Fr Greg Moses, Nowra, NSW has submitted the following and prefaces his article with “I have had these thoughts since my time of studying in Leuven in the late ‘70’s. The present rendition was stimulated initially by the Israel Falou saga*, edited a bit since then. It is not concerned with whether or not there is an afterlife but what the afterlife might be like.

These thoughts on the afterlife are heavily influenced by the work of a ninth century Irish philosopher whom I first came to know about in Leuven, by the name of John the Scot or Johannes Scotus Eriugena, literally John Scot Born in Ireland, working at the time on the Continent, in the court of Charles the Bald. The word Scotia at this time included Ireland. Our lecturer at the time was Professor Carlos Steele.

According to John the Scot, in his major work, Periphyseon, at the end of time hell as a separate place will be no more. How do we know this? Because the Bible tells me so: in 1 Corinthians 15 where it says at the end of time God will be all in all. When God is all in all, there will be no room left for hell. It also fits with his overall view of everything coming out of God and going back into God, God as the Beginning, Middle and End of everything.

But what about all this talk about heaven and hell?  John the Scot’s solution to this is that while everyone will be in heaven, the Kingdom of Heaven come in its fullness, some people will enjoy being there more than others, and some people may not enjoy it at all.

For instance (my language), people who get their kicks through pushing themselves up by pushing other people down. Or by turning other people into objects sexual or otherwise for their own fulfilment and enjoyment, or whose holy Trinity in fact is I, Me and Myself. Or who just can’t stand living in the same place as Jews or Moslems or Christians or the poor the sick the blind and the lame or people of other races or tribes or colour or language, or miscellaneous ‘deployables’ for that matter, who also happen to be in heaven, etc.

Some people thus may find themselves totally kick-less so to speak, eternally frustrated in so far as their usual ways of operating don’t work anymore. This is after all God’s world.  Also, the company may not be at all to their liking. They are in heaven, but because of the way they have shaped themselves by their own free decisions it is not a place where they are at all comfortable or in any way at home. They are in heaven, at the end of time the only place there is, the only one left, but for some people being in that place could be like being in hell.

This after all is a kingdom of truth and joy, of justice love and peace, a gathering of people from every tribe and tongue and race and nation, in which there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, no hurt nor harm on all God’s holy mountain. It is a place in which the people mentioned in the beatitudes for example will find themselves particularly happy.

So, the goal of life is not so much to get to heaven as to allow God’s all-inclusive and intense love and mercy and forgiveness, a love that will die for us, though the working of the Holy Spirit, to gradually transform us into the kinds of people who might possibly enjoy it when we get there!  What kind of people?

Well, for instance the kind described in the Sermon on the Mount or in all the parables, with guidance also from St Paul’s attempted application of the gospel to his communities in the second half of his letters or that of John or James.

There is thus a kind of objectivity to it, our lives do matter and what kind of people in God’s grace and mercy we are becoming.  Heaven is God’s world, not some individualistic consumerist paradise adapted to people’s personal wishes and desires. Nor is it something determined by public opinion or shifting community attitudes. Though what it actually is might still be up for debate.

This general view then gets filtered through the Catholic and Orthodox idea of purgatory but conceived by preference in what seems to be the Orthodox or Eastern Catholic manner as more like a hospital than a prison. It is, so to speak, a place where we get patched up after all the dramas of life some of them our own doing and prepared some more to enjoy heaven by our very immersion in the divine love. Or, in terms imaginatively adapted from one of the parables (Wedding Feast), it is a place where we get all washed up, all healed up, all dolled up on our way into the Feast!

We need to allow ourselves to be gotten to the point where we are not beyond hope, where love can still transform us, where love can still save us, where we can accept to be all washed up, all healed up, and to put on the freely available wedding garment. But love does not force.

The English philosopher of religion John Hick, in his book, Evil and the God of Love (originally published 1966), goes a step beyond this with a speculation that, given long enough, Love will have its way even with the most difficult of customers. God after all has all the time in the world and then some.

My own position on this is that, while this might well be an object of reasonable hope, I don’t think it is something that we can claim to know or take for granted.  Love does not force, and there is no accounting for human stubbornness and pride even when totally irrational, or for the ingrained nature of some kinds of evil.  Also, while definitely helpful, I don’t think it is necessary for the sake of Theodicy. I think the John the Scot inspired idea might in fact be enough for this: see below.

