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Death was not God’s doing.

Wisdom 1:13

From time to time you hear people say that the problem with the Church now is that nobody believes in sin any more. It has all become a sickly soup of love and forgiveness. What about the wrath of God? What about the fires of hell and of purgatory? Surely, if you do bad, you are punished, and if you do good, you are rewarded. Justice, love and peace are all very well, but the world also contains oppression, hate and violence. We do wrong either to ourselves, or to each other.

Such people have a point. If the Gospel is all about things going right, and people full of Christian charity and nothing else, then it has very little to do with any of us. The tendency to think that God forgives everything really, in the end, is to an extent connected with wish-fulfilment, the desire to live in a perfect world, undisturbed. But, on the other hand, it seems strange, to say the least, that the God who is love might condemn anyone he has made to eternal and final suffering in punishment for offences which, in the perspective of infinite goodness, are maybe not that big.