Suicide

Q. Can someone who commits suicide get to heaven?

A. Maybe. Its important as Catholics to realize that ultimately God is in charge and that there are realities that we can’t say much about because they haven’t been revealed to us. That is why St. Paul tells us to “work out our own salvation with fear and trembling.” None of us deserves Heaven, all of us deserve Hell, and yet Jesus came that we might have life. This contradiction between our own fallibility and the goodness and mercy of God demonstrated on the Cross means that anyone, even the worst sinner, CAN go to heaven, and yet NO ONE is guaranteed to go there.

Ultimately God gives us freedom, and although we can’t win heaven with our freedom, God wants us to use our freedom to choose to accept the gift of eternal life He offers us.

Our actions, and intentions, are a type of language through which we speak directly to God about our choice. Its not enough to say we are sorry and that we want to go to Heaven, God wants us to be truly sorry and to truly desire Heaven. When we sin, we are demonstrating that either we don’t trust that God’s plan for us is good or don’t care what He thinks, we are demonstrating that we don’t want THE GOOD, we want to make up our own good. This is the definition of sin. Sin is not the choosing of absolute evil, but the choice of a lesser good over a greater good. Love for anything in creation over and above our love and desire for God.

Suicide is the ultimate rejection of God’s goodness. It is despair at the goodness of the world, or my life, and of our God. It is possible for any sinner to have a change of heart at the last moments of life, even after they have committeed the sin of self-murder. However, experience tells us that this is exceedingly rare! Each and every action we make affects who we are and who we understand ourself to be, and to make a decision that ultimately says that I don’t trust God, I don’t believe that the life which God gave me is good, seems to be directly at odds with in the next moment saying God forgive me, God save me, God give me eternal life. This of course is true with any sin, that’s why we need to frequently confess our sins so as to detach ourselves from them.

Heaven is being forever in the presence of pure Goodness, pure Truth, Pure Light, and Absolute Love–if our actions in this life make our hearts long for these things then Heaven promises eternal joy for us. However, God doesn’t force us to be with Him because He knows that if we love evil, and lies, and darkness, and selfishness in this world then Heaven would be more tortuous for us than Hell.

This being said, it is possibly that the person who commits suicide is impared by drugs or alchohol or physchological problems. In this case, if the person is not really free, then they really can’t sin, or at least be as culpable for it.

Ultimately, its up to God to judge souls, all we can and should say is that suicide like every other sin places our immortal soul in grave danger. Knowing the Loving God who created all things for our happiness and declared all things good, the God who promises to restore all things to their original goodness, makes life worth living, giving us both meaning and purpose. Thus, as Catholics we can’t just tell people that suicide is wrong. Rather, in Charity we must work each and every day to bear witness to the goodness of life, and help others see this truth even in the midst of human suffering.

1. Frank says:

   March 25, 2010 at 10:54 am

   From the Baltimore Catechism:

   Q. 1274. What sin is it to destroy one’s own life, or commit suicide, as this act is called?

   A. It is a mortal sin to destroy one’s own life or commit suicide, as this act is called, and persons who willfully and knowingly commit such an act die in a state of mortal sin and are deprived of Christian burial. It is also wrong to expose one’s self unnecessarily to the danger of death by rash or foolhardy feats of daring.