One of my favorite sayings from the late Pope Francis is, “What I am going to say is not a dogma of faith but my own personal view: I like to think of hell as empty; I hope it is.”

When Pope Francis said this, he came under fire from his own side, Catholics and Christians alike all disagreed with what he personally believed. Obviously there are terrible people in the world who refute Jesus Christ and His message on this earth and die under that belief. There’s good people on earth who still refute His message and die under that belief. What about irredeemable monsters in history, Hitler, Mao, Jeffrey Dahmer? The list goes on and on. Obviously, they must be in hell.

I understand that the quote directly says from Pope Francis that it is his own personal belief. But I like to think the same of hell and all its horrors. I would also like to back it up with faith.

One of the biggest things I was taught as a young Catholic was that if you committed suicide, you would end up in hell. What you are doing is directly spitting on the face of God, His gift of life for every one of us. Now, in its own way, maybe that fear of direct route to hell saved my life, and stayed my hand from killing myself when I was still young and unfamiliar or ignorant to the joys of life. However, that teaching is incorrect to our faith. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says in Article 1, Respect for Human Life, paragraph 2283.

“We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance. the Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives.”

Who is to say what happens in the milliseconds after death? How do we know what happens in the fraction of a millisecond a man takes his last breath, the bullet penetrates the cranium and is about to wreak its destruction? How do we know that Jesus doesn’t talk to each and every one of us in the moments before death?

In the book of Philippians, chapter 2, verses 9-11, it says, “Therefore God also highly exalted Him and gave Him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

Isaiah 45:23 also says, “By myself I have sworn, from my mouth has gone forth in righteousness a word that shall not return: ‘To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear.’”

Every knee will bend, and every head shall bow, in this life and the next. Why shouldn’t hell be empty?