Wednesday, November 30, 2005
LIMBO
On talk radio this afternoon the hot Church topic wasn't homosexual priests, the hot topic was Limbo. Specifically the changes that are said to be coming:
THE Catholic Church is preparing to abandon the idea of limbo, the theological belief that children who die before being baptised are suspended in a space between heaven and hell.
The concept, which was devised in the 13th century and was depicted in numerous works of art during the Renaissance, such as Descent into Limbo by the painter Giotto, and in Dante's masterpiece, the Divine Comedy, is of a metaphysical space where infants are blissfully happy but are not actually in the presence of God.
The idea of limbo was developed as a response to the harshness of early Church teachings which insisted that any child who died before he or she was baptised would still be stained by Original Sin and so would be condemned to hell.
The belief, which is unique to the Catholic Church, has fallen out of favour over the past 50 years. It is rarely mentioned and until recently has been left in its own kind of limbo.
However, an international commission of Catholic theologians, meeting in the Vatican this week, has been pondering the issue and is expected to advise Pope Benedict XVI to announce officially that the theological concept of limbo is incorrect.
Instead, the new belief is expected to be that unbaptised babies will go directly to heaven.
Pope Benedict had already expressed his doubts about limbo when, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he was head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Church's doctrinal watchdog.
Continue reading...
The talking heads here seem to think that if the theology of limbo has been promulgated, it can't just be withdrawn without harming the credibility of the Church's claim to truth.
