system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: According to Catholicism, is the Devil a heaven-sanctioned enforcer of punishment or a competing god-like being that can "steal" tarnished souls away from God?

Whether you believe in such a thing is immaterial.
gpt
The Bible doesn't actually say all that much. It just talks about god's judgement resulting in some people being cast into Hell to suffer for whatever reasons. So they're there because god said so. Jesus mentions lots of fire and suffering too. No Satan there.

A lot of the stuff beyond that came from theologians, writers (Milton in particular with Paradise Lost, and Dante with the Divine Comedy trilogy), integration of ideas from pagan religions (Hades, the Norse Hel, etc), and other odd sources that just built up over the last few thousand years.

However, the Catholic church did actually take a formal stance. In 1992, the Pope declared the following to be a part of Catholic belief:

> 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." Jesus often speaks of "Gehenna" of "the unquenchable fire" reserved for those who to the end of their lives refuse to believe and be converted, where both soul and body can be lost. Jesus solemnly proclaims that he "will send his angels, and they will gather... all evil doers, and throw them into the furnace of fire," and that he will pronounce the condemnation: "Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire!" The teaching of the Church affirms the existence of hell and its eternity. Immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into hell, which is described (in quotes) as "eternal fire.

Note an important thing missing there. Satan.

In fact, here's a bit more of what the Pope said:

> The chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God, in whom alone man can possess the life and happiness for which he was created and for which he longs

Again, no Satan. Hell is god giving you the silent treatment, not Satan poking your ass with a red-hot pitchfork.

Satan's actually a real oddity. The Bible barely mentions him at all, to the point where most modern ideas about him could almost be considered folk beliefs if you felt cynical. The idea that he sits in Hell with all his fallen angels torturing the damned all day is really one from the writers again. Dante's Inferno casts him as some slobbering idiot who is subject to the same torture as everyone else in Hell. Paradise Lost has him cast as some epic dickhead king of the underworld full of pride and bullshit. That whole "better to reign in hell" thing? That's from Paradise Lost.

For the most part, actual biblical teaching that does mention him has him as The Adversary, just a bit of a shit-head fallen angel who likes to tempt people into doing naughty things and was probably the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and also probably the great Dragon in Revelations that is gonna come back at the end of the world and fuck shit up. It does mention him being cast into the Lake of Fire, which we can assume means Hell, but not that he reigns there and tortures people for kicks.