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 .
Original Sin, as you should know, is not actual sin. I said actual sin.
I'd pissed If I was stuck in Limbo for the last millenia.
The apostle Paul quotes from a Greek play by Menander in 1 Cor. 15:33: "Evil companions corrupt good morals." Does this make the play Scripture.
You argued yourself into a corner and then refused to acknowledge it. You said the Church had no authority to add anything to Scripture, when "Scripture" at the time meant the Old Testament.
SD
Here's a good link that addresses the gift of infallibility which Christ gave to His Church:
http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/pub/soc.religion.christian/faq/infallibility
You'll note I said "to His Church" and not just "to the Pope."
There are essentially three organs of infallibility: 1. The bishops dispersed throughout the world in union with the Holy See. 2. Ecumenical councils under the headship of the pope. 3. The pope himself separately. It is this third organ that people usually focus on. There have only been two ex cathedra pronouncements by the Pope. They are Ineffabilis Deus (on the Immaculate Conception) and Munificentissimus Deus (on the Assumption). These documents can be found at
www.papalencyclicals.net
The meaning of, specifically, papal infallibility is not the Pope is perfect, still less that he will always be smart, good, or even minimally competent. It means that, whatever his personal virtues or lack thereof, he will never be able to lead the whole Church astray into error. Because "the gates of Hell shall not prevail" against the Church.
So if you think about that for a minute, you'll realize that it's as essentially negative gift, one which is a limit (not an extension) of papal power. Nothing guarantees that a particular pope will teach fully, intelligently, courageously, clearly, unambiguously and effectively everything that God wants taught. (Some do this well, some are jack mediocre.) But it means he will NOT be able to use his authority to bind the Church to any erroneous doctrine.
Darn vatican...always changing the rules in the middle of the game....
If it is good enough for the Son of the Living God to use examples from it, I certainly am not going to believe a raving lunatic like Luther when he decides he knows better than God.
You have hit on the major problem with Limbo and with the even-more dangerous notion that the unbaptized go to some part of hell.
If you are as compassionate as you are toward these true innocents, how much more compassionate must God be?
You are the one thinking legalistically. What you are missing is that the Catholic church is a body, a living organism headed by Christ who has designated in the apostles and their successors a means to resolve disputes, not to legislate in advance all the details. The Truth is Christ himself. We live in Christ, adhere to Christ, follow Christ, obey Christ, believe Christ. What exactly that means was relatively simple at the outset but has infinite room for deepened understanding because Christ is God incarnate and infinite. So as time goes on various people offered explanations of deeper understandings of who Christ was and of the structures (and therefore disciplines, rules and regulations) of his Body the Church. Some of the proffered explanations were ruled out of bounds, inadequate, erroneous, some were ruled in bounds by those appointed authorities (apostles, successors to apostles, with Peter's successor as the unifying final authority on earth).
So no, it never was and never will be and never can be laid out all nice and neatly in lists and decrees and rules because the Teaching is a Person, the Truth of the Universe, the Word of God Incarnate. He taught everything when he was here but his immediate disciples only understood a small fraction of it all--enough to be saved. He himself told them he would send his Holy Spirit to guide them into all truth and he appointed men to be the immediate tools of the Holy Spirit's guiding. Through this institution made by Christ himself, the unfolding of exactly what is reformable discipline and what is irreformable doctrine in ever increasing depth and detail takes place.
You have to trust the men Christ authorized to do the leading, themselves led by the Holy Spirit. Jesus did not think it wise to draft a written set of laws or a Constitution that would endure for all time. He put Himself as the living Constitution and Authority for his Body the Church but he from the beginning established his apostles as the means by which he through the Holy Spirit would govern this living organism.
So, some things (disciplines) changed, others developed without reversing or changing. The Catholic claim is that all this took place under Holy Spirit guidance. But you have to trust that. Your demand for a list shows a legalistic mindset and a failure to grasp the organic nature of the Mystical Body of Christ. It's very Enlightenment, Montesqueuian and non-Catholic. We have fallen back on written constitutions because we mistrusted the regiment of persons, princes etc. in the secular sphere. As we are now discovering, written Constitutions are worthless unless their caretakers are virtuous and intelligent and honest. We've failed at the task of taking care of our written US Constitution and will pay a terrible price for it (aborted babies being only one part of the price).
