What Hell Must be Like, Father Walter Siszek S.J.

What Hell Must be Like

“ The world of solitary confinement is a universe of its own...the isolation...the silence...the interrogations that would go on for 24 or 48 hours with no rest no sleep no food...the psychological...the minutes of silence and solitary routine stretched out without end...

There was no such sort of human companionship to sustain you at Lubianka. When you came back from an interrogation session here, you were on your own. You could only torture yourself by going over and over the session in your own mind, wondering whether what you had said was right, or what you might have done better, agonizing again and again over every question and every answer. Here there was no relief to be sought by talking it over with somebody else, by asking advice (poor as it might prove to be), by sharing experiences, and by sympathizing with one another.

Solitary confinement, in short, must be very much like what some theologians paint as the principal torment of hell: the soul, at last, recognizing its mistakes for what they were and condemned forever to the loss of heaven, constantly tormenting itself with reproaches and tearing itself apart because it still sees and understands and wants the things it has lost forever, but knows it is condemned to lose forever because of its own choices, its own failings, its own mistakes..."

From Walter J. Ciszek's book He Leadeth me

Why Was the Latin Mass Really Attacked? With Dr. Janet Smith Coffin Nation - Episode 241

click here to listen to the podcast

"from 1962 to 1965 you had Soviet Communism taking route everywhere: China, North Korea, Eastern Bloc Countries, You had Cardinal Mindszenty , Primate of Hungary in jail being tortured. You have
Father Walter Ciszek still in prison in the Soviet Gulag. You had actual priests and Prelates in Communist jails and there was at least one Schema presented to the Council Fathers on Communism and not only was it not edited, it was ignored. Not one line in Vatican 2 Condemning Communism" 

taken from this episode starting about 60 minutes into the podcast

When a society actually endorses evil, where will it end?

 From He Leadeth Me  ( pages 120-121 )

 by Father Walter Ciszek S.J.

"Abortion is legal in the Soviet Union. Anyone who wants one can have it performed. The government says it has to be legal in order to prevent private abuses. The wages of husband and wife together make it hard to support more than one or two children so everyone wants an abortion. Yet the question haunts them. The hallways of the clinics adjoining the abortion rooms were full of posters, not praising abortion, but informing patients of the possible detrimental effects on both mind and body such an operation could have. The doctors, mostly women, and the nurses and other personnel would try to dissuade patients from the operation. Women confided years later that they could not rid themselves of feelings of guilt about it. And these were not "believers" but women and girls who had received a complete atheistic education in Soviet schools. 

Even for Communism, it is a basic question of life and death, of wrong and right. If life at its very roots can be treated so lightly, people would say, who is going to stop such a mentality from spreading? Society? Hardly. Society can't even handle properly its present problems of crime and other social disorders. And when a society actually endorses evil, where will it end? Can man alone be trusted to solve mankind's problems? Look at history and the depths to which civilized countries have sunk, time after time." 

Walter J Ciszek. S.J. (1904-1984 ) a servant of God, spent twenty-three years in the Soviet Gulag and is now being considered for beatification in the Roman Catholic Church