few that are part of my history.

1. Someone I trusted betrayed me.
2. There has been unaccountable loss.
3. People are saying things about me that are not true.
4. My best efforts have gone unrewarded.
5. I've tried to be a good person, so why did this illness/accident happen to me?

It took a long time for me to come close to an undivided faith, and I'm not there yet.

The first steps were to realise that my hell list was actually about "poor me." The prison of my ego was being attacked.

Was this needed for spiritual growth?

Then came the awareness that many of the judgements I made about other people, could also be applied to me.

I tell you, it was quite a journey and not without resistance.

Discovering that heaven and hell are both food for spiritual growth, a balanced diet of comfort and teaching, is difficult.

It demands truthfulness and a sense of humour, and without prayer, these can be hard to find.

In this season of Lent, we are invited to deal with the divided self. How do we understand the shadow as light waiting to be born?

At the same time, we realise that the outcome is all blessing.

That's how Jesus describes it in the Beatitudes.

• Joy Cowley is a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator.

These Sufi parables of Jesus are not the parables we have in the gospels. Rather, they are stories written to illustrate Jesus' teachings.

The one I like that is simple and yet powerful in its wisdom. It goes like this:

Jesus, son of Mary, was walking down the road when he came to a group of people who were huddled together, shaking with fear.

"What is your affliction?" Jesus asked.

A man said, "We are very afraid that we will go to Hell."

Jesus walked on and further down the road, and he saw another group with mournful faces, lying back listless, unaware of their surroundings.

Jesus asked them, "What is your affliction?"

One of then answered, "We are longing for Paradise."

Jesus continued on his way, and eventually he came to a group of people working at the side of the road. They looked as though they'd had hard lives, and yet they were alive with enthusiasm, and their faces shone with happiness.

Jesus stopped. "Who made you like this?" he asked.

"The Spirit of Truth," they said, and one added. "When you know the Spirit of Truth, nothing else matters."

For me, this parable encapsulates Jesus' words in the gospels: "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life." All three, and my occasional resistance to them are portrayed in the parable.

I've grown beyond a belief in Hell, but I can still become paralysed by fears that sneak in from childhood. Isn't amazing how childhood fears will crop up like weeds in an old established garden?

Then there are times when I think retirement would be nice, a passive life until I go home to God.

But what would I do? Aren't we already at home with God?

And aren't we, in maturity, aware that we have done the hard stuff that has rendered down to become wisdom?

As a child, I learned the Biblical descriptions of Heaven: pearly gates, golden streets, harps, angels singing all day, no darkness, no cold, no sin. This for all eternity.

Even to a child, this sounded more like Hell.

So Heaven for me is living in the present with Jesus the Way, Truth and Life and now and then pausing to hear Mary's words, "Do whatever he tells you."

I do not want a Heaven without pain and hard work.

So how can I describe Heaven?

With my roots firmly planted in the mud of life, may my face grow towards the light.

Give me the beauty and agony of storms; the Golgotha that becomes the place of resurrection.

Let my aching feet measure the journey. Let my empty hands show true riches.

And may my heart burst with love for all creation.

This is Jesus's Way, Truth and Life.

For me, it is Heaven, and I think it is now.

• Joy Cowley is a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator.

And it only got worse.

When Pope Francis called the reluctant Emanuele up to whisper his question about where his beloved father went after death, I was crying so obviously that the other customers in line at Starbucks looked up from their phones.

I muttered a general apology for the public display but continued to watch the rest of the remarkable footage of Pope Francis going pastoral; a good shepherd holding the littlest lamb close to his heart.

Emanuele wanted to know: Was his dad in heaven even if he was an unbeliever?

Why was I crying?

Why had this short clip of an old man being nice to a little boy touched me and many other people so deeply?

I think it was because Francis showed us how to risk simply embracing the hurting world.

No explaining, just loving.

This is love in action, and it speaks to us as words cannot.

Francis cuts through the distance between pope and child, between believer and unbeliever, and gets to the heart of the matter—human to human.

Francis refuses to be anything other than present to a wounded heart.

When Pope Francis says that "God is the one who says who goes to heaven," he resists placing himself above God or making an idol of our human rules and limited understanding of God.

He chooses to act on what he knows of God rather than to limit God by conjecture about the afterlife.

Yes, it remains true—according to our best guess and carefully thought out tradition, based on Scripture and enshrined in the Catechism of the Catholic Church—that "those who die in God's grace and friendship and are perfectly purified, live forever with Christ" (No. 1023).