Getting back to the John the Scot from Ireland inspired idea: this then influences how we operate in the context of giving pastoral or spiritual guidance. The focus will be in discerning together with the individual or couple or group what is the best way to facilitate the journey of transformation of this individual or this couple or the members of this group in these circumstances into the kinds of people who might enjoy heaven when they get there, the realistic next step along their road. Or, in process relational terms, it is a matter of discerning the divine lure, which is always specific to individual circumstances.

Also, as stated above, even by itself this does effectively remove the doctrine of an eternal hell from the problem of theodicy, justifying God in the face of evil. At the end of time everyone is in heaven. It is not God’s fault that some people are not enjoying being there, and there is no reason to think that a Love that will die for us will ever give up in trying to transform them into people who will so enjoy it.

Even if this Love in a particular case is not being successful, God is doing all that a loving God can be expected to do or even could do consistent with the uncontrolling nature of Love. We hope very much that Love will eventually succeed, but that is what it is, a plausibly well-grounded hope. Coming at it from another angle, we are after all allowed to hope that at the end of time hell will be empty.

Finally, this view also gives an extra point to living and working and praying and longing for the Kingdom of God in this world. Our enjoyment of heaven when we get there emerges not so much as a reward for our work in the here and now but as more like a natural consequence of the way we are being formed by that very way of living. This is in addition to whatever fragile successes we may have.

We get ourselves ready for enjoying heaven precisely by being people who live and work and pray for the coming of the kingdom in the here and now. Or better, we are gotten to be ready for heaven precisely by allowing ourselves to be turned into such people in the here and now. If we are such people, when we get there we will be only too delighted. Heaven is not some opium of the people: it is the absolute stir to our social and ecological action, in spite of all its limitations, in this world.

Gregory James Moses, Nowra NSW (April 2025)

*The “Israel Folau saga” refers to the controversy surrounding the termination of Israel Folau’s contract with Rugby Australia due to his social media posts expressing his religious beliefs. Folau, a devout Christian, posted a message on social media stating that «hell awaits» certain groups, including homosexuals, unless they repent. This led to Rugby Australia terminating his contract, citing a breach of the Professional Players Code of Conduct.

Pope Leo XIV, with Monsignor Leonardo Sapienza, walks out of the Vatican’s Synod Hall on May 10, 2025. (Credit: Vatican Media.)

A few weeks into the papacy of Leo XIV, contributing editor of Crux, Christopher R. Altieri penned the following reflection on what is important to the newly elected pontiff.

Born Robert Francis Prevost, the Augustinian missionary priest who served as prior general of his Augustinian order in Rome and was bishop of Chiclayo in Peru, came late to the Vatican – in 2023 – when the recently departed Pope Francis made him prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops and gave him the red hat.

There is little without precedent in the Catholic Church, but it is fair to say nothing exactly like this has happened before and safe to say it took Church watchers quite by surprise. Conventional wisdom had it that cardinals would not pick a fellow from the United States because it would combine the “soft power” of the papal office with the “hard power” of US political (economic, military, and cultural) clout in unhealthy ways. The concern was real, and not without precedent.

For most of the fourteenth century, the pope and eventually his whole court and government were removed to the French town of Avignon. The Avignon papacy began as an expedient arranged by the king of France – then the ascendant power in Europe – to break a deadlocked conclave. It quickly developed into what came to be known as the “Avignon Captivity” (and sometimes “Babylonian Captivity”) and lasted the better part of seven decades, from 1309-1376.

The fear had been, in essence, that bringing Avignon to the papacy would be as bad or worse than bringing the papacy to Avignon. The late Cardinal Francis George of Chicago has been widely quoted through the years as saying the election of a pope from the United States would not happen until the US enters political decline. Would-be readers of the signs of the times will now be wondering whether we have witnessed the jettison of that homespun wisdom or the fulfilment of a prophecy, or perhaps both.

What’s in a name? In any case, there’s a great deal in the name: Leo. The last Leo was Leo XIII, the father of Catholic Social Teaching in the modern era, who gave the Church and the world the seminal encyclical letter, Rerum Novarum, on the rights and duties of capital and labour, in the heady days of the industrial revolution.

Cardinal Ladislav Nemet, who dined with Pope Leo XIV on Thursday evening – the night of Leo’s election – told HRT Croatian Radio the pope is keenly sensible of the digital revolution unfolding in the 21^st century.

“[Pope Leo] said that we are inside a new revolution,” Nemet said. “In Leo XIII’s time there was an industrial revolution going on,” Nemet said, “now there is a digital revolution going on.”

