Dear St. Joseph’s Parishioners,

 

Limbo——Has it gone to Limbo???

 

Like most Catholics over forty, I learned about Limbo in my early years in Catholic school. The word comes from the Latin “limbus” and means border or hem. It is defined as the state or place for those who deserve neither the Beatific Vision nor eternal punishment and this included babies not baptized before death. In my childhood imagination, I pictured this immense room just outside Heaven filled with crying babies!

 

The belief about Limbo has been part of our faith life and was an incentive to have new babies baptized a.s.a.p. The Church’s teaching about Limbo goes back to the fifth century and St. Augustine who argued that unbaptized babies were condemned to real, though diminished, pains of hell. Later theologians allowed that there was a place of natural happiness that was neither Heaven or Hell. This belief lasted into the twentieth century though the Church never issued an official statement on it. The Catechism of the Catholic Church published in 1994 makes no mention of Limbo.

 

At times one argument used to support this teaching has been Jesus’ words “Unless you are baptized you cannot enter the kingdom of Heaven. If we understand scripture in context (as opposed to literal interpretation)  we see: 1) that Jesus was talking to adults; and 2) for these adults baptism/purification was a sign of one’s conversion, of one’s willingness to amend one’s life. Jesus was not talking about babies!

 

With the Second Vatican Council and the theology in engendered that focused more on God’s love and mercy than punishment, the idea of Limbo seemed less and less acceptable. Catholic theologians have questioned the Church’s teaching on Limbo for a number of years. Now, on April 20, the Vatican’s International Theological Commission has issued a document stating that there was good reason to hope that unbaptized babies who die do go to Heaven.

 

According to CNS (Catholic News Service) the interesting part about the Vatican’s document is that it repeatedly refers to the “sensum fidelium” — the sense of the faithful — to illustrate that Catholics have increasingly rejected the idea that the vision of God would be denied to innocent babies. This “sense of the faithful” was an important teaching of the Vatican II which stated that “the whole body of the faithful shares in Christ’s prophetic office and cannot err in matters of belief.”

 

An editorial in a recent issue of the National Catholic Reporter (which also carried the CNS report) asks: Can God live without Limbo? I think we would all answer a resounding “yes.” The editorial concludes: “We hope God is pleased that the Church has restored his capacity for exercising infinite mercy. It must have been a grand moment in heaven.”

 

 

 

 

Sister Marie Wiedner

(retired Pastoral Associate)