Wailing and Gnashing of Teeth

The sixteenth Daddy Goodspeak is worried that too few people these days go creeping about their business in fear of eternal damnation. "Jesus came to tell us everyone is wanted in paradise," he said; however, against those who find the accommodation restrictive even the wishes of the Saviour cannot prevail: "hell, about which little gets said today, exists and is eternal for those who shut their hearts to his love". Affectionate chap, this Jesus. Nevertheless, our real enemy is not the one threatening hell-fire, but "the attachment to sin, which can bring about the failure of our existence", as when politicians consider giving rights to homosexual couples, or when the UN denies medical personnel the right to place their own lily-white consciences before the welfare of their patients.

During his stint as Grand Inquisitor, the sixteenth Daddy Goodspeak gave us the benefit of his opinion on the devil: "a puzzling but real, personal and not merely symbolic presence ... a powerful reality, a baneful superhuman freedom directed against God's freedom." As a result, it has been found necessary to drag out a dean of theology to reassure those Catholics who have the misfortune to live in the present century that he didn't really mean it that way: "talk of devils with forks tended merely to foster fear in a way unfaithful to the gospels themselves" says Michael Paul Gallagher. Hence "Hell is better seen as a state of self-separation from God or self-exclusion from love", rather than as a result of, for example, Jesus having been faithful to the gospels in Matthew 10 xxxiii. Michael Paul Gallagher also observes that "it is a terrifying freedom to live a refusal of love and to live only for oneself" which - leaving aside the question of whether one can avoid living for oneself - sounds perilously close to treating the devil as a merely symbolic presence.