Saint gregory - five year old in hell

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What are you talking about? What my priest said that what is heresy is the idea that divine mercy has an expiration date.
 
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St. Alphonsus Liguori calls Mary the “Divine Mother” in The Glories of Mary. This could perhaps be a translation mistake, but I have no reason to think he would mean that Mary is a goddess.

I think what the passage is trying to articulate is that God knows every heart; some He takes early and some He waits for various reasons. He knows the number of every little sin that you will commit until your personal judgement. Some souls He expects more of and others He expects less of because every soul is different.

That being said, God is infinite in His mercy as well as being infinite in His justice. His compassion is more than you could imagine.
 
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Lost Soul #1: So what are you damned for?

Lost Soul#2: Murder, corrupting the populace, you know, everything expected from a good politician… What about you?

Lost Soul #1: I broke fast and ate a cookie 😞
 
No problem. I would have said the same thing if I thought someone was knocking divine mercy
 
Because people are so stubborn. Many have no interest in holiness, and therefore they fail to prepare for death. Moreover, many are deceived by heresies that deny that sin is anything to be concerned about. God always seeks out the lost sheep, but sin is addicting, and many refuse to hear the Good Shepherd calling them away from that deadly drug.
 
I would tend to agree.

I think the phrase just means Mother of God, Mother of the Divine.
 
The article is just an excerpt from St. Alphonsus Liguori’s writings. St. Alphonsus wrote a whole sermon on this for the first Sunday of Lent, so I don’t think it’s heretical if a Doctor of the Church taught it.
 
No, I don’t think it is a verbatim sermon, but a mixture of the author at Church Militant and uncited quotation from St. Alphonsus Liguori.

I might be mistaken. I will have to look at it more closely.

In any case, the argument is very subtle, and can easily mislead some souls who are doubtful and not for a scrupulous soul to fix his attention on. It’s quite Jansenistic in tone.

If I don’t forget, I will look at it again more closely tonight or in the morning.
 
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It does appear on the surface to be an excerpt of the Saint’s writings but I’m unable to verify that since I don’t have that book or the online version of that book to compare with.

My first objection is that whoever linked the Saint’s Treatise, Preparation for Death, has failed to actually link to the passage in the treatise he is quoting from, which is section 18. The pdf file only goes to section 10, so I can’t read what was actually written by the Saint unless I go and look for it somewhere else.
 
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St. Alphonsus’s main point in the passage as a whole is not to be presumptuous and sin with reckless abandon believing that one day, the sinner will simply have time to repent at the last minute and all will be well. That is a perfectly orthodox and very practical warning for a soul and good for all to keep in mind.

One must equally weigh the degree of God’s mercy to the sinner. There is a balance that needs to be arrived at or many people will live only in a great servile fear of God’s wrath and justice or worse yet, be moved to despair. Overly emphasizing one point at the neglect of another can be quite damaging to certain souls.
 
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St. Alphonsus is a doctor of the church but that excerpt which Simon has quoted in his OP is going to make for some contentious debate here within the forum. The overwhelming majority of forum members here are not moral theologians. I don’t think that passage concerning the damnation of what most here could only be seen as innocents is helpful for today’s times.

The saint was writing for an 18th century listener. Throwing that paragraph out into the forum as a whole is going to be problematic, for lack of a better term.
 
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I don’t think a 5 year old is capable of doing anything to put him in hell.

Theoretically anyone 7 or older could commit a mortal sin. It could put him in hell, but there probably isn’t any concrete evidence that anyone that young is actually there. Our teachers in grade school used to scare the dickens out of me. One said the devil will come and carry you off to hell if you are bad and commit sin. Another said an eighth grader died and appeared to his friend, telling him he went to hell because of some sin or other. I always feared going to bed at night because I was afraid I would wake up, the devil standing there, his horns wagging at me, and his eyes like burning coals in his head.

So, actually that happened. I woke up one night with a man standing by my bed, his eyes burning like anthracite, looking down at me. It was my father, angry at me for something or other, telling me I would be standing in the corner again tomorrow.

Oh, well, such is life.
 
Although I never frequent Churchmilitant, or at least have not, for a very long time. What was said in the video by one of the speakers is spot on and explains the general point that the excerpt made very well. (2:20 - 3:40 in the video.)
 
I wanted to listen to the excerpt again from the speaker, but now it is not letting me. How evil!! 🙂 It’s going to a different video clip. Strange.

Oh, wait, I see, you have to click on the full episode link at the bottom of the video to get to the part I was talking about. Rodney was speaking.
 
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The only reason I knew it was actually from St. Alphonsus is because he said the same thing in a book of sermons that I have. And yes, I have noticed in these forums that St. Alphonsus’ writings often cause a lot of problems here. I guess his writings are only for some people.
 
simonjosiah1 said:
saint Gregory relates that a child of five years, who had arrived at the use of reason, for having uttered a blasphemy, was seized by the devil and carried to Hell.
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BS. The age of reason is not freaking FIVE.
 
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