Frank talk about sin, judgment, and hell...

Insight Scoop has a Q & A session posted by Carl Olson that is a give and take between His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI, and priests and seminarians in his Diocese that is originally from Chiesa:

I wanted in part to speak precisely of the last, universal judgment, and in this context also of purgatory, hell, and paradise. I think that we are all still affected by the objection of the Marxists, according to which Christians spoke only of the beyond, and overlooked the earth. So we want to show that we are truly concerned about earthly things, and are not people who speak of faraway realities, who do not help the world.

Now, although it is right to demonstrate that Christians work on behalf of the world – and we are all clearly called to work so that this world that may truly be a city for God and of God – we must not forget the other dimension. Without keeping this in mind, we do not work well on behalf of the world.

Demonstrating this was one of my fundamental aims in writing the encyclical. When one is not aware of the judgment of God, when one does not recognize the possibility of hell, of the radical and definitive failure of life, then one does not recognize the possibility and necessity for purification. Then man does not work well on behalf of the world, because in the end he loses his bearings, he no longer knows himself, not knowing God, and destroys the world. All of the great ideologies have promised: We will take things in hand, we will no longer overlook the world, we will create the new, just, correct, fraternal world. Instead, they destroyed the world. We see this with Nazism, and we also see it with communism, which promised to build the world the way it was supposed to have been, and instead destroyed the world.

In the "ad limina" visits of the bishops from formerly communist countries, I see always anew how in those lands it is not only the planet, the ecology that has been destroyed, but above all and more seriously, souls. To rediscover truly human understanding, illuminated by the presence of God, is the first work for the rebuilding of the world. This is the common experience in these countries. The rebuilding of the world, respecting the planet's cry of suffering, can be realized only by rediscovering God in the soul, with one's eyes open to God...

Read more here or read the entire article which is linked from this site...