The Catholic claim is that written documents are secondary to the living organic authority of the persons Christ placed in charge and of their successors. It could only be trustworthy if indeed the Holy Spirit has been guiding it. These people Christ placed in charge do indeed use written documents to record their teaching, but that is actually only secondary to their doing the actual teaching. That's what counts--the actual teaching. Controversy always can arise and always will arise about the meaning of any written document. So a Catholic does not place his trust in the documents themselves or in any list of them but in the persons who taught the teachings recorded in them. And we'd be utter fools to place our trust in those persons if we did not first believe that Christ authorized these persons and has guided their successors through the Holy Spirit down through the centuries.
Therefore, if the current Holy Father (and before him John Paul II) are convinced that Limbo was never taught as an irreformable dogma (and on this every theologian of any repute would agree that they are correct), then instead of whining about them arbitrarily demoting a dogma to a discipline or an irreformable doctrine to a reformable one, we ought to accept their judgment that Limbo was never taught as dogma, but merely as theological speculation. If any body of historians or theologians were making a counter claim, insisting that Limbo was taught dogmatically, that would be one thing. But no one is making that claim who has any familiarity with the history of Limbo. The people who are throwing up their hands and accusing the Church authorities of arbitrarily abandoning settled doctrine are basing it on what the nuns taught them in school or on popular perceptions about what happens to the unbaptized infants etc.
The canon of Scripture is what God intended it to be not what the Church intended it to be. The Church as the Bride of Christ is guided and protected through the Holy Spirit and the God-breathed Word of God, the Holy Scriptures, both Old and New Testament. If you think that the early church fathers decided without the authority of God which were canoncial books and which were not you are mistaken. When Christ spoke of the Scriptures he spoke of the totality of the Scriptures with the full knowledge of what was canonical before even the beginning of time.
Please, the limbo of the patriarchs is not the same thing as the limbus puerorum. You only confuse matters to equate them. There is no direct biblical support for the theological speculation about the limbus pureorum but it does make much sense as derived from firmly biblical beliefs. The problem is that while it was one way of dealing with the problem of the unbaptized infants, it's not the only way and was never taught authoritatively, only speculatively. One very good reason that it was never taught authoritatively whereas the limbus patrum was taught authoritatively is that the latter has more explicit biblical support while the former has only indirect biblical support, drawing on solid theology, yes, but putting pieces of solid theology together in ways that have never been dogmatized.
Ad hominem and unkind.
I didn't attack you personally.
First of all, Scripture is what Christ's Church says it is. Not surprisingly, the Canon of the Old Testament defined by the Church is the same one that Jesus and the Apostles used --the Septuagint.
B. THE CANON AMONG THE ALEXANDRIAN JEWS (DEUTEROCANONICAL BOOKS)If that is so than you are still missing many books in your own Scripture. The Apocryphal books were never part are Jewish canon.The most striking difference between the Catholic and Protestant Bibles is the presence in the former of a number of writings which are wanting in the latter and also in the Hebrew Bible, which became the Old Testament of Protestantism. These number seven books: Tobias (Tobit), Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, I and II Machabees, and three documents added to protocanonical books, viz., the supplement to Esther, from x, 4, to the end, the Canticle of the Three Youths (Song of the Three Children) in Daniel, iii, and the stories of Susanna and the Elders and Bel and the Dragon, forming the closing chapters of the Catholic version of that book. Of these works, Tobias and Judith were written originally in Aramaic, perhaps in Hebrew; Baruch and I Machabees in Hebrew, while Wisdom and II Machabees were certainly composed in Greek. The probabilities favour Hebrew as the original language of the addition to Esther, and Greek for the enlargements of Daniel.
