Limbo is Laid to Rest

Time was when babies who died before receiving the sacrament of baptism were consigned to limbo, that state of oblivion where souls remain and couldn’t enter heaven.  They weren’t condemned to the eternal suffering of hell but they couldn’t enjoy God’s “beatific vision” either.

There were two kinds of limbo, the limbus infantium or limbo of the children, the place where unbaptized infants dwell forever, and the limbus patrum or limbo of the patriarchs, the place for the righteous of the Old Testament who had died before Christ.  These righteous souls were freed to heavenly bliss when Christ “descended into hell”.

After almost 800 years, limbo in Catholic theology is now finally buried.  A three-year study by the Vatican’s Theological Commission concluded that the concept of limbo was an “unduly restrictive view of salvation”.

Pope John Paul II had encouraged the decline of the concept of limbo by excluding the term from his later catechisms.  His concern for the fate of aborted fetuses was said to have compelled him to ask the commission to officially consider the question of unbaptized babies.  Then Pope Benedict XVI recently approved the study on the abolition of the concept of limbo from Roman Catholic teaching.

The study points out “serious” grounds that souls of unbaptized infants could go to heaven.  “Grace has priority over sin, and the exclusion of innocent babies from heaven does not seem to reflect Christ’s special love for the little ones,” the report says.

Pope Benedict XVI, in approving the document, “The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who die Without Being Baptized”, has thus revolutionized the meaning of the word ‘limbo’.  However it may be perceived generations hence, ‘limbo’ today already sounds medieval, where it truly belongs as the concept was begun at that time anyway, or exotic, like the limbo dance of the West Indies which entered the world pop scene in the 1950s with Chubby Checker’s Limbo Rock song.  (These two kinds of limbos have no relation.)

The Pope, as the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, top theologian and doctrinal watchdog during the pontificate of Pope John Paul II, had already expressed doubts about the concept of limbo when he wrote that since limbo is only a theological hypothesis, it is thus “never a defined truth of faith”.

The concept of limbo in Catholic teaching may be dated back to St. Augustine, one of Pope Benedict XVI’s spiritual heroes.  Augustine firmly believed in man’s original sin and convinced the Council of Carthage (AD 418), which he attended, against the concept of an “intermediary place” between heaven and hell.  He effectively relegated unbaptized babies to hell, though in the least harsh of circumstance, as shown in his later writings.

By the Middle Ages, St. Thomas Aquinas and other theologians came up with a more considerate notion:  limbo (from the Latin limbus, meaning “a boundary”).  Innocents who forever dwell in limbo have eternal “natural happiness” though denied of heaven.  Deprived of the vision of God, they need not suffer because they know not what they miss.

In the same period, the poet Dante Alighieri in Divine Comedy (specifically, Canto IV of Inferno) described the “first circle of hell” as limbo, a place that’s neither “sorrowful nor glad,” where souls grieved for their separation from God but were not punished.  In this famous literary work, Dante had placed in limbo Old Testament figures like Adam, Noah, and King David, four ancient poets—Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan, mythological characters like Electra, Aeneas, and Orpheus, the philosophers Plato and Socrates, the geometrician Euclid, and the healer Hippocrates.

Eight centuries after Dante, the Vatican abolishes this outer edge of hell but takes care to emphasize that baptism is the only way to be cleansed of original sin that we are all born with, and encourages parents to continue to baptize their children.

“There is greater theological awareness today that God is merciful and wants all human beings to be saved,” the report says.  “We emphasize that these are reasons for prayerful hope, rather than grounds for sure knowledge,” it adds.

Fr. Paul McPartlan, a commission member, said, “We cannot say we know with certainty what will happen to unbaptized children but we have good grounds to hope that God in His mercy and love looks after these children and brings them to salvation.”

(6 May 2007)