An eminent panel of Catholic theologians met at the Vatican last month, and, although word is not yet official, they apparently decided to abolish the concept of limbo. Another cherished childhood belief bites the dust.
It seems that limbo was never actually official church teaching, but a sort of medieval theory that kept getting passed along with all the good stuff, kind of like a Don Ho CD that winds up in your CD collection. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger himself – who, before becoming Pope Benedict XVI last year, spent two decades as the church’s chief arbiter of doctrine – said in 1984 that, “Personally, I would let (limbo) drop since it has always been only a theological hypothesis.”
Oh, sure. Now they tell me.
It didn’t feel like a theological hypothesis during the Eisenhower administration. It was the subject of long, intense discussions with the nuns, who taught us that limbo was a kind of ethereal place where the souls of babies who died before being baptized in the faith would spend eternity. It wasn’t quite heaven, they said, because you wouldn’t see the face of God, but it was a lot better than hell, because there was no fire and torment.
To a kid growing up in the nervous 1950s, this sounded like a pretty good deal, a way better deal than the one we got. Sure, we’d been baptized as babies and thus didn’t have to worry about original sin, but occasions of other kinds of sin were everywhere: the hamburger you were too hungry to pass up, even though it was Friday; the brother who needed a punch in the nose; the girl in the desk in the next aisle who was now wearing a bra!
You’d think about this during civil defense drills. The Russians had The Bomb, and your old man was too cheap to build a fallout shelter, so you’d hit the floor, duck and cover (like that was going to help) and think about the unfairness of it all: Here you were, a kid who’d snarfed a hamburger for lunch, about to be incinerated by godless commies who decided to drop The Bomb on a Friday, not only ruining the weekend but condemning you to hell, or at least purgatory, and meanwhile, those lucky unbaptized babies would be enjoying limbo.
We spent a lot of time quizzing the nuns about the particulars of the place and the rules for getting in.
What if you were, like, a baby, and your parents were driving you to church to be baptized, only the Russians dropped The Bomb while you were still in the parking lot and you died? Would this count as a Baptism by Intention, even if you were too young to intend to get baptized and only your parents had the intention? What if you were, like, just born, and were still in the hospital and your parents hadn’t even thought about setting the baptism date and the Russians dropped The Bomb? Limbo, right?
Amazingly, the nuns had answers for all of these questions, which was the beautiful thing about growing up Catholic. You follow the rules, you go to heaven. You don’t, see you in hell. And for unbaptized babies – and certain Old Testament worthies like Moses and Abraham, who, the nuns assured us, would surely have been Catholic if they’d had that option – there was limbo.
In the early 1960s, the Second Vatican Council opened the church up a bit, which was a good thing, but eliminated a lot of eschatological exclusivity, which was disappointing for some people. What good is an afterlife if they’re going to let everyone in?
The pope and the bishops said everyone, not just Catholics, could get to heaven through the miracle of Christ’s redemption. And if even pagans could get to heaven, then why not unbaptized babies?
By the time John Paul II became pope in 1978, limbo was in, well, limbo. It hadn’t been dealt with formally, but you knew it was coming. Now, apparently, the time has come, and it’s confusing.
I think of what the comedian George Carlin said in 1983, when the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops got American Catholics a waiver of the fish-on-Friday rule: “What about the guy who’s in hell on a meat rap?”
What about all the unbaptized babies who were in limbo? Were they never there, or did they get out? Are they like hurricane victims, waiting at the Superdome for a bus to take them to Houston? Nowadays, you can’t even find a nun to ask.
Kevin Horrigan is a columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Readers may write to him at: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 900 North Tucker Blvd., St. Louis, Mo. 63101, or e-mail him at khorriganpost-dispatch.com.
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