The ancient Greek Old Testament known as the Septuagint was the vehicle which conveyed these additional Scriptures into the Catholic Church. The Septuagint version was the Bible of the Greek-speaking, or Hellenist, Jews, whose intellectual and literary centre was Alexandria (see SEPTUAGINT). The oldest extant copies date from the fourth and fifth centuries of our era, and were therefore made by Christian hands; nevertheless scholars generally admit that these faithfully represent the Old Testament as it was current among the Hellenist or Alexandrian Jews in the age immediately preceding Christ. These venerable manuscripts of the Septuagint vary somewhat in their content outside the Palestinian Canon, showing that in Alexandrian-Jewish circles the number of admissible extra books was not sharply determined either by tradition or by authority. However, aside from the absence of Machabees from the Codex Vaticanus (the very oldest copy of the Greek Old Testament), all the entire manuscripts contain all the deutero writings; where the manuscript Septuagints differ from one another, with the exception noted, it is in a certain excess above the deuterocanonical books. It is a significant fact that in all these Alexandrian Bibles the traditional Hebrew order is broken up by the interspersion of the additional literature among the other books, outside the law, thus asserting for the extra writings a substantial equality of rank and privilege.
It is pertinent to ask the motives which impelled the Hellenist Jews to thus, virtually at least, canonize this considerable section of literature, some of it very recent, and depart so radically from the Palestinian tradition. Some would have it that not the Alexandrian, but the Palestinian, Jews departed from the Biblical tradition. The Catholic writers Nickes, Movers, Danko, and more recently Kaulen and Mullen, have advocated the view that originally the Palestinian Canon must have included all the deuterocanonicals, and so stood down to the time of the Apostles (Kaulen, c. 100 B.C.), when, moved by the fact that the Septuagint had become the Old Testament of the Church, it was put under ban by the Jerusalem Scribes, who were actuated moreover (thus especially Kaulen) by hostility to the Hellenistic largeness of spirit and Greek composition of our deuterocanonical books. These exegetes place much reliance on St. Justin Martyr's statement that the Jews had mutilated Holy Writ, a statement that rests on no positive evidence. They adduce the fact that certain deutero books were quoted with veneration, and even in a few cases as Scriptures, by Palestinian or Babylonian doctors; but the private utterances of a few rabbis cannot outweigh the consistent Hebrew tradition of the canon, attested by Josephus--although he himself was inclined to Hellenism--and even by the Alexandrian-Jewish author of IV Esdras. We are therefore forced to admit that the leaders of Alexandrian Judaism showed a notable independence of Jerusalem tradition and authority in permitting the sacred boundaries of the Canon, which certainly had been fixed for the Prophets, to be broken by the insertion of an enlarged Daniel and the Epistle of Baruch. On the assumption that the limits of the Palestinian Hagiographa remained undefined until a relatively late date, there was less bold innovation in the addition of the other books, but the wiping out of the lines of the triple division reveals that the Hellenists were ready to extend the Hebrew Canon, if not establish a new official one of their own.
On their human side these innovations are to be accounted for by the free spirit of the Hellenist Jews. Under the influence of Greek thought they had conceived a broader view of Divine inspiration than that of their Palestinian brethren, and refused to restrict the literary manifestations of the Holy Ghost to a certain terminus of time and the Hebrew form of language. The Book of Wisdom, emphatically Hellenist in character, presents to us Divine wisdom as flowing on from generation to generation and making holy souls and prophets (vii, 27, in the Greek). Philo, a typical Alexandrian-Jewish thinker, has even an exaggerated notion of the diffusion of inspiration (Quis rerum divinarum hæres, 52; ed. Lips., iii, 57; De migratione Abrahæ, 11,299; ed. Lips. ii, 334). But even Philo, while indicating acquaintance with the deutero literature, nowhere cites it in his voluminous writings. True, he does not employ several books of the Hebrew Canon; but there is a natural presumption that if he had regarded the additional works as being quite on the same plane as the others, he would not have failed to quote so stimulating and congenial a production as the Book of Wisdom. Moreover, as has been pointed out by several authorities, the independent spirit of the Hellenists could not have gone so far as to setup a different official Canon from that of Jerusalem, without having left historical traces of such a rupture. So, from the available data we may justly infer that, while the deuterocanonicals were admitted as sacred by the Alexandrian Jews, they possessed a lower degree of sanctity and authority than the longer accepted books, i.e., the Palestinian Hagiographa and the Prophets, themselves inferior to the Law.
