Ruminations on Reagan in Hell... and 'Invincible Ignorance'

[Sapphocrat]

Mods: I own the copyright to the article in question, thus the liberal quoting...

The first thing I thought of when I heard of Reagan's death today was this:

In 1997, I interviewed former National Lampoon editor Sean Kelly about his just-published book (co-authored with Rosemary Rogers), "Who in Hell... A Guide to the Whole Damned Bunch" -- which I described as "an encyclopedic guide to the denizens of the fiery pit. Everyone you'd expect to find is here, from Dante's long list of demons to those worldly sinners envisioned as condemned by the Venerable Bede, as well as dozens of modern-day figures placed there by Kelly and Rogers themselves."

The authors, Kelly explained, had, well, a devil of a time deciding who was (or should be) in Hell:

After exhausting the obvious sources -- Dante, Homer, Virgil, and classical Greek and Roman texts -- and combing the Internet, the authors found precious little other material about Hell and its inhabitants. They were "stymied." ...

(The) authors realized they would have to start making judgment calls. ...

The first person they condemned was Adolf Hitler. "Rosemary called me up," says Kelly, "and said, 'Hitler's in Hell. He was baptized Catholic, and he committed suicide.'

"And I thought: I know how to do this now." ...

They set some ground rules based on traditional Catholic interpretation of sin, and stuck to them -- religiously. First and foremost, a person could not be condemned to Hell if he or she had received the Last Sacrament (final Holy Communion and Penance), or had otherwise demonstrated true repentance before death.

"You get a long list of villains, and then try to think if there's any way they could have gotten out," says Kelly, who likens the condemnation process to a session between Siskel & Ebert: Everyone who ended up in the book had to get two thumbs up -- or, more accurately, two thumbs down. ...

In the process, there were compromises, of course, and occasional disappointment at being unable to condemn a particular person. Rogers, for instance, wanted to put Bing Crosby in Hell, "because he clearly was one of the worst people who ever lived, and was also a hypocrite in the bargain. On the other hand, as a good Catholic, he doubtless got extreme unction and the whole nine yards at the end."

This was also the case for Joseph P. Kennedy, "the presidential patriarch and truly one of the heinous creatures of his time." ...

Citing his four-year-old's constant refrain of "It's not fair!" Kelly notes that "there seems to be born in us a longing for justice. That just seems to hit human beings at some point: That there is the idea of justice, and that it's possible for things to work out justly -- and that it isn't happening in this realm." ...

"There's a certain kind of theology of Hell which is expressed by St. Teresa of Avila, who says, 'All the way to Heaven is Heaven, and all the way to Hell is Hell.' In other words, the fruits of evil are evil. St. Teresa is suggesting we believe that the bad guys who are 'getting away with it' are in fact really not getting away with it: They're tormented and they're riven with guilt and anxiety.

"That," Kelly concludes, "makes a little bit more sense to me -- Hell as a spiritual or psychological condition. The closest word we have in secular terms is depression, or despair. That's why Dante has 'Abandon all hope' up over the gate to Hell, because that's what it is. Dostoyevsky says it's the condition of a human being unable to love, but you might as well say it's the condition of a human being unable to hope." ...

Kelly is drilled on a number of names that didn't make it into Who in Hell... and a few that might make it into future editions. ...

Kelly agrees that one can cross off the entire Kennedy clan, simply because they were good Catholics -- "and because, at the end, John had priests all over him at the hospital. So one has to assume not that he's in Heaven, but that he escaped -- they 'pulled it out,' like Brideshead in Brideshead Revisited." ...

Bob Dole: "Wherever he's going in his afterlife, he gives the impression sometimes that he's there already. There's a real zombie feel to it, like the second Reagan run where you really thought, 'Good God, what do they give this man in the morning to get him up and walking around? Some kind of huge electric charge? Some kind of Geritol-nitro cocktail?'"

And what about Ronald Reagan? Is he, as mentioned in the introduction to Who in Hell... one of those "Protestants too ignorant to be held accountable?"

"Yes. One of the things about Reagan is that he comes from Catholic stock; they decided the 'bowl of soup' was worth converting and changing the spelling of their name, so I presume a couple of his ancestors are cooking pretty good.

"But I guess 'invincible ignorance' is something you can plead for someone who was just too dumb to know what they were doing. One of the qualifications for mortal sin is full knowledge.

"Until the end, Reagan thought he was doing good. If you actually could have got through to him and shown him, literally, the consequences of something he had just done, he would have been appalled. He had no idea that cutting welfare means that children don't eat."

Full article:
http://www.amuseyourself.com/epitaph/seankellygoestohell.html