What Hell is Like

The quoted material below is from the book, God and the World, which is a compilation of comments recorded during a series of interviews that Pope Benedict XVI gave while he was Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith:

The path we follow toward genuine loving leads by way of losing oneself and through all the affliction of an exodus. Thus along the way lie all those temptations to get there more quickly, to accept substitutes. Only later do we realize that these substitutes bring only enormous disappointment and will plunge us afterward into unbearable loneliness, into the frustration of an absolutely empty existence. They are in fact images of hell.

For if we ask ourselves what “being damned” really means, it is this: taking no pleasure in anything anymore, liking nothing and no one, and being liked by no one. Being robbed of any capacity for loving and excluded from the sphere in which loving is possible – that is absolute emptiness, in which a person exists in contradiction to his own nature, and his life is totally ruined.

If, then, the essential characteristic of man is his likeness to God, his capacity for love, then humanity as a whole and each of us individually can only survive where there is love and where we are taught the way to this love.

We come back to Christ: the saving act of Christ consists of making comprehensible to us the fact that God loves us. He brings this home to each of us, and by his way of the cross he accompanies each of us along the path of losing ourselves. And by transforming the law of love into the gift of love, he overcomes the greatest loneliness of all, the state of being unredeemed.

The passage above is also taken from a wonderful little book called Benedictus, Day by Day with Pope Benedict XVI, published by MAGNIFICAT and Ignatius Press. The book provides a short, daily meditation for each day of the year. The meditation quoted above is for October 31.

For anyone who is interested in probing the depths of Catholic theology but who doesn’t have the time to study it, this little book can transform your life (literally). Pope Benedict is one of the greatest theologians in history, and he has the ability to write in a manner that’s easily accessible to everyone.

This book, Benedictus, is also beautifully produced and includes images of inspirational art on every page. It has a full index of the source material (as well as the art), keyed to the day of the year. You will love this book!

ComePrayTheRosary.org

ComePrayTheRosary.org not only enables people to pray the Rosary simultanelously with other people worldwide (or individually), but it's also a great website for people who want to learn the Rosary.

There are some useful instructions and background information toward the bottom of my October 29 info, and today I'd like to add some information about other features of ComePrayTheRosary.org. For example, you can see a real-time map of where the other people are praying:

World Map

You can zoom-in on any area of the world to any level of detail you choose, such as the United States, a specific state, or a specific city:

Zoom to Any Area

To access these features, you select the number that shows how many people are currently visiting the website (in the example below, it's the number 133, which is shown at the very bottom of the screen).

Select the Number Above (for example, 133) to See the Maps

I love this website, ComePrayTheRosary.org.

About a year ago when i wanted to learn to pray the Rosary, all of the "instructions" i could find on the web were a bit difficult to use. The information itself was great, but the formatting of the information made the material difficult to read (very "user unfriendly").

The best overview of the Rosary I can find on the web is Blessed John Paul's Apostolic Letter. If you are new to the Rosary and want to learn more, I wholeheartedly recommend reading the Apostolic Letter and visiting ComePrayTheRosary.org!