Dear Fr. Jim
I have a friend who is now getting ready to join the Catholic Church. She attends mass with me every week and has now picked up on two different versions of the creed spoken at mass.
Her question to me has to do with the part where the creed says Jesus descended into Hell. I have investigated this part of the creed to the extent that I could not give her a good meaning for this. It appears that it is not a literal meaning that Jesus descended to hell but rather in one explanation he went to Limbo, and in another to the extent that we can find hell on earth. What would be a good answer to this?
Keith
Hi Keith-
Well, first off give your friend a prize for paying attention at Mass! I can imagine thousands of Catholics who recite those words about Jesus descending into Hell and never thinking much more about what that meant.
Let’s go back to that Garden of Eden and that original sin of Adam and Eve. After humanity’s “fall” – no soul would be able to enter heaven until the human race was redeemed by the Messiah, Jesus Christ. Only the “evil” merited eternal punishment. So if someone wasn’t “evil” but they could not go to heaven, where did they go in the meantime?
The confusion comes about because of a language difficulty. In Greek there are two words for hell: hades and geena. Hebrew, similarly has two different words for hell: Sheol and Gehenna. “Sheol” and “Hades” basically meant a temporary place of the dead. “Genna” or “Gehenna” meant a perpetual one.
In the English language, the word “Hell” is the only word that covers both. If we wanted to be more descriptive, the was a “Hell of the dead” – describing the place where the good and virtuous people from the Old Testament waited for Jesus’ redemption; and a “Hell of the damned’ is the place created for the Devil and his demons… a place of absolute absence of love.
So when we say Jesus “descended into Hell” it was Jesus “opening the gates of Heaven” to all those souls judged worthy of entering into God’s presence but still had to await that redemption by Jesus.
For more information, check out the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 631-635.
Hope that answer helps with any confusion your friend might have – and extend my congratulations to her on coming into the Catholic Faith!
God Bless
Fr Jim
