Catholicism's best saintly and theological sources say that Hell is a torture chamber and the fate of the damned should be celebrated
Jesus warned that we should nor fear Satan and co and yet he said that we should fear God who destroys body and soul in Hell or Gehenna. Yet today we are told that by dying in sin you end up in a bad condition for eternity and as you have shut God out you endure fire and other terrors for you have left yourself unguarded. This does not fit how Jesus said it's God's choice if you go to Hell as well.
Christian doctrine says that Jesus tells you to depart from him at the end for you have already departed and he is only saying, "I do not condemn you or hate you but I love you and you have to have your own way". This is a deliberate lie for they say that Hell is mitigated by Divine Justice so that a Stalin will suffer worse than a fornicator.
God supposedly loves even the damned for it is said that if he hated them they would not exist. This presumes a very low kind of love. It is like a parent who thinks that loving your child is just bringing them into existence and letting them hunt for food like dogs. And hating a being and keeping it alive to suffer makes perfect sense.
St Thomas argued that "those who are in Hell can receive the rewards of the good they did in life and get their punishment mitigated" Summa, 69.7, reply ad 9). So God clearly does have more control over what happens in Hell than you are led to believe.
Thomas also argued that the persons there are consumed by hate for God but as they don't know God properly they really hate the image they have of him so they do hate him but indirectly. Now this contradicts the Catholic doctrine that goes back to Paul in Romans 1 that everybody has a sufficiently accurate sense of who God is. And Catholicism warns that people who love God fall away. Maybe the damned know God better than anyone and that is why they hate him!
There is a patronising doctrine as well that the damned want to live forever despite the pain for nobody wants to go out of existence. Why would you really worry about that for it does not upset you that you did not exist before you were born and at death you never realise what has happened any more than you realise when you have fallen into the relatively dead sleep? It is just a lie to make the doctrine fit the love of God. Again it is victim blaming.
Nothing about the hell doctrine is beautiful or inspiring. If it is not passive aggressive gloating now, it will soon be.
QUOTES FROM CHRISTIAN WEBSITE
http://www.tentmaker.org/Quotes/hell-fire.htm
Tertullian
“At that greatest of all spectacles, that last and eternal judgment how shall I
admire, how laugh, how rejoice, how exult, when I behold so many proud monarchs
groaning in the lowest abyss of darkness; so many magistrates liquefying in
fiercer flames than they ever kindled against the Christians; so many sages
philosophers blushing in red-hot fires with their deluded pupils; so many
tragedians more tuneful in the expression of their own sufferings; so many
dancers tripping more nimbly from anguish then ever before from applause."
“What a spectacle. . .when the world. . .and its many products, shall be
consumed in one great flame! How vast a spectacle then bursts upon the eye! What
there excites my admiration? What my derision? Which sight gives me joy? As I
see. . .illustrious monarchs. . . groaning in the lowest darkness, Philosophers.
. .as fire consumes them! Poets trembling before the judgment-seat of. .
.Christ! I shall hear the tragedians, louder-voiced in their own calamity; view
play-actors. . .in the dissolving flame; behold wrestlers, not in their
gymnasia, but tossing in the fiery billows. . .What inquisitor or priest in his
munificence will bestow on you the favor of seeing and exulting in such things
as these? Yet even now we in a measure have them by faith in the picturings of
imagination.” [De Spectaculis, Chapter XXX]
Augustine
“They who shall enter into [the] joy [of the Lord] shall know what is going on
outside in the outer darkness. . .The saints'. . . knowledge, which shall be
great, shall keep them acquainted. . .with the eternal sufferings of the lost.”
[The City of God, Book 20, Chapter 22, "What is Meant by the Good Going Out to
See the Punishment of the Wicked" & Book 22, Chapter 30, "Of the Eternal
Felicity of the City of God, and of the Perpetual Sabbath"]
Thomas Aquinas
In order that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful to them and
that they may render more copious thanks to God for it, they are allowed to see
perfectly the sufferings of the damned. . .So that they may be urged the more to
praise God. . .The saints in heaven know distinctly all that happens. . .to the
damned. [Summa Theologica, Third Part, Supplement, Question XCIV, "Of the
Relations of the Saints Towards the Damned," First Article, "Whether the Blessed
in Heaven Will See the Sufferings of the Damned. . ."]
“The same fire” (which he decides to be material) “ torments the damned in hell
and the just in purgatory…The least pain in purgatory exceeds the greatest in
this life.” Summa Theo. Suppl. Qu. 100, acts. 2, n. 3.
Ignatius Loyola 1548
“Let us fancy we see hell, and imagine what is worst to behold—a horrible cavern
full of black flames. Sulphur, devils, dragons, fire, swords, arrows, and
innumerable damned who roar in despair. Imagine the worst you can, and then say,
‘All this is nothing compared to hell.' …In that voracious subterranean cavern
all the filth of the world is collected and inclosed, without exhalation or air,
which must produce a most foetid pestilence…The sight is tormented by frightful
devils; a holy religious saw at death two so monstrous and ugly devils, that he
cried out that rather than see them again he would walk till the day of judgment
on fire of sulphur and melted metal.” Spiritual Exercises, Medit. 12 (This is
one of the commonest books of Roman Catholic devotion.)
