Dear Parishioners and Friends of St. Mary’s of the Lake:

 One day before Mass a lady asked me a profound question –i.e.  ‘Why did Jesus go to hell after His death, as we proclaim in the Creed?’  This prompted me to take some time to review some reading materials -- especially the Catechism of the Catholic Church. This Pastoral Notes is a kind of ‘follow-up’ on my quick answer to the lady that day because of the crunch of time.

 Basically, when we proclaim Jesus ‘descended into hell’ we first must understand that the word ‘hell’, in this case, is a loose translation of Hebrew and Greek terms which pre-date Christ and refer in general to the ‘realm of the dead’ or the ‘abode of the dead’ where there is an absence of the Beatific Vision.  Our faith has taught us: The sin of Adam and Eve had closed the gates of Heaven. Holy souls from Adam, Eve, Abraham, and Moses... awaited the Redeemer in this ‘realm of the dead’. It's not until Christ reconciles us to the Father by His redemptive act on the Cross that He can then rise from the dead and receive authority from the Father to reopen the gates of Heaven for us and all the redeemed. In other words, when we say Christ descended into ‘hell’, we acknowledge that He went to free the just who had died before Him.  

A few quotation numbers from the current Catechism of the Catholic Church may help us understand more deeply what we profess in the Creed:
# 632 The frequent New Testament affirmations that Jesus was ‘raised from the dead’ presuppose that the crucified one sojourned in the realm of the dead prior to his resurrection. This was the first meaning given in the apostolic preaching to Christ's descent into hell: that Jesus, like all men, experienced death and in his soul joined the others in the realm of the dead. But he descended there as Savior, proclaiming the Good News to the spirits imprisoned there.

#633 Scripture calls the abode of the dead, to which the dead Christ went down, ‘hell’ - Sheol in Hebrew or Hades in Greek - because those who are there are deprived of the vision of God. Such is the case for all the dead, whether evil or righteous, while they await the Redeemer: which does not mean that their lot is identical, as Jesus shows through the parable of the poor man Lazarus who was received into ‘Abraham's bosom’: ‘It is precisely these holy souls, who awaited their Savior in Abraham's bosom, whom Christ the Lord delivered when he descended into hell.’ Jesus did not descend into hell to deliver the damned, nor to destroy the hell of damnation, but to free the just who had gone before him.

Fr. Philip