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Sunday, April 22, 2007

Oh. Never mind.
Posted by Jill | 5:58 AM
Isn't it funny how life always seems to come back to George Carlin's Class Clown? I'm speaking in particular of the immortal "Heaven, Hell, Purgatory and Limbo" bit, in which Carlin talks about the rule change that allowed Catholics to eat meat on Fridays after all and how there are still guys doing time in Hell on a meat rap.

So what happens to the Church of Infallibility now that they've decided they made another mistake -- that Limbo doesn't exist after all (except in cheesy Caribbean resorts.....sorry...but someone had to do it)?

The Roman Catholic Church has effectively buried the concept of limbo, the place where centuries of tradition and teaching held that babies who die without baptism went.

In a long-awaited document, the Church’s International Theological Commission said limbo reflected an “unduly restrictive view of salvation.”

The 41-page document was published on Friday by Origins, the documentary service of the U.S.-based Catholic News Service, which is part of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops

[snip]

“The conclusion of this study is that there are theological and liturgical reasons to hope that infants who die without baptism may be saved and brought into eternal happiness even if there is not an explicit teaching on this question found in revelation,” it said.

“There are reasons to hope that God will save these infants precisely because it was not possible (to baptize them).”

The Church teaches that baptism removes original sin which stains all souls since the fall from grace in the Garden of Eden.

‘No negation of baptism’
The document stressed that its conclusions should not be interpreted as questioning original sin or “used to negate the necessity of baptism or delay the conferral of the sacrament.”

Limbo, which comes from the Latin word meaning “border” or “edge,” was considered by medieval theologians to be a state or place reserved for the unbaptized dead, including good people who lived before the coming of Christ.

“People find it increasingly difficult to accept that God is just and merciful if he excludes infants, who have no personal sins, from eternal happiness, whether they are Christian or non-Christian,” the document said.

It said the study was made all the more pressing because “the number of nonbaptized infants has grown considerably, and therefore the reflection on the possibility of salvation for these infants has become urgent.”

The commission’s conclusions had been widely expected.

In writings before his election as pope in 2005, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger made it clear he believed the concept of limbo should be abandoned because it was “only a theological hypothesis” and “never a defined truth of faith.”

In the “Divine Comedy,” Dante placed virtuous pagans and great classical philosophers, including Plato and Socrates, in limbo. The Catholic Church’s official catechism, issued in 1992 after decades of work, dropped the mention of limbo.


Well, if the concept of Limbo comes from The Divine Comedy and was accepted as doctrine for centuries because it played into the needs of the church, then I think it's just as valid to get one's idea of the afterlife from other works of fiction. My own personal view comes from the movie Defending Your Life. What about yours?

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