As Crux’s Charles Collins astutely noted in the days before the conclave, the media coverage – the reportage of cardinals’ remarks, the analysis, and the punditry – strongly suggested the cardinals would be asking themselves questions focused on the supposed conservative / liberal divide epitomized by debates over “traditional values” and Latin Masses on one side, or gay marriage and women clergy on the other.

In a word: The debates of the bottom half of the 20^th century. “The first part of the 21^st century sees a society questioning what it means to be human,” Collins wrote, “with ‘post-humanism’ being pushed by the leaders of many technology firms.”

If those early indications suggested the new pope agrees, Leo himself removed any possible lingering doubt when he addressed the whole College of Cardinals gathered in the New Synod Hall on Saturday morning.

“Pope Leo XIII, with the historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum, addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution,” Pope Leo XIV said.

“Today,” Leo continued, “the Church offers to all her treasure of social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and the developments of artificial intelligence.”

Much has been made of Pope Leo XIV’s service as a missionary priest and as a bishop in an impoverished part of the global south, as well as of his administrative leadership roles in both the Order of Saint Augustine of which he was prior general and in Rome as prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops.

All of that certainly played an important part in the cardinals’ discernment. That Leo XIV is a canonist of some repute is more important than one might think if one were to judge by the early commentary, especially in light of the state of law in the Church after Pope Francis. One of the criticisms levied by senior churchmen during the reign of Francis – often privately, but across the whole broad spectrum of opinion in the Church – was that Francis was not the most careful or orderly legislator ever to sit on the throne of Peter.

Pope Francis’s 2015 structural reform of marriage tribunals, for example, was not universally well received. Francis’s piecemeal reform of the Roman curia was long on theory but lacked the attention to practical detail as would put the Church’s central governing apparatus in form for 21^st century action.

Pope Francis liked to issue legal decrees to solve particular problems. That way of going about things may or may not deal handily with the problem to hand but always tends to create difficulty down the line. Francis issued scores of Apostolic Letters motu proprio – on his own initiative – throughout his pontificate, at the rate of roughly five per year.

To give you some perspective: Pope St John Paul II issued thirty-one motu proprio in all the twenty-six years of his reign. Francis had topped that by the end of his fifth year in office and never really slowed the pace until the end.

The single most important legislative reform of the Francis pontificate was Vos estis lux mundi, a sweeping 2019 law that – on paper, at least – strengthened the process of investigating abuse and coverup allegations and provided a procedural framework for their judicial prosecution at Church law.

Pope Francis, whose own pontificate was bedevilled by cases of frequently alarming mismanagement, proved reluctant to use the law with any meaningful regularity or transparency. The cardinals knew going in, that the man they picked would have to put things in order.

Skeletons out of the closet

One thing observers noted almost immediately was that Leo XIV has an imperfect record on handling cases of abuse and coverup. Some of the accusations he has faced come from quarters highly questionable for their credibility and received a review that appears to have exonerated then-Cardinal Prevost.

One allegation of grave mismanagement appears to be well founded. That allegation is related to the case of Fr James Ray, an abuser-priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago. Then-Fr Prevost OSA, who was provincial head of the Augustinians in Chicago in the year 2000 allowed Ray – who had allegations against him and had been on restricted ministry for nearly a decade – to live (or did not prevent him from living) in a house belonging to his Order of Saint Augustine.

The Archdiocese of Chicago had reportedly noted the restrictions when they requested hospitality for Ray in the Augustinians’ house, which was situated very near an elementary school. Then-Fr Prevost apparently never alerted the school, nor caused the school to be alerted.

The episode with Ray, it is important to note, happened two years before the crisis of abuse and coverup exploded into global scandal. That eruption started in Boston in 2002, but it could have started almost anywhere. The scandal quickly engulfed the whole United States before it spread worldwide.

The crisis of abuse and coverup is not only part of the Church’s recent history but is of very long standing. It is certainly part of the Church’s present. One of the Church’s leading experts on the crisis, Jesuit Father Hans Zollner, has said we will not live to see the end of it.

“This will not be over in our lifetime,” Zollner said in March of 2019, “at least in countries where they have not yet started to talk about it.” The crisis was with us in the year 2000, but the scandal – and the awareness the scandal compelled – was only dimly on the horizon.

Prevost’s imperfect record on abuse may in fact be a sign of much belated awakening among the cardinals. It may demonstrate the cardinals – and the man they elected – finally understanding how abuse and coverup is a key issue, perhaps the key issue: They picked someone whose skeletons are out of the closet, which means they know he will be scrutinized and will have no excuse.

Read in that light, the election of Leo may actually be a sign they take the crisis seriously.