“No One Ever Goes to Hell Who Has Been Truly Loved by Another”
Msgr. M. Francis Mannion is still at it, giving bum answers to good questions. In his regular column in Our Sunday Visitor (Nov. 16, 2003), he is asked: “My 25-year-old son was recently killed in a motorcycle accident. He was a very good man and a good son, and he had a lot of integrity. However, he was an agnostic…. Now, I worry about his salvation. I want to believe he is with God or at least in purgatory…. Should I worry that he might be in hell?”
Mannion answers: “If we love someone and hope for their [sic] salvation, God sees their merits and virtues far more deeply and perceptively than we do…. It is a holy and noble thought that no one ever goes to hell who has been truly loved by another human being in this life. What good we see in the lives of those we love, God sees all the more.”
First, if God sees more good in those we love than we do, think of how much more bad God sees in them. Most people like to advertise their goodness, not their badness, but people cannot hide their badness from God.
Second, to “hope” for someone’s salvation has no bearing on whether he is actually saved.
Third, it is not “a holy and noble thought that no one ever goes to hell who has been truly loved by another….” Such a “thought” has nothing to do with authentic holiness. And if it’s noble, at best it’s a noble lie. We defy Mannion to find anything in Scripture or magisterial Church teaching that would affirm that “no one ever goes to hell who has been truly loved by another.”
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