Posted on 11/29/2005 3:42:52 PM PST by Claud
Vatican considers dropping 'limbo'
Theologians meet to look again at fate of unbaptised tots
(ANSA) - Vatican City, November 29 - The Catholic Church appears set to definitively drop the concept of limbo, the place where it has traditionally said children's souls go if they die before being baptised .
Limbo has been part of Catholic teaching since the 13th century and is depicted in paintings by artists such as Giotto and in important works of literature such as Dante's Divine Comedy .
But an international commission of Catholic theologians is meeting in the Vatican this week to draw up a new report for Pope Benedict XVI on the question. The report is widely expected to advise dropping it from Catholic teaching .
The pope made known his doubts about limbo in an interview published in 1984, when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Vatican's doctrinal department .
"Limbo has never been a defined truth of faith," he said. "Personally, speaking as a theologian and not as head of the Congregation, I would drop something that has always been only a theological hypothesis." According to Italian Vatican watchers, the reluctance of theologians to even use the word limbo was clear in the way the Vatican referred in its official statement to the question up for discussion .
The statement referred merely to "the Fate of Children who Die Without Baptism" .
Benedict's predecessor, John Paul II, gave the commission the task of looking at the issue again in 2004. He asked experts to come up with a "theological synthesis" able to make the Church's approach "more coherent and illuminated" .
In fact, when John Paul II promulgated the updated version of the Catholic Church's catechism in 1992 there was no mention of the word limbo .
That document gave no clear answer to the question of what happened to children who died before being baptised .
It said: "The Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God...In fact the great mercy of God, who wants all men to be saved, and the tenderness of Jesus towards children... allow us to hope that there is a way of salvation for children who die without baptism." This view is in stark contrast to what Pope Pius X said in an important document in 1905: "Children who die without baptism go into limbo, where they do not enjoy God, but they do not suffer either, because having original sin, and only that, they do not deserve paradise, but neither hell or purgatory." According to teaching from the 13th century on, limbo was also populated by the prophets and patriarchs of Israel who lived in the time before Jesus Christ .
Protestants are not indifferent.
And hardly any Catholics came to their reliance on the Sacraments through long, hard debate and careful study.
Most Protestants are Protestant because they were born into Protestant families and taught to be. And most Catholics are Catholic because they were born of Catholic families and taught to be as children.
The Catholic arguments themselves, when you look at them completely objectively and without the advantage of having a warm faith in them since childhood, are good but they are not airtight.
Infallibility is a problem in a Church that murdered thousands by torture for heresy in an earlier age and that is right now embroiled in a massive scandal from the coverup of pedophile priests spanning decades. Now, it may well be that infallibility is theologically right, after all, but anybody not raised with it looks at the bloody and dark deeds of the Catholic Church, past and present, and thinks that any claim of infallibility is utter claptrap.
Now, it may well be that through long, careful, patient study, one can come to a position that understands the theology behind the infallibility claim (although one will never find a set of doctrines that one can identify as THE infallible doctrines - within the very core of Catholicism there is not really agreement on what they are with any PRECISION).
It is not indifference for someone raised in a very different tradition, one which has been loving and nuturing of the faith (I am thinking of all of my German Lutheran friends, who are scarcely distinguishable from my own Catholic family, except that they are German and we are French, and their kings long past went with Luther while ours had the Pope under their control in Avignon). It is, rather, instant revulsion. The cradle Protestant does not have the warmth in him that you and I feel towards the Catholic Church. He sees a corrupt and alien institution, a Latin and Latino institution (replete with Latin prelates and Latin corruption too), with an infamous reputation in the present for pedophilia, and a history of killing his own ancestors for holding the opinions that he himself holds, and which he had held from birth with great love and affection and naturalness.
To him, the Catholic Church looks very like the Dragon on the Seven Hills, when he is pushed to it. It is not indifference. It is that history and comportment of the Church as an institution is a turn-off, and Catholics never seem to be a bit contrite about it either.
You know, Muslims say the same thing. They assert theirs is the one true religion, and that we're in deep kim-chee because we don't believe it. Our criticisms of things like, oh, terrorism, wife beating, slavery, massive pedophilia, corruption, oppression and endless war are that this is not Islam but bad people doing things in the name of Islam. They tell us that if we were to just study the Koran and the traditions closely we would see that.
Now, is it INDIFFERENCE on our part that we say "No thanks"?
