...[Jacinta] said: "That Lady said that many souls go to hell. What is hell?"
"It is a pit full of worms and a very big bonfire," replied Lucia, perhaps quoting her mother, "and people go there who commit sins and don't confess them, and they stay forever and burn."
"And never get out any more?"
"No."
"Not after many, many years?"
"No. Hell never ends. And heaven doesn't either. Whoever goes to heaven never gets out of it, and whoever goes to hell doesn't either. Don't you see that they are eternal, because they never end?"
Jacinta found this concept of endlessness at once baffling and tantalizing. She could never put it wholly out of mind. Often in the midst of some game she would stop suddenly and say:
"But look here, doesn't hell end even after many, many, many, years?"
"No."
"And those people who have to burn there never die? Never? And they never turn into ashes? And if people pray a great deal for sinners, Our Lord will save them from that? And with sacrifices too? Poor we have to pray and make many sacrifices for them."
Then, when the thought of the burden of sin became almost unbearable, she would remember the consolation that had been granted with it.
"How good that Lady is! Yes, she has promised to take us to heaven!"
William Thomas Walsh, Our Lady of Fatima, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1947, 89-90.