And so this would seem to place Emanuele's father, an unbeliever, outside the possibility of going to heaven.

But "God is the one who says who goes to heaven," not the catechism. Not the pope, not you or me, but God.

Assuring Emanuele that a loving God would accept his father into heaven says more about God than it does about heaven. Continue reading

• Image: Twitter

Francis was visiting a parish on the outskirts of Rome when the child put the question to him.

Francis routinely holds question-and-answer sessions with young people when he visits parishes.

The child (whose name is Emanuele) was in tears when he asked Francis the question.

"If only we could all cry like Emanuele when we have an ache in our hearts like he has," the pope told the children.

"He was crying for his father and had the courage to do it in front of us because in his heart there is love for his father."

After gaining Emanuele's permission, Francis told the other children what Emanuele had said -

"‘A little while ago my father passed away. He was a nonbeliever, but he had all four of his children baptised. He was a good man. Is dad in heaven?'"

"How beautiful to hear a son say of his father, ‘He was good,'" the pope said.

"And what a beautiful witness of a son who inherited the strength of his father, who had the courage to cry in front of all of us.

"If that man was able to make his children like that, then it's true, he was a good man. He was a good man.

That man did not have the gift of faith, he wasn't a believer, but he had his children baptised. He had a good heart," Pope Francis said.

"God is the one who says who goes to heaven," the pope explained.

The next step in answering Emanuele's question, he said, would be to think about what God is like and, especially, what kind of heart God has.

"What do you think? A father's heart. God has a dad's heart.

"And with a dad who was not a believer, but who baptised his children and gave them that bravura, do you think God would be able to leave him far from himself?"

"Does God abandon his children?" the Pope asked. "Does God abandon his children when they are good?"

The children shouted, "No."

"There, Emanuele, that is the answer," the Pope told Emanuele.

"God surely was proud of your father, because it is easier as a believer to baptise your children than to baptise them when you are not a believer. Surely this pleased God very much."

Source

• The Catholic Register
• America Magazine
• Image: Aleteia

Frost's little piece reads like a nursery rhyme with a depressing moral, at first glance. "Nothing gold can stay"-is he saying that nothing good lasts, that everything beautiful eventually withers and dies?

We're all tempted to believe that, especially when we're confronted with the reality of death. But at the core of the poem is a hidden message of burning hope.

"Nature's first green is gold," he says, and he's quite right. Every plant puts out flowers first, and leaves second.

The golden forsythias in early Spring are breathtaking, until the flowers drop off, and then they become ordinary green, pretty, but nothing special. It's just the natural progression of the year.

Not just of the year, though. That's what happened to mankind, too.

The Garden of Eden was the Spring of mankind, but it didn't last forever. Man fell, and "Eden sank to grief." Suffering and winter entered the world.

Spring reminds us of that original, short-lived paradise, and it's bittersweet, because now we know "nothing gold can stay."

Except then, Frost throws a really confusing image into the mix. "Dawn goes down to day." I wanted to say, "Wait a second. Dawn goes up. The sun rises up."

This metaphor is flat-out inaccurate, because as the the sun rises, it grows in heat and brightness. What's going on here?

The image of a flower doesn't match the theme of diminishing beauty either, actually. If that's what Frost wanted to say, he should have talked about ice that melts, or a fire that reduces a log to ash, or any one of a million images.

But the thing about a flower is that it isn't attractive for its own sake; it's trying to attract a pollinator. Every fruit and seed has to begin with a flower. That flower produces fruit, which in turn, produces many new flowers. Continue reading

• Anna O'Neil is a graduate of Thomas More College of Liberal Arts. She likes cows, confession and the color yellow, not necessarily in that order.

Toaipuapuaga Opapo Soana'i, 23, spoke during a Mass at the Catholic cathedral at Apia last week, the Samoa Observer reported.

She delivered a message that heaven and hell are real.

The young woman spoke of a vision she had on Good Friday, which came after several other visions in preceding days.

On Good Friday, she passed out while suffering the ordeal that saw the wounds appear.

She said God took her through hell and let her see the suffering people will endure if they don't change their ways.

"People in hell are calling out for help, begging Jesus to save them, but there is nothing that can be done," said Ms Opapo.

"God also took me to heaven, he let me see how magnificent that place is."

She said she saw a gate guarded by angels with the book of life.

"I hear angels singing, there was laughter, there was happiness everywhere, children sitting on clouds, everything was white," she claimed.

