349. How can God refuse the prayers of the saints for mercy to the damned?
349. HOW CAN GOD REFUSE THE PRAYERS OF THE SAINTS FOR MERCY TO THE DAMNED?
Surely God’s goodness, love and mercy is greater than the sinner’s evil. Why does it not conquer?
If the saints do not pray for those in danger of damnation, they lack charity. If they do, how can God refuse their prayers of charity? Is His mercy and charity less than the saints’?
How can sin and evil and misery win in the end? If the damned freely choose eternal misery over eternal joy, doesn’t that mean that they win and that God and love loses? And that our love for them, as expressed in our prayers for their salvation, also loses?
There are people who do something self-destructive just to upset those they hate. Don’t these people win in the sense that they prove by their self-destructive choices that even the love of those who love them does not conquer their own hate, that even the goodness and mercy of those who pray for them does not conquer their own evil? Doesn’t God’s gift of free will to all persons, even evil persons, give to evil persons a greater power for evil than the prayers of good persons have for good when those prayers are not answered by the conversion of the evil persons?
Whether God’s mercy suffers (allows) . . . men to be punished eternally?
Objection 2. The charity of the saints in this life makes them pray for their enemies. Now they will have more perfect charity in that life. Therefore they will pray then for their enemies who are damned. But the prayers of the saints cannot be in vain, since they are most acceptable to God. Therefore at the saints’ prayers the divine mercy will in time deliver the damned from their punishment.
Reply to Objection 2. As Augustine and Gregory say, the saints in this life pray for their enemies that they may be converted to God while it is yet possible for them to be converted . . . since for those who depart this life without grace there will be no further time for conversion, no prayer will be offered for them. . . (S99,3).
The prayers and loves and hopes of the saints, and of God Himself, cannot pray for and hope for what is intrinsically impossible, like making 2 + 2 not to be 4, or the past not to have been, or circles to be square. In fact, it is psychologically impossible to hope and pray for what we know is intrinsically impossible. What we pray for is what is possible.
The conversion of a sinner is always possible in this life, in time. Even Hitler may have repented in the split second between his squeezing his suicide gun’s trigger and the effect of that act, namely his death. “While there’s life, there’s hope.”
But where there is no more life, no more time, and therefore no more possibility of repentance, there is no more hope. Therefore we cannot and should not (try to) pray for the damned, either human or angelic (demons, fallen angels). That is like praying that circles be non-circular. It is intrinsically impossible.
We cannot regret and be saddened by what we know is impossible—intrinsically, inherently, necessarily, absolutely impossible. The conversion of the damned is impossible—it is a self-contradictory concept—because after death there is no more time for conversion. Conversion necessarily presupposes time, at least the kind of time necessary for changing your will, since conversion is a change of will, a change of heart. After death, this change is impossible.
For if it were possible in Hell, it would be possible in Heaven too, and in that case Heaven would be as uncertain and as changeable as Hell. If the damned in Hell could change and choose to become saved, then the saved in Heaven could possibly change and choose to become damned. And then Heaven would not be Heaven. In order for Heaven to be Heaven, Hell must be Hell.