We need to be saved

Hell exists, says Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, but so does hope. Choices have consequences, and by making the right choices we move towards God

Before very long, I would imagine, together with my fellow-Cardinals, I will be going to the Vatican for the election of the successor to Pope John Paul II. The election takes place in the most precious jewel of the Vatican Museum, the 15th-century domestic chapel of Pope Sixtus IV, known as the Sistine Chapel. Here, twice a day, the Cardinals assemble and one by one place their vote in a silver urn for the one whom they truly believe is the best person to assume the mantle of Peter. The event itself is dramatic, but made more so by the surroundings. Thirty years after painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo was asked to paint the Last Judgment. At that time, Rome had been sacked by invaders and Christendom had been split in two at the Reformation. So Michelangelo portrays Christ as a threatening judge with arm up-raised as if ready to strike. On the left, the dead are raised from the cloddish earth and hauled up to heaven by friends. On the right, the damned are pushed down to the corner of the painting where hell yawns to receive them.

These images appear forbidding, even alien, to the modern imagination. We should not however dismiss them out of hand. The 20th century has given us more than enough images of a man-made Hell-on-earth — the trenches of the Somme, the atrocities of Auschwitz and the Gulag, the apparently endless saga of international terror and private horror. The notion of the Last Judgment is rooted not in some arbitrary divine whimsy, but in the awful realities of human behaviour. Human cruelty, alienation and despair are the result of moral decisions made both by individuals and by whole societies.