Could someone go to hell “for” another?
To go to hell so that other souls may be saved has been the loving desire of many saints, who have expressed this impossible prayer to God out of sheer love and sorrow for those who are moving towards damnation.
But such thing is impossible: for God does not send any soul to hell. Hell is a state of eternal separation from God, and the choice of being separated cannot come from He who is all-good, all-merciful, all-forgiving…it is the choice of the damned soul to be separated from God and that is the state of Hell.
God cannot force salvation on anyone, otherwise (a) we would not have free will and (b) our beloved Jesus would not have had to suffer so much in order to draw us back to Him! Consequently neither can we “force” salvation on anyone.
Remember: we are called to be willing to lose our life for our brothers, but not to be willing to lose salvation. That is a horrible sin in countless ways: a sin of despair for the person in question, a sin of distrust in God’s divine providence, a sin of presumption that we can fix things ourselves, a sin against the person’s freedom and free will…I could go on forever!
But to reply to your peculiar example (which, mind you, I hadn’t read yet
I focused on the thread title!):
a man confesses to his priest, identical twin brother that he plans to kill another man and will never regret it. The priest kills that man so his brother won’t go to hell, and he himself never repents because he saved his brother from damnation. What happens to each’s soul?
It seems that the person would die in a state of mortal sin and unrepentant (though I don’t get why was he confessing
), having committed what appears to be a mortal sin of thought and having the firm intention to carry it out without repentance (see J_Peterson’s reply), and the other person would also die in a similar state of mortal sin (having broken the sixth commandment) and unrepentant (according to your words), thus in this case they both seem to have chosen to reject God and they both seem to end in the state of hell by their very choice
Now to add some humor:
as that imaginary confessor comes up with such a clever solution for his brother, I imagine their guardian angels’ reactions:
:banghead:
http://static.diablofans.com/public/style_emoticons/default/facepalm.gif