Greetings !
Last night during my 2nd grade CCD class , one of the boys asked me If God loves us and is so good , why did he create Hell ?
He was quite serious and to be honest , slightly took me off guard with this question :o . I think its the first time in 14 years I have been a catechist , that the kids asked me this .
So my question to anyone is, what would you have said ?
Thanks in advance

They get smarter and smarter, don't they?!?

I think I would address the question in this way (using age appropriate languague!): Hell is part and parcel of God's great gift of Free Will. God wants us to do the right thing, and to love our neighbor as ourself, but God also gave us the gift of Free Will, in which we can choose how to respond in any given situation.

Thanks ! Thats pretty much what I said to him, off the cuff, as I was taken totally off guard. All the kids, including my aide, seemed to want to know my thoughts , lol ..
I also thought at the same moment, that I would have never ask the Nuns that taught me what he asked me, esp the part about questioning God's goodness ! :o
Yes, things have changed quite a bit since I was a kid :shock:

I tell my kids there's a Hell because people freely sin & reject God. It leads to some discussion of the importance of free will.

Thanks..
Teaching 2nd grade, Reconciliation for the kids will be in Feb 2010 and we will be talking alot about choices and free will .. It was just a bit early for the kids to be asking about Hell ! :evil:
Perhaps they were discussing the subject at school or at his home , who knows ;)

I believe God did not so much create hell as to permit hell again as others have said, because to love requires free will so that we freely love or not love God who is goodness itself. Angels and human beings love God by doing good and avoiding evil by cooperating with the grace of God given to all free creatures with intellect and free will. The Bible says "DEUT 11:26 "I set before you here, this day, a blessing and a curse"; I believe God will give us a blessing if we obey Him and a curse if we disobey Him. And we are "blessed" if we hear the Word of God and keep it, and "cursed" if we do not want to hear the Word of God and we do not want to keep it. If we think all of our talents come from ourselves and see them not as a gift from God, we can commit the sin of Pride as the Devil did, when he refused, I believe, to recognize Christ as the source of all Good as Man because He was also God. The Devil wanted to be independent from God and wanted others to worship him rather than God and became the father of lies and was cast into Hell for all eternity by St. Michael the Archangel who fought the devil and his angels who refused to serve God with their free will. We must work our our salvation in fear and trembeling knowing that with our free will we can refuse to humble ourselves before Christ by gathering with Him rather than scatter each day of our lives and persevere to the end, not knowing when we will be called to Eternal Judgement and enter Heaven or Hell as our final destiny; thus we "Watch and Pray" with the Virgin Mary and Christ to gain Eternal Life in Heaven at the End of our days.