As November is the month of Holy Souls, containing both the feasts of All Saints and All Souls — let’s continuously pray for all our beloved deceased. Why? Because there’s this thing called Purgatory, and you really don’t want to go there. Aim higher. 

I love hell. Let me qualify that. Hell is a great motivator, perhaps the greatest motivator. But shouldn’t love be our greatest motivation? Certainly, but hell is a great backup when we’re feeling less than virtuous.

Hell is never a nasty surprise waiting for a basically happy person. Hell can only be the full-flowering of a pride and selfishness that have, through a long time, twisted a heart so thoroughly that it considers happiness as unhappiness and has an arrogant disdain for happy people. If you are essentially warm of heart this side of eternity, you need not fear a nasty surprise awaits you on the other side because somewhere along the line, you missed the boat and your life went terribly wrong.

You might think Heaven and hell are a matched set — you can’t have one without the other. But the post-modern mind seems to have decoupled two of the most basic and universal religious ideas in human history, according to the writer and host of Hell: A Survivor’s Guide.

VATICAN CITY - Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy" is more than a literary masterpiece, it is an invitation "to rediscover the lost or obscured meaning of our human path and to hope to see again the glowing horizon on which the dignity of the human person shines in its fullness," Pope Francis said.