Hell

When the human body and soul are separated at death, the body remains on Earth while the soul undergoes particular judgement to determine where it will spend eternity.

When a person dies in a state of mortal sin or not in friendship with God, their soul is damned to hell forever.

God created man to live with Him forever and desires the salvation of all people but He will not force his love on any one. God gives man the freedom to choose to accept or reject his love and mercy.

Jesus warned that those who choose to sin and turn their back on God will experience continual and horrible punishment in hell. Hell is often represented as fire.

A soul in hell is separated from God and isolated from anyone else. Cut off from the Communion of Saints they cannot benefit from our prayers.

Eternal damnation in hell is not imposed by God but by the person based on the way that they chose to live their life and the decisions that they made.

Although the Catholic Church infallably teaches that the canonized saints are in Heaven, it has never formally declared that any specific individual is in hell.

When Jesus returns at the end of time, there will be a general judgement where the bodies of the damned will join their souls in hell for eternity.

Choosing to sin separates man from God:

Rejecting God’s friendship:

We cannot be united with God unless we freely choose to love Him. But we cannot love God if we sin gravely against Him, against our neighbor or against ourselves: “He who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.” Our Lord warns us that we shall be separated from Him if we fail to meet the serious needs of the poor and the little ones who are his brethren. To die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God’s merciful love means remaining separated from Him for ever by our own free choice. This state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed is called “hell.”
Catechism of the Catholic Church 1033

Hell exists because God is good:

Hell is necessary:

He said in reply, “He who sows good seed is the Son of Man, the field is the world, the good seed the children of the kingdom. The weeds are the children of the evil one, and the enemy who sows them is the devil. The harvest is the end of the age, and the harvesters are angels. Just as weeds are collected and burned [up] with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all who cause others to sin and all evildoers. They will throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.”
Matthew 13: 37-42

Souls in hell choose to be there:

Man is free to choose:

God takes our freedom seriously:

Our choice must be made during our life:

By using images, the New Testament presents the place destined for evildoers as a fiery furnace, where people will “weep and gnash their teeth”, or like Gehenna with its “unquenchable fire”. All this is narrated in the parable of the rich man, which explains that hell is a place of eternal suffering, with no possibility of return, nor of the alleviation of pain. The Book of Revelation also figuratively portrays in a “pool of fire” those who exclude themselves from the book of life, thus meeting with a “second death”. Whoever continues to be closed to the Gospel is therefore preparing for “eternal destruction and exclusion from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might”. The images of hell that Sacred Scripture presents to us must be correctly interpreted. They show the complete frustration and emptiness of life without God. Rather than a place, hell indicates the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy.
Pope John Paul II, General Audience, 28 July 1999

Hell is eternal: