We are now hearing about 55 Cancri, a planet which is extremely close to its star.
Newsroom (19/07/2022 13:00, Gaudium Press) “Scientists appear to have discovered a planet named 55 Cancri, seemingly ‘from hell’, because it is so close to its star that its surface is like molten lava. All the materials on this planet are liquid because of the very high temperatures they experience”, says Fr. Mario Arroyo, Doctor of Philosophy, and professor at the Pan American University, according to a report from late May.
Fr. Arroyo is referring to planet 55 Cancri, an exoplanet more than 40 light-years from Earth, a planet of the “super-Earth” type, to be examined by the widely publicized James Webb space telescope.
This planet is an impressive sight: its proximity to its star means, according to NASA, that it reaches “surface temperatures well above the melting point of typical rock-forming minerals“. In other words, its own rocks melt, being unable to withstand the heat coming from its sun. For this reason, the daytime side of the planet is believed to be oceans of lava; the surface not only heats up, but also melts, and at least part of it is then converted to steam.
“At night, the steam cools and condenses to form lava droplets that rain back down to the surface, solidifying again at dusk,” NASA says.
When Fr. Arroyo talks about this planet in reference to hell, he points out that “it’s obviously a metaphor, because hell is not a place but a state, hell being the state of eternal and definitive deprivation of God,” he explains.
On Second Thought…
The priest refers to the penalty of harm – that being the privation of God – which is the most terrible suffering, but not the only one. There is also the pain of sense, which in Lucrezia Rego de Planas’ expression is “the suffering of the body“, an “intense pain in the body”, which Christ several times expressed as caused by a “fire”. This is, of course, not necessarily a material fire, but it can be, and which appears to be a principle of the material order, because it has as its end an effect in the material order.
A place called hell does not necessarily exist, but it can exist; just as there is a Heaven, an actual material Heaven.
Moreover, some theologians argue that the principle of the material order that punishes the bodies of the damned may be far more effective in its punitive action than our ‘sympathetic’ earthly fire. Besides the Tradition of the Church, there are some particular revelations that support the idea of hell as a place and as a fire, beginning with the apparitions of Fatima.
Fr. Arroyo also points out that “this planet 55 Cancri, although it is in such extreme situations of heat and temperature, is not deprived of the presence of God, God is also present there. There is nothing in the universe that is deprived of the action of the presence of the Creator, not even hell, because God sustains the existence of every being, and the moment this sustaining fails, beings would return to nothingness, including demons and the damned.”
Clearly, God’s presence in Heaven is different from that in hell, because there in Paradise He is in a glorious union with the rational creature, His reward being “immensely great”; in hell, everything speaks of the rejection that the damned have voluntarily and definitively chosen towards God, and of the legitimate rejection that God has towards those who have refused to accept the thousands of kindnesses of His love.
Indeed, “in Him, we live and move and have our being“. We cannot escape His searching eyes, for they will find us, and reflecting on this always does us good.
In every moment, the most efficacious thing is to look Heavenward….
Compiled by Sandra Chisholm
