Hell is a place where sinners really do burn in an everlasting fire, and not just a religious symbol designed to galvanize the faithful, the Pope said.
Addressing a parish gathering in a northern suburb of Rome, Pope Benedict XVI said that in the modern world many people, including some believers, had forgotten that if they failed to "admit blame and promise to sin no more," they risked "eternal damnation — the Inferno."
Hell "really exists and is eternal, even if nobody talks about it much any more," he said.
Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, a Church historian, said that the Pope was "right to remind us that Hell is not something to be put on one side" as an inconvenient or embarrassing aspect of belief.
In October the Pope indicated that limbo, supposed since medieval times to be a "halfway house" between heaven and hell, inhabited by unbaptized infants and holy men and women who lived before Christ, was "only a theological hypothesis" and not a "definitive truth of the faith."
