The Church never taught that any particular person is in hell, not even Judas.

The Church names people it believes are in heaven. It has no equivalent procedure for hell, and no pope or council has definitively declared that any named person is damned. Historical Church teaching texts have, however, spoken about particular individuals differently.

There is no process for declaring anyone damned

Canonisation is a formal declaration that a named person is in heaven. Nothing corresponds to it in the other direction. There is no anti-canonisation, no official list of the damned, and no procedure by which such a case could be brought.

The Church holds that it cannot see into a person's final disposition towards God, and that repentance can come at any moment up to death. The current Catechism says that God predestines nobody to hell, and tells the faithful not to despair of the salvation even of those who have taken their own lives, and to pray for them.

John Paul II said it outright

One of the clearest statements of this position came from John Paul II. In his 1994 book Crossing the Threshold of Hope, he wrote that the Church had never made any pronouncement identifying who was in hell. He addressed Judas directly, explaining that Jesus's warning that it would have been better for Judas never to have been born did not establish his eternal damnation. In a 1999 general audience, he repeated that, without special divine revelation, humans cannot know which particular people are damned.

Benedict XVI took a similar position. In an October 2006 general audience, he described Judas's eternal fate as a mystery and said it was not for humans to judge his final destiny.

So on whether the Church has definitively identified an individual as damned, the speaker is right, and he is stating the recognised position rather than a personal opinion.

On Judas, two official sources pull against each other

Judas is the hardest case, and Fr Colin chose it deliberately. The difficulty is that historical and more recent Church texts speak about him differently.

The Roman Catechism, issued in 1566 after the Council of Trent as the official manual for parish clergy, says of those who fall into despair:

“Such, perhaps, was the condition of Cain … Such certainly was the condition of Judas, who, repenting, hanged himself, and thus lost soul and body.”

The word about Cain is “perhaps”. The word about Judas is “certainly”. Strictly, the certainty refers to Judas's despair, but the passage goes further by saying that he lost soul and body. The same catechism, in its section on Holy Orders, describes Judas's apostleship as having brought him “everlasting destruction”.

Both passages present Judas as damned. They are not casual remarks by individual theologians, but statements in an official catechism issued by papal authority for the instruction of priests. Against that, John Paul II said the Church had never made a pronouncement identifying who was in hell, and explicitly included Judas in his discussion.

The two can be reconciled by distinguishing between an authoritative teaching text presenting a conclusion and the Church definitively establishing that conclusion as doctrine.

The usual defence, and why the distinction matters

The standard answer is that the Roman Catechism was published after the council members had dispersed and was not itself a formal decree of the Council of Trent. It therefore does not carry the same authority as a conciliar definition or an infallible doctrinal declaration. That is correct, and it matters.

It does not make the Roman Catechism a private opinion, though. It was issued by order of Pope Pius V to guide parish priests in teaching the Catholic faith. A catechism is one of the ordinary ways the Church communicates its teaching, but its statements do not all carry equal doctrinal weight.

So the Roman Catechism does not establish that Judas's damnation was ever made a binding article of faith. It does show that an official Church teaching text historically presented that conclusion. The difference between “the Church never definitively declared it” and “the Church never taught it” is what makes the statement a problem.

Evaluation

There is a true claim close to what was said, and it is the one usually meant: no pope or council has definitively declared that a particular person is damned, there is no process for doing so, and John Paul II said the Church had made no such pronouncement. All of that is correct.

But “never taught” is a wider statement than “never definitively declared”. An official catechism of the Catholic Church presented Judas as having lost soul and body and described his fate as everlasting destruction. Those statements are not definitive doctrine, but they cannot be dismissed as private opinion either. The claim presents the absence of a binding declaration as though the Church had never officially presented a named individual as damned, and that is what makes it misleading.