I do not know if heaven and hell exist, but I believe they do. I would not presume to know who is, or is not, going to either fate. The Roman Catholic Church authenticates a saint as having qualified for heaven because of an exemplary faith and life. Of course, the Church has erred in a few instances (Christopher and Veronica, for example) but generally reserves such an honor for exemplary persons who have exhibited holiness (for example, Nobel Peace Prize recipient and likely-to-be saint, Mother Theresa of Calcutta). I leave it to God to determine an individual’s fate.

Why would I believe that there is a heaven? In addition to scriptural assurances, the nature and complexity of my experience of life, and experiences in life, lead me to believe that this is not all “sound and fury signifying nothing.”

Is it likely that some of the most morally corrupt individuals in history are in hell? If there is a hell, it is likely. However, if God is infinitely compassionate, it is also possible that God has afforded even the most grievous sinners the opportunity to repent. So I am not about to trump God and declare who might be banished from God for all eternity.

I prefer to think of “hell” as separation from God—whether that separation is a permanent state seems to me uncertain. After all, would it not thwart even God for some of God’s own never to come to fulfillment in the eternal presence of God? Why would God bring them into existence? Human free will can resist God’s invitation, but not forever.

I often wonder about Catholics who prefer the Latin Mass. I cannot help but think that they are saying, “Give me that old time religion.”

The problem is that Latin, while old, is not religion. It is neither sacred nor better than the current vernacular language. In fact, it was the vernacular language of the Roman Empire. While it continues to be read and profitably studied by classics scholars and taught in high schools and colleges, it is a dead language that is only spoken by a very small, and shrinking, number of people today.

It remains the official language of the Vatican, but try to find a bishop who speaks it. When official meetings at the Vatican are conducted in Latin, bishops scramble for their headsets for simultaneous translations. Vatican documents are issued in several languages so that Catholics can actually read them. The closest thing to a lingua franca today—like Latin in the Roman Empire—is English, so American Catholics should be grateful to be native speakers of the world language.

One of the ironies of the recent movement of a minority of Catholics to bring back the Latin Mass is that they pine for a liturgy (and an era) that the younger ones among these (and not a few) never knew. They must be listening to the stories of their parents’ or grandparents’ liturgical experience and wanting the same. The curious part of this is that most parents and grandparents do not want to return to the “good old days” of Latin Masses.

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It seems to me that the Vatican comments are aimed principally at Catholic theologians who may express an ecclesiology different from the one articulated by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The Introduction to the document reads:

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