That we may be altogether of the same mind and in conformity with the Church
herself, if she shall have defined anything to be black which to our eyes
appears to be white, we ought in like manner to pronounce it to be black. For we
must undoubtedly believe, that the Spirit of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the
Spirit of the Orthodox Church His Spouse, by which Spirit we are governed and
directed to Salvation, is the same ... Rules for Thinking with the Church,
Spiritual Exercises, II
St Francis De Sales 1622
“Represent to yourself a dark city all burning and stinking with fire and
brimstone. The damned are in the depth of hell within this woful city, where
they suffer unspeakable torments in all their senses and members. Consider above
all the eternity of their pains, which above all things makes hell intolerable.”
Garden of the Soul.
St Fray Luis De Granada 1588
“There will the condemned in cruel rage and despair turn their fury against God
and themselves, gnawing their flesh with their mouth, breaking their teeth with
gnashing, furiously tearing themselves with their nails, and everlastingly
blaspheming against the judge…Oh wretched tongues that will speak no word save
blasphemy! Oh miserable ears that will hear no sound but groans! Oh unhappy eyes
that will see nothing but agonies! Oh tortured bodies that will have no
refreshment but flames…We are terrified when we hear of executioners—scourging
men, disjointing them, dismembering, tearing them in pieces, burning them with
plates of red-hot metal. But these things are but a jest, a shadow compared with
the torments of the next life.” Sermons 1. 72 (Translated by Rev. Orby Shipley.)
St Thomas More 1535 (Speaking only of Purgatory)
“If ye pity the blind, there is none so blind as we, which are here in the dark
save for sights unpleasant and loathsome. If ye pity the lame, there is none so
lame as we, that can neither creep one foot out of the fire, nor have one hand
at liberty to defend our face from the flame. Finally, if ye pity any man in
pain, never knew ye pain comparable to ours, whose fire as far passeth in heart
all other fires that ever burned on earth as the hottest of all that passed a
feigned fire painted on a wall. If ever ye lay sick, bethink you then what a
long night we sely souls endure that lie sleepless, restless, burning and
broiling in the dark fire one long night or many years together. You walk
peradventure and totter in sickness; we lie bound to brands, and cannot lift up
our heads…Your keepers do you great ease; our keeper are such as God keep you
from—cruel, doomed spirites, odious, envious, and hateful, despiteous enemies
and despiteful tormentors, and their company more terrible and grievious to be
in than is the pain itself; and the intolerable torment that they do us,
wherewith form the top to toe they cease not continually to tear us.”
Supplication of Souls
Reverend E.B. Pusey, D.D.:
"Gather in one, in your mind, an assembly of all those men and women, from whom,
whether in history or in fiction, your memory most shrinks, gather in mind all
that is loathsome, most revolting * * * conceive the fierce, fiery eyes of hate,
spite, frenzied rage, ever fixed on thee, looking thee through and through with
hate * * * hear those yells of blaspheming concentrated hate, as they echo along
the lurid vault of hell; everyone hating everyone * * * Yet a fixedness in that
state in which the hardened malignant sinner dies, involves, without any further
retribution of God, this endless misery." (Quoted from Christ Triumphant by
Thomas Allin)
St. Anthony Mary Claret
“Once [a soul] is condemned by God, then God's friends agree in God's judgment
and condemnation. For all eternity they will not have a kind thought for this
wretch. Rather they will be satisfied to see him in the flames as a victim of
God's justice. ("The just shall rejoice when he shall see the revenge . . ."
Psalm 57:11) They will abhor him. A mother will look from paradise upon her own
condemned son without being moved, as though she had never known him.”-- "The
Pains of Hell," Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, consisting of thirty-five
meditations from The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius as explained by St.
Anthony Mary Claret. St. Claret's "explanations" were written in Spanish in the
late 1800's.
Catholic Truth Society
What will it be like for a mother in heaven who sees her son burning in hell?
She will glorify the justice of God. - Pamphlet from the late 1960s, part of a
catechismal teaching [cited in an essay by the English poet, Stevie Smith, "Some
Impediments to Christian Commitment"]
From the Catholic Encyclopedia
The poena damni, or pain of loss, consists in the loss of the beatific vision
and in so complete a separation of all the powers of the soul from God that it
cannot find in Him even the least peace and rest. It is accompanied by the loss
of all supernatural gifts, e.g. the loss of faith. The characters impressed by
the sacraments alone remain to the greater confusion of the bearer. The pain of
loss is not the mere absence of superior bliss, but it is also a most intense
positive pain. The utter void of the soul made for the enjoyment of infinite
truth and infinite goodness causes the reprobate immeasurable anguish. Their
consciousness that God, on Whom they entirely depend, is their enemy forever is
overwhelming. Their consciousness of having by their own deliberate folly
forfeited the highest blessings for transitory and delusive pleasures humiliates
and depresses them beyond measure. The desire for happiness inherent in their
very nature, wholly unsatisfied and no longer able to find any compensation for
the loss of God in delusive pleasure, renders them utterly miserable. Moreover,
they are well aware that God is infinitely happy, and hence their hatred and
their impotent desire to injure Him fills them with extreme bitterness. And the
same is true with regard to their hatred of all the friends of God who enjoy the
bliss of heaven. The pain of loss is the very core of eternal punishment. If the
damned beheld God face to face, hell itself, notwithstanding its fire, would be
a kind of heaven. Had they but some union with God even if not precisely the
union of the beatific vision, hell would no longer be hell, but a kind of
purgatory. And yet the pain of loss is but the natural consequence of that
aversion from God which lies in the nature of every mortal sin. V. POENA DAMNI
