The Apostles’ Creed clearly states, “He descended into hell.” But Jesus Himself stated that Hell is “the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels”. (Mt 25:41) That doesn’t sound like a place for the divine Son of God.

So what gives? Well, astute readers will notice that in the above paragraph, the first use of the word “hell” begins with a lower-case “h”, while the second use of the word begins with a capital “H”. The latter indeed refers to the place of the damned, who are of course not included in Jesus’s redemption because of their own free-will choices.

But the former refers to the place of the dead (“Sheol” in Hebrew, “Hades” in Greek), whose inhabitants too were in need of the Savior.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it this way:

“Christ went down into the depths of death so that ‘the dead will hear the voice of

the Son of God, and those who hear will live.’ . . . ‘[So] the Gospel was preached even to the dead.’ The descent into hell brings the Gospel message of salvation to complete fulfillment. This is the last phase of Jesus’s messianic mission [--] the spread of Christ’s redemptive work to all men of all times and all places . . .” [CCC, Nos. 634-635]

So Jesus, far from excluding those who had died before Jesus’s death and resurrection, but still in the friendship of God, extended His salvation to them as well.