The Priest at Prayer, May 18

The Priest and the Eternal Truths

HELL

Third Meditation - The Priest in Hell

I. How sad must be the ceremony of Degradation of a delinquent priest, when the rubrics of the Roman Pontifical are carried out with full solemnity!

The Bishop sits outside the church on a raised plat­form where he can be easily seen by all. He gathers round him his Church ministers, and also the secular Judge to whom the degraded priest is to be handed over. And the culprit is there, vested in the ornaments of his particular rank and status: bishop, priest, etc., but when the sentence of Degradation has been read the officiating Prelate strips him of the ornaments one by one:

"I take this mitre from thy head because thou hast profaned it, presiding unworthily."
"I pluck this ring from thee, the pledge of fidelity, because thou hast violated the Church, God's Spouse."
"We scrape and wipe the consecration from thy hands. . ."

And the culprit is handed over to the State to be dealt with like any ordinary criminal.

If I were a bad priest, what shame for me when Christ will strip my soul of all my priestly prerogatives and hand me over denuded of all good and love of God to the executioner of Hell, there to be tormented like any sinner, like the apostate, the murderer. . .!

II. It would not be so terrible if Christ, in degrading and condemning me, were to obliterate every trace of my priesthood, and I became in Hell just one among the many. But no, not even in Hell shall I lose my indelible Character of a priest; on the contrary, my priesthood will mark me out for recognition by the other damned, by the torturing demons, and by the very flames of Hell. Oh, the eternal hissing of all Hell on the hypocrisy and hideous crimes that dragged me down to that place of torment and abjection, down to that "sewer of the human race" (St. Thomas); crimes that in life I tried to cloak in priestly garb, in mumbled recitations, in a paraded semblance of virtue!

Not even among the infernal flames shall I be denied my pride of place, my coveted rights and privileges! I, a priest, higher and nobler in rank than any earthly monarch, shall stand pre-eminent in torment and ignominy, the bait of the biting tongues of all the damned.

The mighty shall be mightily tormented.­(Wisdom vi, 7)

III. Besides the pains common to all the eternally disinherited of the Heavenly Father: the pain of everlasting separation from God, the soul's supreme and only Good; the fire that is never quenched; the gnawing worm of conscience, deathless like the soul itself, ever fretting and consuming; the endless gnashing of teeth in blank despair; the weeping that continues unabated; besides these general pains there awaits the priest his own personal torture: the shame of being the butt of scorn to all Hell.

If the evil cunning of sinners remains rooted in them by death; if the lost soul so identifies itself with sin that it becomes, as it were, sin-made-man; if even here on earth the enemies of God and of His Church are so scathing in their epigrams of scorn and contempt hurled against the Catholic priest; what will they not invent, for all eternity, by way of insults with which to revenge themselves in some measure upon Almighty God in the person of His one-time minister?

Were we to gather the whole sweep of shameless calumnies and denigrating affronts that twenty centuries have heaped upon the head of the priest, what a library they would form!

All that, and more, and for all eternity, the condemned priest will have to bear from the infernal mouths of those confirmed in evil, like him, and embittered by their endless life of woe.

IV. To allow the thought of this torment to sink still deeper, let us take a few verses from chapter 14 of the prophecy of Isaias, and let us apply them to the con­demned priest in Hell. The passage we quote speaks primarily of the death of the King of Babylon, and it constitutes one of the sublimest passages written by the great Prophet:

"The shadow world beneath is astir with prepar­ation for thy coming; wakes up its giants to greet thee.

"The great ones of the world, that ruled the nations, rise up from the thrones where they sit, hailing thee with a single voice:

" 'Thou too, in the same case as we, thou, too, like us!

" 'All thy pride sunk down into the world beneath. . . .

" 'What, fallen from heaven, thou Lucifer, that once didst herald the dawn?

" 'Who sees thee there, but will peer down at thee and read thy story. . .?'" (Is.14)

Is this the man who, with his preaching on the eternal truths, made us wince with fear? he who troubled and disquieted us in our sins, threatening with eternal punishment from God? he whose very garb was a reproach to us? he who was accounted holy, the undis­puted representative of virtue? And now, his pride is sunk down to Hell; now, the mask that hid his face is torn away, and he is seen as criminal as the rest of us: "he, too, like us!"

If in this world my self-love can barely suffer the slightest indication of a sneer, and feels the greatest reluctance to confessing my sins to a fellow priest, what will my feelings be in Hell? What shall I have to say then?

I, who am so avid and eager for human happiness, even for a few drops of forbidden sweetness and contra­band pleasure; I, so addicted to the fugitive and secret gratifications arising from sin; I shall have, in Hell, not just a few moments, as on earth, but all eternity - the Scriptural aeternum et ultra - in which to relish con­tinuously my supreme unhappiness, my ever-enduring infamy, the ceaseless gall and wormwood of remorse.

Is the pleasure which such-and-such a passion procures me, and whose slave I am, so great, of such sterling worth, that it should be bought at such a cost?

St. Bernard pertinently asks:

"If you could enjoy for a month all the good things and pleasures of this world on condition that when they came to an end you would have your eyes gouged out, you would be plunged into a dark, infectious dungeon, and you would live there for forty years, steeped in all kinds of miseries; would you choose the enjoyment?"

Dear God, no, I do not wish to purchase a moment­ary pleasure at the cost of eternal suffering.

Rwsolution
I shall often meditate on the pains in store for me if I end up in Hell, especially when I am assaulted by the tumult of the flesh. The thought of the eternal flames will serve to cool down the ardors of lust. But also when I am in affiiction I shall console myself thinking how often I have deserved to be cast into the pool of fire. Great beyond all measure is God's Mercy in com­muting to me the penalty of endless torment for the brief pangs of this life; sharp and prolonged as these may appear, they will finally pass away.
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Adapted from The Priest at Prayer
by Fr. Eugenio Escribano, C.M. (© 1954)
Translated by B.T. Buckley, C.M.

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Please pray for our priests and pray for vocations to the priesthood!