Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever. 
In today's Gospel, we hear our Lord say, blessed are those who hear the word of God and observe it, or keep it, that's Luke 11, verse 28. These words of the Savior remind us of the office of a prophet. A prophet is someone who speaks the word of God to us on the one hand, and on the other hand, a wise person or a blessed person is someone who hears God's Word and takes it to heart and puts it into practice. Our Lord even somewhat astonishingly says he who receives a prophet because he is a prophet will receive a prophet's reward. Matthew 10, verse 41. So there's a great reward in store for embracing the words that God's prophets share with us.
Today we celebrate the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima. In Portugal in 1917, our Lady was clearly operating in the role of a prophet, not only predicting future war and the spread of what she called the errors of Russia at the time, but she was also speaking God's word directly to us, her children. One of her key messages at Fatima was on the reality of something that people would like to wish away or explain away, namely the truth about hell. To the three children of Fatima, Lucia, Francisco, and Jacinta, Our Lady presented a vision of hell as a great sea of fire with demons and the souls of the damned horribly suffering together in that torment. After the vision, Our Lady told the children, she said, You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to My Immaculate Heart.
She also gave the Fatima seers the prayer that we recite at the end of each decade of the rosary when we say, Oh my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell and lead all souls to heaven, especially those in most need of thy mercy. That's from Our Lady, that prayer. A blessed mother had said to Lucia, the oldest of the children, she had said, pray, pray very much and make sacrifices for sinners, for many souls go to hell because they have nobody to pray and make sacrifices for them. And little Jacinta, in her dying days said that more souls go to hell because of sins of the flesh than for any other reason. Presumably Our Lady had shared that sad truth with the children as well. Living in a culture like ours, those words should give us much to reflect on and they should be received as the words of a prophet.
The reality of hell and its eternity, the fact that it is an endless punishment, are clearly affirmed in our Lord's teaching, his preaching in the New Testament in general. In Mark 9, 48, Jesus calls hell the place where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched. In Matthew 13, verses 41 and 42, he says that the angels will throw all evildoers into the furnace of fire where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. We hear Jesus say in Matthew 25, verses 41 and 46, that evildoers will be sent into the eternal fire, that they will go into eternal punishment. So not just temporary, not just for a very, very long time punishment, he says eternal punishment. And St. Augustine, building on our Lord's warnings, adds that what will make the second death, meaning hell, so hard to bear is that there will be no death to end it.
Our Lord's words are not empty threats either. As St. Gregory the Great noted, he said, if God threatened us without ever intending to fulfill his threat, we should call him deceitful instead of merciful, and that would be sacrilegious, said St. Gregory, and he is right about that. Even earlier in the second century, St. Justin Martyr had said this, he said, lest anyone repeat the claim that our statements that sinners are punished in everlasting fire are not just boastful words calculated to instill terror, and that we want men to live a virtuous life through fear and not because such a life is pleasant, I will make this brief reply, he says, that if it is not as we say, then there is no God, says St. Justin. If there is no hell, there is no eternal God. In other words, if eternal life is real and true, so is eternal punishment. Why? Because our Lord affirmed both of them. St. Jerome had compared hell to a city that, in his words, is fortified against exit, but is always open for entrance, he said. You can get in, but you can't get out.
Even the recent Catechism of the Catholic Church of Pope St. John Paul II affirms our Lord's teaching on hell, saying in paragraph 1035 that, immediately after death, the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into hell, where they suffer the punishments of hell, eternal fire. And it gives a list of the creeds and of the church councils from various centuries that reaffirm this teaching. Before that, in paragraph 1033, it says this, to die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God's merciful love means remaining separated from him forever by our own free choice. This state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed is called hell.