No, it isn't. It is an all too keen awareness of the moral cesspool that is the Arab world. We look at it, see all the bad, and are dissuaded by that bad to even seriously consider for a moment that their religion could even possibly be true. Of course a religion that presides over mass hangings and beheadings cannot POSSIBLY be the true religion of a loving God. And that's about where our reasoning ends. It's not indifference that makes Islam repellent to us. It's knowledge.
That is the problem that our church faces. We have a long history, and there are some moments in it when the Devil got control of the apparatus of Church governance and did unspeakable and unpardonable things. What's more, those things were done to the very ancestors of the people who are now Protestants. It is one of the strong reasons why their ancestors BECAME Protestant in the first place: the abuses of the Catholic Church.
Moreover, there's a geographical issue.
Look at the Protestant countries: America, Canada, Britain, Holland, northern Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and South Korea.
Now look at the Catholic countries: Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Belgium, Croatia, and the Philippines.
There is a pattern of economic and scientific development, and it does not favor the Catholics. France, of course, is the exception. But considering that the French monarchy essentially controlled the papacy back during the period that the Protestants broke off and formed their national churches, it is true to say that Catholicism was the French national Church. English Kings couldn't get divorces from the Pope. But French kings DID, because France controlled the Church and England didn't.
Anyway, we have all of that history and the present divisions of the world working against us. Protestants don't look askance at the Catholic Church because of indifference or ignorance. They see the division of the world between Protestant-Germanic efficiency and Catholic-Latin corruption and backwardness. And they aren't WRONG on that score either. What is the difference between Holland and Belgium, really, other than religion...and economic development of the Protestant end of it?
And they see the present horrors and past horrors, and are repelled by it.
This doesn't mean they are right. It does mean that the Church cannot expect, simply by stating that it is the visible body of Christ on Earth, to be given the benefit of the doubt by the descendants of people the Church once tortured and hounded with armies, and who are much more scientifically and economically advanced than the Catholics are now in part BECAUSE OF their Protestantism.
All of these things are so.
And God knows it.
The Holy Spirit dwells within the Church He made.
But we have so mucked up the nest with our power trips, and so overstated the case for authority but been so underwhelming in our actual practice of peace and Christian charity too often in our history to deserve the benefit of the doubt. Why do German Lutherans owe Roman Catholicism the benefit of the doubt?
They don't.
God knows this.
And that is why the sincere birth Lutherans do not have to abandon the faith of their fathers to find salvation.
Now, some do go through all of that study, and slough away the history and the inanity and insanity of obsessive Catholic leadership of the past. They overlook the criminality of the American episcopate in covering up pedophilia, and realize that the men and institution is flawed, but God nevertheless dwells in the house that He built, and that the sacraments do indeed bring man closer to God. And there are a few converts every year. But those are exceptional souls, and God does not set the bar so high on Protestants that the sincerely faithful among them are not loved and saved, no so low for Catholics that simply being part of the Catholic ethnicity is enough.
We shouldn't have to argue about this, because it's obvious.
However, we do, because it just needs to be said.
The mission is not to convert everyone to Catholicism.
The mission is to open everyone's eyes to God. God will take care of the rest, in His fashion. Some will convert. And some will remain with the Lutheranism into which He chose to send them as babies. We cannot gainsay the wisdom of God on this. We just have to respect it, and realize that the divisions of the Church are at least partly the responsibility of horrific acts by the Catholic Church over the course of history.
God didn't do those acts. Men using the authority of the Church did. But that distinction is not very easy to see when your own country and families were the ones to whom the bad acts were done.
Thanks 8-)
Origional Sin..
Never said there was a "free pass".
