"He dies in tears"

recently read the pope's encylical on hope; at the end of it he seems to offer reflection on the last judgment as a reason to hope. Most people either ignore the last judgment because of God's mercy or find it scary. Is the pope saying that reflection on the last judgment calls for a restructuring of priorities? Maybe I read it too fast...

Not to quibble, Amy, but when you write that Ratzinger "then brings it all around to Christ. Every time. It is Christ."

How else would you expect him to conclude his reflections?

I just finished a course on Trinity and Eschatology which used "Eschatology, Death and Eternal Life" as one of the required texts. We also used "Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved" by Hans urs Von Balthasar. You might give it a look, as well.

I do find it odd that four famous Catholic men of recent times (including the last two Popes) held out for hell possibly being empty not on heretical universalist grounds of surely it will be so...but on the grounds of God's antecedent will possibly coming about by everyone's final fre choice:
"Who wishes all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth" NT...."For I desire not the death of the sinner but that he should turn from his way and live" OT.

Aquinas however said that "the antecedent will of God does not always take place"....for example, it is also God's antecedent will each day as it begins that each of us acts perfectly today...and that might not happen and probably will not happen since James says, "In many things we all offend".

Benedict, Rahner, John Paul II and Hans urs Von Balthasar apparently had a concept of Scripture that does not accord with anything I have read in the two chief minds of historical Catholicism: Augustine and Aquinas on this topic as it relates to inspiration and scripture and Judas. Augustine and Chrysostom both had sermons that stated that Judas was in hell (Trent forbade that judgement outside of Revelation/Scripture but not inside Scripture as in Christ's consistently ominous words about Judas...words that are misleading if Judas went through purgatory and is in Heaven) and all four above mentioned modern Catholic men held out hope for damnation not being so about Judas in a definite manner (I have the cites somewhere on my computer which is being fixed... for the first three men).

In short do modern men simply have a huge problem with accepting the idea of hell itself; and this holding out hope for Judas despite Christ's consistently ominous words about him...is nothing more than humans seeking to overturn Revelation unwittingly and sporadically out of fear ....since Benedict also had a sermon in which he declared against the tendency to excuse Judas...yet he like John Paul and Rahner etc held out hope for non condemnation for him (despite Christ's words..."better for that man had he never been born"..."not one of them perished but the son of perdition"). "Son of perdition" is a tad harsh if Judas was glory bound in the long run...."better...never born" is impossible regarding the saved.

In Acts 12 God kills Herod Antipas by an angel and requires that his body be left for the worms to eat. Is this really the way God would dispose of someone bound for heaven however eventually? One hopes that Uzzah is in Heaven since God killed him for disobeying as to touching the ark even though his intention (to prevent its falling) was good. But Herod Antipas and Judas and many others who died ominously at the hand of God including Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5 or the villains of the Old Testament that died ominously as to details.....all were Heaven bound??? Modern man including modern Church leaders do not seem sane in this area....compassionate yes....sane no.

Have our leaders themselves unwittingly made evangelizing less probable given that it now seems very hard to actually reach damnation....even for Judas.

Strangely the atheist existentialist Jean Paul Sartre in his biography of the practicing criminal-playwright Jean Genet touches on this new modern compassion that cannot see evil within an evil man when he..Sartre... said to readers of Genet: "You will make excuses for him out of his past in order to hide yourselves from his will to do evil."
I think some of that excessive naivete is present in some very famous Catholic writers and leaders.

Tissa Balasuriya?

Most self-identified feminist theologians?

(As in "feminist theology")

I particularly like how he doesn't stray controversial or confusing and paradoxical issues. I'd been wondering how to reconcile the concept of purification, with how help can come from prayers from others during that purification (given that it is an act necessarily individualistic), and I found it addressed in "Eschatology":

Does not this prayer [for the departed] presuppose that Purgatory entails some kind of external punishment which can, for example, be graciously remitted through vicarious acceptance by others in a form of spiritual barter? And how can a third party enter into that most highly personal process of encounter with Christ, where the "I" is transformed in the flame of his closeness? Is not this an event which so concerns the individual that all replacement or substitution must be ruled out? Is not the pious tradition of 'helping the holy souls' based on treating these souls after the fashion of 'having' - whereas our reflections so far have surely led to the conclusion that the heart of the matter is 'being,' for which there can be no substitute? Yet the being of man is not, in fact, that of a closed monad. It is related to others by love or hate, and, in these ways, has its colonies within them. My own being is present in others as guilt or as grace. We are not just ourselves; or, more correctly, we are ourselves only as being in others, with others and through others. Whether others curse us or bless us, forgive us and turn our guilt into love- this is part of our own destiny. The fact that the saints judge means that encounter with Christ is encounter with his whole body. I come face to face with my own guilt vis-a-vis the suffering members of the body as well as with the forgiving love which the body derives from Christ its Head. "The intercession of the saints with the Judge is not...some purely external affair whose success is necessarily doubtful since it depends on the unpredictable benevolence of the Judge. It is above all an inner weight which, placed on the scales, can bring them to sink down (Balthasar)."

Providing a cohesive unifying eschatology that can bring together the themes set forth by the Psalmist, the Deuteronomist, Daniel/Paul, the Evangelists and Jesus himself is a tall order indeed. This can only be done successfully and honestly by leaving behind the concept of 'unity of scripture'. It actually gets a lot easier to understand then.

Amy,

I've studied lots of heavy theology in the past and even in the present. Ratzinger is different. Whenever I read him, I feel like I'm on retreat. God whispers His Love through Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict. Reading him, I feel the burning the disciples on the road to Emmaus felt when they encountered the risen Christ.

TSO
Perhaps sermon 148 was about the same time in his life that Augustine was getting a bit more merciful to the unbaptized infants...lol. So if we accept Augustine on Ananias et al, then the early Christian community was in part fooled by a pretend disaster into fear of the Lord since the actors in the play merely left this life but passed into glory. I'm not ruling it out but Augustine should have cleaned up the sermon therefore to include there being some great recompense within purgatory prior to Ananias' glory otherwise we have a Protestant once saved always saved moment herein...no wonder the counter Reformation had Church experts go over Augustine's works when the Protestants and later the Jansenists showed love for him.

So had Augustine been standing in the church when Ananias and his wife were killed and buried without space for repentance, Augustine would have been less fearful than everyone else...in fact it seems he would have smiled at their glory whereas the passage says that the community took fear.

TSO
Got it..now. I was thinking more of him as relates Judas where his sermon does place Judas in hell. So your sermon 148 is even more interesting in light of his position on Judas: he is severe with Judas as is called for by Christ's words and yet he is lenient on Ananias and Sapphira/ in the Judas case there is text to support severity yet in the Ananias case, there is no text to support leniency so therein he was on his own.