Transcript

His right hand and his holy arm have gotten him the victory.

Words taken from today's intro at the entrance antiphon.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

Amen.

All of us, I think, are familiar with the story of the Trojan Horse.

All seemed fine for the men of Troy when they saw the Greeks supposedly retreat from battle and board their ships for the journey home.

But the Greeks had left a monument of sorts behind: a large hollow wooden horse.

The overconfident Trojans brought the horse within their strong walls, and then they began their victory party.

Eventually, the men of Troy fell off to sleep, and many even passed out in a drunken stupor.

Within the belly of that wooden horse, however, lay a number of Greek soldiers waiting to come out and to open the gates of Troy to their returning Greek comrades.

The Greeks would completely defeat the men of Troy, beginning with their use of a Trojan Horse.

Now, by way of analogy, by way of comparison, our dearest Lord would use His own Trojan Horse strategy, if you will.

He would take on a real human nature by the power of the Holy Ghost and through the womb of His Most Blessed Mother.

He could never die in His divine nature; God can't die in the Spirit.

But the Son of God could suffer and could die in His very sacred flesh, and the most precious blood that He took up, that seemingly weak human nature, therefore would be the Trojan Horse.

It would be that wooden horse that would allow Him to die and venture towards the gates of the netherworld.

The holy deacon, the heart of the Holy Ghost, the great Saint Ephraim, had this to say: Death had its own way when our Lord went out from Jerusalem carrying His cross.

But when, by a loud cry from that cross, He summoned the dead from the underworld, death was powerless to prevent it.

Saint Ephraim then continued, Death slew Him by means of the body which He had assumed, but that same body proved to be the weapon with which He conquered death.

The devil and his demons, like the Trojans of old, were inebriated with the perverse and vicious delight on Good Friday as they saw the holy victim die upon the cross.

The devil and death perceived our Lord as just another victim, a prey to be simply devoured.

After the crucifixion, the human soul of Christ descended to the dead like all other victims before Him.

The gates of death were then opened to let in our Lord, but once that human soul of the Son of God entered the gates, His all-powerful divinity came out from hiding.

The belly of the horse contained the infinite God within the most holy soul of our Savior.

He did not enter into the hell of the damned, where Satan resides; rather, the Son of God stomped, if you will, upon the ceiling of hell from above in triumph while taking all the spoils of His victory over sin, Satan, and death.

And what did He do?

He released the holy men and women from Limbo, the Limbo of the Fathers.

The Church Fathers call this moment the very harrowing of hell—our Lord's triumphant descent and conquering of the underworld.

Again, St. Ephraim, the holy deacon, the Syrian, had this to say: Concealed beneath the cloak of His manhood, His Godhead engaged death in combat.

But in slaying our Lord, death itself was slain.

It was able to kill the human life of our Lord, but was itself killed by the life that is above the nature of man.

St. Ephraim then continued, saying, Death could not devour our Lord unless He possessed a body; neither could hell swallow Him up unless He bore our flesh.

And so He came in search of a chariot in which to ride into the underworld, and this chariot was His body, which He received from the Virgin Mary.

In it, He invaded death's fortress, broke open its strong room, and scattered all its treasures.

Again, the Church describes Christ's descent into the underworld, to the Limbo of the Fathers, as the harrowing of hell.

In other words, the holy raiding of hell, the despoiling of hell, the conquering of hell.

Our Lord put an immeasurable fear into the devil, his demons, and the damned as they sought to hide from Christ's omnipotent majesty.

In short then, and this is essential: Christ came to conquer hell, not to experience it.

I'm going to repeat that: Christ came to conquer hell, not to experience its fires.

Christ freed individuals from the Limbo of the Fathers; therefore, Christ did not suffer hell and its pains in any way.

Christ was dashing against the gates of hell, proclaiming His victory and delivering the righteous ones who came from the Old Testament.

But on the other hand, there is a most dangerous and very novel idea gaining popularity in Catholic circles over the last few decades.

It holds that Christ descended into hell not as a champion announcing His victory over Satan, sin, and death, but rather that Christ descended into the realm of Satan as a sentenced man and was filled with despair, like the damned themselves.

As usual, the culprit of this modern era is a so-called new theology—new theology which is just modernism put in a new garment.

Especially a man like Father Hans Urs von Balthasar wrongly taught that our Lord Jesus was crushed in hell and that He suffered as an object of the Father's wrath, as if the Father had wrath against His own divine Son.

Balthasar, who sounds more Calvinist than actually Christian and Catholic, goes so far as to say that God the Father cursed His Son and banished His Son to hell.

For Balthasar and other new theologians, Christ suffered in hell's flames and experienced complete despair, exactly like the damned.

Balthasar saw the descent as a continuation of Christ's passion.

Christ suffers, he said, a second death in order to expiate the penalty due to all mankind's sins.

And could we not add that von Balthasar and the new theology felt that perhaps this would save all men from the fires of hell?

Dare we hope?

Another question that von Balthasar asked was whether all men ultimately end up in heaven.

What blasphemy issued forth from the lips of a quote-unquote Catholic theologian!

In conclusion, the traditional doctrine of Christ's descent into hell can be summarized in four points.

First, the sinless human soul of Christ, united to His divine personality—that is called the hypostatic union, united to the second person of the Holy Trinity—descended only to the realm of the dead reserved for the souls of holy individuals called the Limbo of the Fathers: men like Abraham, men like Moses, men like Noah, men like Adam.

Catholic teaching has consistently and unambiguously held that Christ ascended in soul only to the Limbo of the Fathers, not to the hell of the damned and forsaken.

Secondly, Christ then liberated and freed the just from Limbo, conferring on them the glory of heaven.

He came to bring them home.

Thirdly, in bringing the souls of the just out of their prison, Christ's power and authority were made known to all of the dead, both good and evil, and to the devil and to his demons, who were in fear.

Lastly, because Christ descended in His sinless soul as the all-holy Redeemer and Savior, His descent was glorious and was similar, in a way, to His very resurrection from the dead, and He did not suffer in hell.

This is the orthodox teaching.

Of all the Church Fathers, that trumps all the errors of the new theology of the modern Church.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

Amen.

Thank you.