#damnation

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apenitentialprayer:
Huh. Today I learned Saint Bridget of Sweden claimed that Jesus Himself told her that Herod the Great, Pontius Pilate, and Judas Iscariot were damned (Prophecies and Revelations1.25)

~~Kind of a bunch of wonky stuff in her writings that make me hesitant to rely on her alone though~~
Huh. That makes me sad especially with Pontius Pilate. The Orthodox revere him and his wife as saints afaik (and I love the way they’re portrayed in The Passion but that’s not an authoritative source).

But isn’t it official Church doctrine that no one can be definitely said to be in hell? Obviously with the rigorous canonization process we can say who is in heaven, but for everyone who is not canonized, we don’t know and have no way of telling.

And saints can be wrong, but it is weird to hear this in the context of private revelations as opposed to something like St. Thomas Aquinas being wrong about the Immaculate Conception.

I know for a fact that Saint Procula is considered a saint by the Orthodox Church, but I think Pontius Pilate is only considered a saint in the Oriental Orthodox Church - I don’t know what that means for Ethiopian Catholics.

The official Church teaching is that no one can be said to be canonicallyin hell; that there is no person that the Catholic Church mandates us to believe is definitely in hell. But individuals have been placed in hell in the writings or visions of particular people. I’ve seen claims that one saint and a blessed claimed that Martin Luther is in hell, for example, but I haven’t seen primary sources for that. But yeah, as it stands, we are free to pray for any individual in the hopes that they are not in hell - the only group of people we are not allowed to pray for are “the damned” as a class, because their judgment has already been wrought.

And the Church doesn’t believe that private revelations are something Catholics are required to believe, and She acknowledges that private revelations are not protected by infallibility the way that the deposit of faith is; that mystics can misinterpret what they saw, for example, or not accurately describe what they experienced. That’s why doctrine is really only supposed to be shaped by what is in the Bible.