Let's read on a little further in the Catechism, though, particularly about the Protestants:
817 In fact, "in this one and only Church of God from its very beginnings there arose certain rifts, which the Apostle strongly censures as damnable. But in subsequent centuries much more serious dissensions appeared and large communities became separated from full communion with the Catholic Church - for which, often enough, men of both sides were to blame." [UR 3 # 1] The ruptures that wound the unity of Christ's Body - here we must distinguish heresy, apostasy, and schism [Cf. CIC, can. 751] - do not occur without human sin: [2089]
Where there are sins, there are also divisions, schisms, heresies, and disputes. Where there is virtue, however, there also are harmony and unity, from which arise the one heart and one soul of all believers. [Origen, Hom. in Ezech. 9, 1: PG 13, 732]
818 "However, one cannot charge with the sin of the separation those who at present are born into these communities [that resulted from such separation] and in them are brought up in the faith of Christ, and the Catholic Church accepts them with respect and affection as brothers .... All who have been justified by faith in Baptism are incorporated into Christ; they therefore have a right to be called Christians, and with good reason are accepted as brothers in the Lord by the children of the Catholic Church." [UR 3 § 1] [1271]
819 "Furthermore, many elements of sanctification and of truth" [LG 8 § 2] are found outside the visible confines of the Catholic Church: "the written Word of God; the life of grace; faith, hope, and charity, with the other interior gifts of the Holy Spirit, as well as visible elements." [UR 3 § 2; cf. LG 15] Christ's Spirit uses these Churches and ecclesial communities as means of salvation, whose power derives from the fullness of grace and truth that Christ has entrusted to the Catholic Church. All these blessings come from Christ and lead to him, [Cf. UR 3] and are in themselves calls to "Catholic unity." [Cf. LG 8]
Which statement? The closest any pope came to an authoritative statement was by Pius VI--Denzinger no. 1526. But it was in response to a false teaching of the Synod of Pistoia. No pope has ever made a pronouncement on this and surrounded it with all the markers of in irreformable teaching. You are using the term "ex cathedra" to apply to papal teaching in general, but that's exactly what Vatican I did not say.
Calling this "theological speculation" is a way to squirrel out of a doctrine that catholics have been told for centuries. How many parents who have lost children have been assured they are in "limbo"? Reducing scripture to speculation and then espousing that to grieving parents is the work of an evil intellect. The question is not what happens to those who were consigned to "limbo" - you can't be in a place that never was - but what happens to all those who were told their loved ones were in "limbo"? What effect does this back peddling have on them?
Unless you count Jews like Jesus and His Apostles, who quote from the Septuagint most often (by far) when referencing the Old Testament.
Septuagint quotes in the New Testament.
Deuterocanonical books in the New Testament
"The Church has no right to change the reality of the thing, only to divine what that reality is."
Is that all?
Didn't Jesus say to Peter "What you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and what you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven"?
It seems to me that he gave Peter more than the mere power to divine. That sounds to me like the power to determine outcomes by ordering that it be so, that God will respond to the decisions of Peter by making it so.
I didn't say they were.
I said you were. And you are. You preach indifferentism and drip with venom for your own alleged Church. You sound no different than the vilest bigot in your analysis.
Good luck with your own particular faith.
SD
Regarding Innocent III, here's the quote from Denzinger: "Poena originalis peccatis est carentia visionis Dei actualis, vero poena peccati est gehennae perpetuae cruciatus." He contrasts the penalty of perpetual hell with the penalty of the lacking of actual vision of God. If you want to assign Limbo to the hell side of the equation rather than the heaven side, be my guest. To me the language suggests exactly the opposite.
Which canon? Catholics and Protestants use different canons. The ultimate and insurmountable problem for the doctrine of "Sola Scriptura" is that the Bible did not and can not canonize itself. Any argument for a particular canon must be extra-canonical and extra-scriptural.
For Catholics, that authority is Christ's Church, "the pillar and foundation of truth."
Yet you ascribe an authority to the Bible that borders on idolatry.
I cannot combine my belief in the Holy One Everlasting with any thought of Him punishing the most innocent of us all, nor on the punishment that gives to parents suffering the world's worst fate: outliving their child. I am sorry if that offends anyone, but it is just cruel to think that the most precious and innocent of us would go to H@ll.
Thanks.
Is it a mortal sin to not go to Mass every Sunday?
I know this is pointless cause you've already shown yourself incapable of abstract thought. See, for example, your invalidating of the New Testament earlier and your refusal to answer questions about it.
Limbo was offered to the grieving as a comfort, as an alternative to damnation for those unbaptised.
To now re-affirm that limbo is merely an idea, not a certainty and that our best answer to the question is "we don't know, but we trust in God's mercy" is not backpeddling. It remains a comforting thought.
SD
And yet even Jesus used examples from some of these "Apocryphal" books. Go figure.
I attested to the God-breathed nature of the New Testament as Holy Scripture. Catholics in this discussion are the only posters that have diminished the authority of the Scriptures.
That the limbo of infants dying without baptism is a theological speculation? That's what I was taught by the nuns in CCD.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.