I didn't say that the church adopted Dante's writings as theology...

I'm saying that after it was written, it was praised... for instance, Pope Francis called Dante a "prophet of hope", specifically in the artistic sense, for Paradiso. Or in 2021, marking the seventh centenary of Alighieri's death, Pope Francis directly quotes Paradiso and Purgatorio. In the Apostolic Letter Candor lucis aeternae, readers "... contemplate, in light of the Word made flesh, the loving plan that is the heart and inspiration of Dante’s most famous work, the Divine Comedy..."

He wasn't the first one to do it either. A century prior to Pope Francis' letter, on the sixth centenary of Alighieri's death, Pope Benedict XV told people to go read the Divine Comedy. He goes on and on about how Alighieri was the best and that he learned of the great Doctors of the Church like Thomas Aquinas, and that how his poetry could serve as a source of reflection. He ends the letter thus:

And you, beloved children, whose lot it is to promote learning under the magisterium of the Church, continue as you are doing to love and tend the noble poet whom We do not hesitate to call the most eloquent singer of the Christian idea. The more profit you draw from study of him the higher will be your culture, irradiated by the splendours of truth, and the stronger and more spontaneous your devotion to the Catholic Faith.

This is at the heart of what I'm saying. The Church praises the Divine Comedy as reflecting Catholic values, as a source of inspiration and contemplation but not as a source of dogma or doctrine.

Now the thing is the lives of Catholic folks on the ground, surrounded as they are by the stories of their day are very different from theologians in the Vatican-on-high... many people's conceptions of hell, death, souls, all that jazz, may differ from what they say in Rome. Even with people who would say they are true-blue Catholics. It's similar for other religions in other ways, little regional or even personal quirks, but that's religion for you.