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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Having a Hindu chaplain recite the opening prayer in the U.S. Senate does not violate the principle of the Pledge, since Hindus share belief in God, expressed through the multiple gods and goddesses they believe to represent Brahman, the ultimate transcendent. Over one million Hindus live in America. As American citizens, they enjoy the same freedoms and privileges as Catholics, Presbyterians, Orthodox Jews, Sunni Muslims, and Mormons, to name but a few religious groups.

Those who object that such prayers violate the separation of church and state likely would also object when any other chaplain offers prayers at the Senate. For them, offering prayers in the chambers of our secular government is a category mistake.

Granted that the vast majority of Americans believe in God, we have only officially been “One Nation under God” since June 14, 1954, when President Eisenhower signed the law adding these words to the Pledge of Allegiance (which itself was written in 1892), so the notion of a nation of believers is relatively recent in our history. If we are going to give religion a place in public life, then it should not just be one religion. We are a nation of many religions. Just as the military employs chaplains from a variety of religions, so, too, representatives of these religions should have equal opportunities to offer public prayer.

Those Americans who say “give me that old time religion” simply need to recall that Hinduism—truly an old time religion—predates Judaism and Christianity.

I doubt that there has ever been a saint or theologian who did not have doubts about faith. The list of doubters includes the Apostle Peter, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Julian of Norwich, Martin Luther, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Mother Teresa—not bad company for those who sometimes struggle with belief. After all, the claims that faith makes are rather grand: God created us; we have souls; God watches over us; God will judge us; there is an existence after this one; our actions in this world, at least in part, may determine our fate in the next; God has been revealed to us in texts, persons, and events.

It would be hard not to doubt some (or all) of these claims at some time during our lives. Those of us who take faith seriously and are critical thinkers in other aspects of our lives—for example, asking, Is the President lying to us? How do analysts predict the behavior of the stock market? Is it safe to trust technology?—naturally raise questions. Religious faith is not immune from such scrutiny. In fact, a little skepticism is a healthy thing. Those who think through their commitment to faith by raising critical questions can offer more than emotion, more than opinion, and more than personal history or indoctrination to explain their beliefs.

Given the choice between an uncritical and naïve appropriation of faith and Mother Teresa’s admitted struggles with her faith, I join the diminutive woman with wrinkles on her face and light in her eyes who, when asked by a journalist why, given her resources of a band of Sisters who owned only as much as the poor they served, she continued to struggle against poverty with virtually no chance of success, responded: “God, did not call me to be successful. God called me to be faithful.” Being faithful does not mean being uncritical, or mindless, or unwilling to question even our most deeply held convictions of faith. Mother Teresa persevered in faith despite her doubts. We, too, may doubt but have faith without fear that we are being untrue to our faith or to ourselves.