Even the secular newspapers were accenting it. There was something so direct. It seemed to hit a chord.

Perhaps there was also something in it that was urgent.

Pope Benedict -- continuing his orthodox approach to the papacy (if slightly less conservative than some anticipated) -- told the world this week that eternal damnation for sins -- hell -- is no game. It is no fantasy, no matter how the world is currently going about its business.

"Christ came to tell us that he desires all of us in heaven and that hell, which isn't spoken about much in our time, exists and is eternal for those who close their hearts to his love," the Pope said.

The important thing is to understand that "the true enemy is attachment to sin, which can lead us to the failure of our own existence," he said.

As a theologian, noted the Catholic News Service, the Pope wrote about hell on several occasions. In the 1968 book, Introduction to Christianity, he described hell as a state of existential abandonment, "the loneliness into which love can no longer reach."

It all served to put hell at center stage at a time when it is treated like an old wives' tale. It also accented the experiences of those who have clinically "died" and returned.

While the majority of those who report near-death experiences come back to describe an incredibly wondrous adventure -- filled with a love, in the way of Christ, they never expected, as well as inconceivable mercy -- a percentage of those who have glimpsed the "other side" have had episodes that were hellish. In some reckoning, it has been as high as ten percent.

The most famous was that of a former atheist and college professor, Dr. Howard Storm of Northern Kentucky University, who 'died" from a ruptured duodenum while visiting Paris and recounted a terrifying journey down a foggy passage filled with former humans whose sharp, demonic features and inconceivably cruel harassment of him sent the "atheist" pleading for help from God.

Before being raised from what he called "a pipeline to the cesspool of the universe," Storm says he was attacked by the being, whose only pleasure "was inflicting pain" on others.

Storm later became a Protestant minister (featured on national television shows, including Today), as did a former atheistic Soviet doctor who also had a near-death experience -- finding himself in a place of darkness after he was hit by a car. Like Storm, he was saved by a light.

Another Protestant, Angie Fenimore -- who as a young addicted mother committed suicide -- described a similar "living," throbbing darkness -- a virtually palpable gloom -- but heard it whispered to her that it was purgatory.

Because many Protestants who have such experiences don't believe in purgatory, they may at times be describing the lower reaches of purgatory instead of sheol.

"I landed on the edge of a shadowy plane, suspended in the darkness, extending to the limits of my sight," she wrote. "Its floor was firm but shrouded in black mist, swirling around my feet, that also formed the thick, waist-high barrier that held me prisoner. The place was charged with a crackling energy that sparked me into hyperalterness, a state of hair-trigger sensitivity. The foglike mist had mass -- it seemed to be formed of molecules of intense darkness -- and it could be handled and shaped. It had life, this darkness, some kind of intelligence that was purely negative, even evil.

"I knew that I was in a state of hell, but this was not the typical 'fire and brimstone' hell that I had learned about as a young child. The word purgatory rose, whispered into my mind."

In other cases, the experience of hell has been more clear-cut, as was also true during the famous Fatima apparitions, when Sister Lucia dos Santos was shown an inferno where, in her words, "demons and souls in human form, like transparent burning embers, all blackened or burnished bronze, floating about in the conflagration, now raised into the air by the flames that issued from within themselves together with great clouds of smoke, now falling back on every side like sparks in a huge fire, without weight or equilibrium."

Sister Lucia said the demons could be distinguished "by their terrifying and repellent likeness to frightful and unknown animals, all black and transparent."

This is stunningly like Medjugorje, where the Blessed Mother allegedly showed the one seer a conflagration in which a beautiful woman entered and came out in the form of a half-human, half-beast. It is also similar to near-death episodes such as that of Howard Storm -- whose experience was so powerful it caused the reversion back to Catholicism of famed vampire writer Anne Rice, who now writes about Jesus.

In other cases, claimed a psychiatrist named Dr. George Ritchie, who "died" from pneumonia while in the military, souls not ready for Heaven are bound to earth and often affect and even harass the living.

Most describe atheism and rejection of God's love as the key reason for the descent into the hell -- in parallel to what the Pope, who wrote the commentary for the third secret of Fatima, has now pronounced.

The one unforgivable sin is that against the Holy Spirit -- widely interpreted as rejection of God even at the last moment.

"The exterior of your body feels as though it were encased within a white hot stove," wrote a physician named Maurice Rawlings who studied near-death cases. "The interior of your body has a sensation of scorching hot air being forced through it."

Most people believe in hell (71 percent of Americans, in one survey), but the Church moved away from the view of hell as a torture chamber in the 1960s, as part of the modernization following Vatican II. 

In one survey, 87 percent of those who "died" felt "incredible peace or painlessness," and 62 percent "incredible joy." In another survey, less than one percent of those who encountered death had hellish experiences.

But that, according to some researchers, is because those who have such experiences forget them as a defense mechanism or are embarrassed to report them. For those who do report them, evil spirits were in the tunnel they traversed.

If not for the presence of the Blessed Mother during the vision, said Sister Lucia, "I think we would have died of fear and terror."

But present she is -- along with Jesus, Whose mercy reaches to any depth and Who is there for all who call out to Him (even unto the last moment).

3/29/07