Tell that to Jesus and the Apostles!
Septuagint quotes in the New Testament
Luther did not remove these he merely put them back where Jerome placed them - as edifying but not inspired.
By what authority? Luther isn't in the Bible. The Bible he had was the Catholic Bible. So under his doctrine of "the Bible alone," he had no authority to delete books from the existing Bible. Luther set himself up as a super-biblical authority, in contradiction of his own doctrine.
Define "Scripture" that you are attesting to.
You are asserting that there is a precise thing called "Scripture".
You are asserting that you know what it is.
You are asserting that books that Jesus Christ and the apostles cited from are NOT "Scripture", because they are not in your canon.
You then assert that a whole raft of books that Jesus Christ and the Apostles never once cited from, which is to say the ENTIRE New Testament, ARE Scripture.
Nowhere in Scripture is Scripture defined.
So, you are sure you know what "Scripture" is, and you are positively certain what's in it, and what is not. But you do not have any citation in Scripture that tells you what Scripture is.
So, how do you know this?
What is your precise source that tells you that the first part of Daniel is Scripture, but the second part of Daniel is not?
Not mutually exclusive things.
If you think that the early church fathers decided without the authority of God which were canoncial books and which were not you are mistaken.
It's amusing how off you are. That's not what we think. We think the Church is the instrument God used to make the canonical determination. Which makes your citing of the Church having no authority to add to Scripture nonsense.
SD
I didn't attack you personally. I just said my opinion is that you exhibit indifferentism and that you use the vilest arguments against your own Church.
You may not do this from bigotry (I am sure you do not), but your arguments give fuel to those who would be inclined to do so.
SD
But origional sin is damnable..
The problem was that theologians had not yet advanced with sufficient confidence the alternative: that unbaptized infants are in heaven. We started out in the West with them tormented in Hell (Augustine)--as theological speculation, not as dogma. Theologians challenged that and Limbo emerged as a half-way solution. It was left at that level of authority for 1000 years. Now Ratzinger and JPII have said, it's time to think this through some more. That Christ's death on the cross could redeem from original sin and restore access to the beatific vision is perfectly reasonable--whether one fits it theologically under baptism of desire like the good thief or whatever. For 1000 years the matter treaded water. This is no reversal whatsoever. It's a further development of a trajectory underway since the first challenges to the identity of original sin and actual sin and to the belief that original-sin-saddled infants suffer eternal torment in hell.
And now the development of doctrine, begun by a mere theologian (Ratzinger) 20 years ago, picked up papal support (not infallible certification) from JPII in the last years of his life and is being favored by Benedict functioning not yet ex cathedra as supreme pontiff but wearing his theologian's hat as he encourages other theologians to theologize about it. Depending on the outcome, some where down the line, for the first time in history, there might be a formal dogmatic statement on the matter. Or if the International Theological Commission or Benedict himself (as a theologian) decide to table it, it could go back into limbo as far as dogmatization is concerned for another 1000 years. To be all up in arms about the Church arbitrarily taking away a cherished doctrine from poor old parents, to me, smacks of whining.
Well said bump.
The quote from +Irenaeus comes from Proof of the Apostolic Preaching, III, 20. 1. I think +John Damamcene in On Holy Saturday also discusses this in terms of how we exist, enjoy "life" only because God wills it, as we are, in essence, nothing. I think it is certainly safe to say that whatever existence we enjoy is by divine fiat. Our "existence" is not the "existence" of "O WN", the Only Existing One. I must say, by the way, that when I first learned of this thought some years ago, my reaction was identical to yours. I'm still not sure what I think of it, but I can say that I believe it is likely consistent with patristic thought. One of the interesting aspects of this is that some Greek theologians have opined that the West in fact does reject this idea because of a fundamental difference between the East and the West on the nature of both creation and God. By the way, I don't what to think of that.
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