So it's an act of loving kindness on the part of Jesus and Mary and the church that they warn us about the reality and the danger and the truth of hell. It's love and kindness that make them share the hard truths with us. If Jesus and Mary hated us, then they would just encourage us to sin and not care about the consequences, as the devil does. If they were indifferent to us, then they'd never warn us about driving off of this spiritual cliff. No, instead, they love us abundantly, and so they warn us to use our freedom wisely, to literally not throw away our lives. As St. Augustine said in the City of God, he said, if a man disdains the divine will, then he can only use his own will to his own destruction.
God is the source of all that is good. He is the source of life, of love, of beauty, of mercy, of forgiveness. From him flows all truth, all wisdom. His presence is the joy and the fulfillment of his creatures. We were literally made not only by him, we were made for him. And as Franciscans, we would add with St. Paul that we were made especially for Jesus Christ himself, as St. Paul notes in Colossians 1: 16. The sad truth is, though, that we can, and many people do, reject the source of all that is good. They reject the Lord for whom they were created and in whom they were meant to find eternal happiness.
As Pope Benedict XVI noted in his March 25, 2007 homily, he said, Jesus came to tell us that he wants us all in heaven and that hell, of which so little is said in our time, exists and is eternal for those who close their hearts to his love. And Pope Francis, in his 2016 Lenten message, says, the danger always remains that by a constant refusal to open the doors of their hearts to Christ, who knocks on them and the poor, the proud, the rich, and the powerful will end up condemning themselves and plunging into the eternal abyss of solitude, which is hell, said the Holy Father. Those who are saved are saved by God's mercy and his grace. Those who are lost are so through their own faults, not through any fault of our Lord, but through their own lack of openness to God's love and his forgiveness too.
I remember that I was once helping out in a nursing home for a brief time when I was a novice with the Jesuits back in 2003. This was in upstate New York. There was one elderly man in the nursing home who didn't believe in God and showed no openness to the truth whatsoever, even though the nursing home was clearly his last step before entering eternity. When I asked him about his wife, the man said that she had passed away a number of years ago and he flippantly added with a sarcastic gesture, he said, I'm sure she's up there in hell with the rest of them, he said. He was totally oblivious to the cliff that he was driving off of. Bitter sarcasm was the one thing that he was holding onto kind of in the last moments of his life. May you please say a prayer for that man, hopefully, he opened his heart before the Lord came to meet him.
But how many people in our culture are actually like that, so spiritually blind that they know not what they do, as Jesus says from the cross in Luke 23:34. Many people walk in darkness, they just don't know where they're going. What's the solution to this that our Lord presents to us at Fatima? Very simply, four things. Repentance, prayer, penance, and devotion to Our Lady's Heart.
So repentance means turning away from, abandoning our sins, first and foremost our mortal sins, but also making an effort to avoid venial sins as well. Prayer means turning our minds and our hearts to the Lord. It means developing a deep and committed relationship with him, a relationship in which we thank him, learn to praise him, learn to humble our hearts before him, share our hearts with him, also ask him for whatever we need. Penance means, most importantly, making a good, sincere confession and frequenting the sacrament of confession. It also means saying no to ourselves, to our selfish inclinations, to mortifying our senses. We have to mortify ourselves. And devotion to Our Lady's Immaculate Heart, that means loving her in the same spirit of St. John, who, under the cross, took Mary into his own home, as we read in John 19:27, where literally the Greek text there says he took her into his own, meaning into his own heart, as well as into his own home.
Lastly, Our Lord and a number of the Fathers of the Church, echoing Jesus' teaching, tell us that we can avoid the fires of hell also by performing works of mercy, by doing good to those around us and to those who are less fortunate than us. In this way, the poor and the miserable and the sinners who are our beneficiaries in this life, they become, in a certain sense, our benefactors in the next life. They will repay us in eternity, or rather, God will repay us in eternity for the good that we have done to them and for them. 
So let's ask Our Lady, then, for the grace to take to heart the words which she spoke to us and to her children at Fatima so that we can avoid the disaster of eternal punishment and receive a prophet's reward in paradise for heeding her warnings. 
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.