"I cried and thought to myself I am not ready to leave my family."

It was at that point that she regained consciousness.

Ms Opapo is the daughter of a Congregational Church pastor.

A New Zealand religious expert said rapid social change and the challenge of new religious movements to mainstream Christianity in Samoa may have played a role in Ms Opapo's wounds.

Professor Paul Morris of Victoria University told the ABC that the Congregational Church — the largest in Samoa — has undergone tremendous pressure over the last 15 to 20 years from other churches.

"In the history of stigmata incidents, they arise in a particular social reality and context and call those who are ebbing away from faith, back to faith," Professor Morris said.

He allowed for the possibility that Ms Opapo's wounds were psycho-somatic, "that intensity of identification . . . where a young woman or man identifies with Jesus to an extreme degree".

"This auto-suggestibility [can] lead to this physical transformation."

Professor Morris said it is very unusual, but not unheard of, for stigmata cases to occur outside the Roman Catholic Church.

Sources

• Samoa Observer
• ABC
• Image: New Zealand Herald

Even though he is not a nonbeliever Clay Farris Naff finds it a charming concecpt.

But he wonders if Pope Francis meant to include bacteria?

Another week, another story about Pope Francis saying something a little weird and a little cool.

News reports suggested that Francis told a boy that dogs go to heaven.

As it turned out, the current pope was misquoted.

What the Pope said was a little more nuanced than what the media would have us believe - and of course not quite as sensational.

But Naff says, "He had better, because bacteria are part of who we are — a big part. The microbiome within us makes our survival possible."

He finishes his post by by saying, "In truth, whether there are plants, animals, or microbes in heaven doesn't worry me."

"As an atheist and humanist, I haven't the least expectation of an afterlife, and that leaves me free to try to be the best person I can in the limited time I've got."

Read more

They've even "helpfully" noted how this contrasts with the position of his predecessor, Benedict XVI.

But the thing is . . . the whole story is false.

Here are 7 things to know and share . . .

1) What is being claimed?

Among other things:

Pope Francis has declared that all animals go to heaven during his weekly audience in St. Peter's Square.

The Pope made these remarks after he received two donkeys as early Christmas presents.

During his discussion, Pope Francis quoted the apostle Paul as he comforted a child who was mourning the death of his dog.

Francis quoted Paul's remarks as, "One day we will see our animals again in eternity of Christ. Paradise is open to all God's creatures." [Source.]

Also:

In his weekly audience in St Peter's Francis quoted the apostle Paul who comforted a child who was crying after his dog died.

"One day we will see our animals again in eternity of Christ', Francis quoted Paul as saying.

The Pope added: "Paradise is open to all God's creatures." [Source.]

Right there we have multiple reasons to be suspicious of the story.

2) Why do we have reason to be suspicious?

First, because the common theological opinion for centuries has been that the souls of animals do not survive death.

Second, because this is just the kind of sensationalistic story that the media loves to get wrong.

Third because we have the same words being attributed to two different events: The Wednesday audience at which the remarks were allegedly made occurred on November 26, but the donkey-giving event occurred later. Continue reading

• Jimmy Akin in National Catholic Register

Besides being an author, Jimmy Akin is a Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to This Rock magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

At least this is one interpretation of remarks made by Pope Francis in his weekly general audience in the Vatican, reports the Guardian.

"The holy scripture teaches us that the fulfilment of this wonderful design also affects everything around us," said the Holy Father.

Relying heavily on St Paul's letters to the early Christian communities, Pope Francis reminded everyone that a "new creation" lies ahead.

He added: "It is not an annihilation of the universe and all that surrounds us. Rather it brings everything to its fullness of being, truth and beauty."

Italian daily Corriere della Sera was in no doubt about his meaning. "It broadens the hope of salvation and eschatological beatitude to animals and the whole of creation," wrote the paper's Vatican specialist in an article published on Thursday.

With apparently little room in the Catholic Catechism allowing room for animals in heaven, reaction to the possible interpretations of Pope Francis' comments remains mixed.

Every year on the feast of St. Anthony the Abbot pets attend mass with their owners and both receive a blessing at Saint Eusebio church in Rome.

Sources

• The Guardian
• La Stampa
• Image: The Guardian

I know that we are united with the communion of saints, and that death no longer separates us (Romans 8:38-39).

I believe we can pray to the saints, and even pray to and pray for our relatives who have gone before us.

