Diane Sawyer’s fawning two-hour interview special with Olympic champion Bruce Jenner regarding his fierce “desire to be a woman” and to thus “fulfill himself,” was followed by hundreds of thousands of Tweets of “Way to go, Bruce” and “Such courage! Such authentic courage and integrity.”

It will take more than the 140 characters Twitter allows to respond to this spectacle, which raises serious statement about not just the 1976 Olympian, but also about ultimate questions, about heaven and hell, about sexuality and the inherent purpose of life itself.

For God doesn’t make mistakes: Bruce Jenner has had five wives, six biological children, and generally carried on heedlessly and prayerlessly in open hedonism as he darn well pleased during his lifetime.

He is accountable for these choices and vectors morally for his life, as we all are at the particular judgment of death. But the larger question hovers, framing Jenner’s creepy sex-change: the linked up question of heaven and hell and how our American society has been given a “bill of goods” regarding both, as we gratuitously assume that the “way to salvation is broad and spacious, and many take it,” whereas revelation and Jesus himself, the Second Person of the Trinity, say bluntly that HIS Way is difficult:

“The way to the Kingdom of Heaven is narrow and difficult, and few take it.” You pays your money and you takes your salvific road, way, and choice.

But it is as if a giant voodoo “spell” has descended slowly like sarin gas on us in the West, especially America. A faux, facile concept of “heaven” obtains as well as the implicit heresy that “hell” is solely for Hitlers and Stalins. Even some “Catholic” theologians like Hans von Balthazar — who should know better — contend that “Probably everybody gets saved. After all, God is nice, merciful, and loves everybody, right?”

However, doesn’t scripture explicitly warn us repeatedly to “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling” and doesn’t Christ himself say, “If you love me, you will keep my commands”?

Yet we almost NEVER hear from any pulpit a ringing homily or sermon that scripture consigns many behaviors to the fiery outer darkness, which is, in the last analysis, a willful repudiation of God and God’s self-sacrificial love. For no priest or preacher, for example, in my 68 years at St. Matthew’s has in any sense broached the very existentially real possibility that, for instance, fellatio, anal intercourse, “69,” in vitro fertilization, theft, contraception, adultery are going to send one, if unrepented, to what Scripture calls “the second death” — the mystery of evil, free will and malice. (Abortion they do speak of.)

Such behaviors come from an ungrateful, reprobate heart, one disloyal to the real saving Gospel so hard-won by Jesus Christ. They are “mortally sinful.” And according to the Wall Street Journal, the average millennial marriage is 26 months, co-habitation is rampant, and the Atlantic Monthly’s recent survey found that the average university co-ed “hooked up”— anything from making out to intercourse — 14 times in a college career.

Further, why are the Obama administration and UN agencies being the “edge of the proverbial axe” in exporting “reproductive rights” and contraception to poor Third World nations, as well as sterilizing poor and helpless Indian women?

Moreover, we have in America 23 percent of our young people infected with a sexually transmitted disease, 43 percent of babies born out of wedlock, 57 million babies slaughtered in the women of America alone since 1973, and now “Catholic” Ireland has with a 62 percent vote approved of “same-sex marriage,” which is vehemently forbidden by scripture and natural law. And this approval of genital sexual activity by force of law will most probably be enshrined in a “finger-to-the-wind” socially corrupt Supreme Court.

And just as Jenner is lionized for his “wondrously brave surgery,” we have been infected morally — since the 1950s or so — with the attitude of anything goes. We have obituaries which universally and gratuitously canonize people with “He went to be with the Lord,” after being married four times and being a wife-beating alcoholic. Interesting.

Thus the “spell” from an obscure source has metastasized in our collective national being, and the lauding of Bruce Jenner’s coming surgery for his vaunted “bravery” is hollow at its core and illustrative of not just him but us as well. Can one live his sex life without regard to the inexpressible holiness of the One who made holy the marital embrace?

Thus at last and finally, it comes down to this: we are facing head-on a “gospel” which is alien to Christ’s, a “voodoo magic self-autonomous gospel” dependent on “feeling saved” — a presumptuous inner feeling without moral “teeth” nor authenticity in it, without saving Christic power but with hymn-singing and weekly pew-sitting. Such a “gospel” lionizes licentious behavior, liberal values and permissive standards alien to Christ’s sacrifice on the cross which made Heaven possible and Hell necessary, as a sewer to a city.

“If they hated me, they will hate you too,” the Savior says and there is no regard for self-mastery in this facile faux “gospel.” The narrative of combat is forming.

Aquinas says, “Jesus is the intellectual emanation of God,” whereby the Father ceaselessly and in self-oblation contemplates Jesus and vice versa in the spirit, and through that sacrifice, Jesus seeks (almost desperately) to bring the contingent being adopted children “home.” For God is not a cross between Burl Ives and Liberace greeting us at the particular judgment, but the Lord is merciful, magnanimous, just, good, thorough, reasonable (in three persons).

Rumor has it that he has a good memory too... And we are summoned to be on Earth (and later in heaven) to be bound to him through a redoubtable faith, love, compassion, humility, and obedience to reciprocate that divine love: because the God who made us without our cooperation will not SAVE us without our cooperation. A facile commitment or repentance will bring the same kind of reward.

And if we dispense with this “voodoo salvation” into repented, charitable, integrated, SAVING Gospel as plainly articulated by scripture, the eternal law, the natural law, we may come to find that, post-death, post some purification, that prayer, adorational, ceaseless, loving and being loved, is the “breath and life blood of the mystical body,” for such is the true intended destination of all human beings.

If we presume our “salvation” without any regard to merit in love, we are doomed; and, likewise, if we patronize the Lord as many nonchalantly do implicitly, we are in for an eerie, startling surprise at the judgment, finding death an end-stopped “period” instead of a “semicolon”:

Our salvation cost Somebody infinitely. As 1 John 4:8 says, “God is love” but in the last analysis and rendering, his heaven will cost everybody everything.

Hensleigh is a resident of Kalispell