Westminster Cardinal Vincent Nichols told the BBC (March 30) that fire and brimstone have "never been part of Catholic teaching" on hell claiming that this originates only from iconography.
Nichols went on putting Lenin, Hitler or Churchill, the butcher of Dresden, among the saints by suggested that hell could be empty although Christ says in Mt 26:24 that Judas is in hell.
Nichols does not know that Christ calls hell a "furnace of fire" (Mt 13:50) where "the fire is not quenched" (Mk 9:48).
The Revelation of Saint John describes hell as a place where the wicked are "tormented with fire and brimstone” (Rev 14:10-11) and as a "lake of fire" (Rev 20:14-15).
In Mt 7:13-14 Christ says, "Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it; but small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it" - stating that a majority of men go to hell.
The myth that in hell there is no physical fire was invented in the 1950-ies in …More