Someone asked me whether a person could theoretically go to hell because others didn’t pray for him or didn’t pray enough, so that he didn’t repent, and noted that this would seem unfair for God to “allow.” The questioner was assuming several things here that do not follow.
First, it’s not a matter of God’s “allowing” someone to go to hell (as if He were to blame for it). If anyone goes to hell, it is because he wanted to live without God. As C. S. Lewis wrote with great insight, “The doors of hell are locked on the inside.”6
Second, all grace, including grace conveyed through prayer, comes from God. Since God knows everything (including even possibilities and contingencies and all possible outcomes), if He foreknew that Person A would not pray for someone else, He could easily “arrange” things in His providence so that Person B would do so.
Third, in the final analysis, whether we are saved will always depend on God’s grace, but it is our decision whether to accept this grace. The grace will be provided. It doesn’t
ultimately depend on another person, so that if he fails, we go to hell. It just doesn’t
work that way. That would be contrary to God’s mercy, to let eternal salvation rest on the week reed of third parties.
The proper way to express our choice with regard to eternal destiny would be to say (using myself): “Dave did not accept the grace and the free option of going to heaven that God provided for him, and so he went to hell.” We all stand before God alone, in the end, as many old folk songs point out, such as: “You got to walk that lonesome valley by yourself.”
We mustn’t confine ourselves to a merely human way of looking at things. God has a completely different perspective (as revealed in Holy Scripture).
Who is saved and who is damned is not in our hands. We can help provide the avenues of grace and blessing that God has for each individual, but each one’s final destiny rests with him and God. We are to pray, do good works, love, do penance on behalf of others, listen, assist, and share the Good News at every reasonable opportunity.
Then we know that we are fulfilling our responsibility and holding up our end of the bargain, so to speak. The good things we do can make the (Christian) path easier for others to follow, but they do not determine others’ paths, let alone whether others go to heaven or hell.
Books such as Proverbs and Psalms present a stark contrast between the “evil, wicked fools” and the “righteous” and the “wise.” That’s proverbial language, though, which intends to convey generalities. We all know that we are quite the mixture of good and evil and often are more like shades of gray rather than pure and righteous and holy versus utterly evil and wicked. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the famous Orthodox writer and dissident against Communism stated that “the line between good and evil runs through every human heart.”
It is the extreme contrast that is the motivational tool to reform behavior and to express the urgency and importance of action on behalf of others. In this matter, there is indeed a relationship between our prayers and graces always caused and offered by God through us to others. The same applies to penitential works and even suffering (redemptive suffering).
God designed things that way, so that we can all be involved in the marvelous process of His graces. He wanted salvation and redemption to be a community or organic effort, not the effort of a bunch of atomistic individuals. We help each other. We are our brothers’ keepers.
I think we can, therefore, quite possibly interpret this aspect of the message of Fátima (perhaps in part, at the least) as: “If no one prays for a soul, that soul will go to hell.” But that is at bottom a collective notion: “every soul needs the assistance of prayer [general]; therefore you [particular; part of the collective] should pray.”
It doesn’t logically follow, however, that if we as individuals fail to pray for an
individual person, that person will go to hell, because, as I noted before, God in His
Providence will simply cause or urge another person to do so.
And even then, a person could receive all kinds of graces through prayer and whatnot, yet still reject God and salvation, because God gave us the free will to do so, so that following Him would be a meaningful choice, not a question of God’s pressing a button and our not being able to refuse, as if we were robots.
After all, Satan himself was in heaven with God and had everything he could possibly need or want. But he wanted to be in God’s place, so it wasn’t enough for him. Causation in such matters of final salvation is not strictly a matter of us (i.e., we as individuals) and them.
Or, on a more human level: we have all seen families where two children were raised the same way, yet one rebels and gets into heavy sin, while the other stays faithful to the Church and Christian moral teachings. Free will: both were given the same “graces” so to speak, by the parents, but the outcome was different because they decided in the end which way they would go.
The final destiny of the person rests on his acceptance or rejection of God and His grace. We know that God predestines those who will be saved, to salvation, yet (paradoxically) not without their choice and free assent. How this works out in fine detail is a matter of debate in Catholic theology, between Thomists and Molinists. But in Catholic teaching (in contrast to Calvinist), He predestines no one to hell.
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