But I guess my interpretation of what that union would look like differed from reality.

I thought that all I had to do was pray and that my dad would visit me in my dreams, or that God would send me endless consolations to constantly comfort me.

I believed that my father would send me signs of his present happiness from "the other side" in big ways.

I probably picked up this idea from other people's anecdotes.

I've heard of people smelling their loved one's cologne, or of finding an old voice message at just the right time, or of visits in dreams.

I was so sure of how things worked that, when my sweet atheist brother insisted that we stop trying to comfort him with talk of heaven, my sister boldly assured him that he would be surprised and change his mind when my dad visited him in his dreams from the afterlife.

He looked pointedly at both of us, and told us we would be surprised when he didn't.

I had a friend who told me that her mother appeared by her bedside one night.

This friend had cancer, and she was in deep anguish over leaving her children behind.

Her mother appeared beside her in bed, and came to comfort her with a smile.

I asked her if she was terrified; and she told me she wasn't at all.

I believed every word of it. My friend has since died. Continue reading

Source

• Victoria Gisondi in Catholic Stand

Victoria Garaitonandia Gisondi is a resident of Bucks County, Pennsylvania and mother of five children.

But which one? Over time, Christians (along with other religious people) have developed several versions of what heaven might be.

So which of our heavens do you believe in? And what makes it a Christian heaven instead of something that simply reflects our earthly desires?

Of course there are people who think of "heaven" as a kind of pie-in-the-sky dream of an afterlife to make the thought of dying less awful. No doubt that's a problem as old as the human race.

But in the Bible "heaven" isn't "the place where people go when they die." In the Bible heaven is God's space while earth - or, if you like, "the cosmos" or "creation" - is our space.

And the Bible makes it clear that the two overlap and interlock. For the ancient Jews, the place where this happened was the temple; for the Christians, the place where this happened was Jesus himself, and then, astonishingly, the persons of Christians because they, too, were "temples" of God's own spirit.

Hawking is working with a very low-grade and sub-biblical view of "going to heaven." Of course, if faced with the fully Christian two-stage view of what happens after death - first, a time "with Christ" in "heaven" or "paradise," and then, when God renews the whole creation, bodily resurrection - he would no doubt dismiss that as incredible.

But I wonder if he has ever even stopped to look properly, with his high-octane intellect, at the evidence for Jesus and the resurrection? I doubt it - most people in England haven't. Until he has, his opinion about all this is worth about the same as mine on nuclear physics - namely, not much.

Continue reading about what stephen Hawking doesn't understand about Heaven

"It's a big deal. It's like finding a needle in a haystack—the sense of discovery is hugely exciting" said Dr. Bond, who led the team of researchers from Massey, Auckland, Canterbury and Victoria Universities, as well as from Japan and the United States. "It has profound implications and opens a new chapter in the history of the Milky Way."

On May 18 in in the same paper, the famous physicist Stephen Hawkings declared he finds no room for heaven in his vision of the cosmos. Comparing the human brain to a computer he said "there is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers."

It seems that the universe is growing bigger with escalating and exciting possibilities while Hawking's vision has stalled, for isn't this the man who asked the famous question: "What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?", says Catherine Hannan

Read about Ian Bond's discovery

Image: Flickyr

Hawking, diagnosed with Motor Neurone disease at 21, is now aged 69.

"I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first," he told the Guardian newspaper. "I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark."

Hawking's comments go beyond those laid out in his 2010 book, "The Grand Design" which provoked a backlash from religious leaders for arguing there was no need for a divine force to explain the creation of the universe.

Hawking joined others including the chancellor, George Osborne, and the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, at the Google Zeitgeist London event where he addressed the question: "Why are we here?"

His talk was focussed on M-theory, a broad mathematical framework that encompasses string theory, which is regarded by many physicists as the best hope yet of developing a theory of everything.

M-theory demands a universe with 11 dimensions, including a dimension of time and the three familiar spatial dimensions. The rest are curled up too small for us to see.

Sources

• The Guardian
• Image: Sound on Sight

The study claims many religions and societies think a certain fixed amount of effort is required to buy a ticket to heaven, and since there is now more time available to collect the required celestial pixie points you can start later.

Putting it more elegantly, Elissaios Papyrakis, an economist at the University of East Anglia says "We show that higher life expectancy discounts expected benefits in the afterlife and is therefore likely to lead to postponement of religiosity, without necessarily jeopardizing benefits in the afterlife."

Read article
Canada.com