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 .
Anyone have chapter and verse on "Limbo"? Purgatory? Infant baptism? Lighting candles for the already-deceased? What about praying to Mary? Rosary beads? Holy water?
And what would establish "The early Christian canon", precisely?
Not the opinion of the post-temple Jews. That there was a Jewish "council" of Jamnia at all was precisely because there had been a fatal change in Judaism with the destruction of the Temple and the loss of the center. The struggle was to preserve what could be preserved, and the Palestinian Jews were much more ethnically focused, and also much more polemically and violently anti-Christian, than Alexandrine Jews or the Greek-speaking Jews of the diaspora. There is no good reason to give the highest authority in determining the Jewish canon to those bitter-ender Palestinian Jews who hated and persecuted the Christians most.
By contrast, the Septuagint itself was a translation made by translators sent under the commission of the High Priest of the Jewish Temple in an era BEFORE the Christian polemics were occurring, with Christians taking the Greek Septuagint, and bitter-ender ethnic Jews in Palestine rejecting anything written in Greek.
The Council of Jamnia, whatever it was, was composed of and represented people who were committed, many of them murderously so, anti-Christians. That's singularly bad authority on which to base any canon at all.
The choice of the High Priest and his translators in an earlier age, which produced the Greek Septuagint that went into universal use is more authoritative: the High Priesthood was still THE established leader of God's One True Faith on earth at the time. The Jews of Jamnia were already deeply in error, had already rejected the Messiah, and were no longer God's One True Faith. The Christians were, at that point.
When the Septuagint was translated, by contrast, the High Priest who ordered it DID have the proper authority to do so.
The Septuagint has greater authority than the Massoretic Text for that reason.
But let's leave aside what the Jews thought. What early Christians thought is far more important.
Go through the earliest Christian Councils that attempted to determine canonical works. You will discover that every single one of them included at least some of the Deuterocanonica, along with books that do not appear in the current New Testament. And they all left out some books now there.
So, Christians disputed the boundaries of the Old Testament, and the whole of the New Testament, for a long time. The Bible first assumed its current shape with Pope Damascus in the late 300s, and Jerome. Jerome had an opinion, and was quite pro-Judaic in his preferences of texts, but he was also doing his work more than 300 years after the fact. There is no particular reason to give his opinion of what ought and ought not be canonical heavy weight, considering that not one single Church Council that dealt with the OT canon agreed with him. Jerome didn't claim special revelation from God on that score either.
He had an opinion. Councils before him didn't agree. And the Pope of his time didn't either, which is why the Vulgate contains the works that Jerome didn't want in there.
Dig around in those early councils. Deuterocanonical works are there in those lists.
More interestingly, and demonstrating that Catholics don't have the vaguely idolatrous fixation with the Bible as the Be-All and End-All of revelation, is the fact that the Eastern Rites of the Catholic Church share the Orthodox Canon, which includes 3 and 4 Maccabbees. The Western Rite does not. And this difference in the Bibles of the Catholic Church is NOT a basis for Schism.
Because God the Holy Spirit is in the CHURCH, and the Church is what interprets the Book and the times and everything else. Just like the High Priest and Sanhedrin before them. The Samaritans tried their damndest to assert that the TORAH was the Law, and that the Torah superseded the authority of the High Priest and the Temple, rendering the latter unneccessary. The Torah was sufficient for all.
The rest of the Jews didn't consider the Samaritans Jews at all, on the grounds that, actually, authority did not repose in the Torah. It reposed in the only men who had been given the authority by God to finally interpret the Torah, and they were the High Priest and the Sanhedrin, then.
Today, they are called the Pope and the Vatican Curia.
With the death of Jesus, the High Priest and Sanhedrin ceased to hold any authority at all. They became ethnarchs and guardians of a tradition. The High Priesthood devolved on Peter and his successors, and the authority of the Sanhedrin devolved upon the Sanhedrin and theirs.
Jamnia had no authority to decide anything about the Bible, any more than Mohammed and his clan did. Because in 90 AD, salvation was no longer of the Jews, and the Jewish clergy ceased to have any authority from God at all.
"Lighting candles for the already-deceased?"
2 Maccabbees contains the discussion of prayers and offerings of atonement for the dead, to blot out their sins before God.
Infant Baptism: "suffer the little children to come to me and deny them not", and the baptism of Cornelius "and his whole household".
Purgatory is the name for the necessary state that isn't eternal damnation in Hell, and yet isn't heaven because those who died in their sins have sin on them. Jesus, in the parable, spoke about keeping the grasping sinner in prison "until the uttermost debt was paid". Which is different from "forever".
Limbo's not real.
Praying to Mary is more appropriately styled asking Mary to pray for you. Why not?
the idea that anyone can just show up in heaven, if one believes in heaven, is pretty preposterous....
you have people that live as Christians, trying always to do good, and you have people that always are engaged in sin....
you have people that think bowing their heads and saying "Jesus" a dozen times in a sentence somehow makes them pious, reguardless of what havoc they bestow on their fellow man....
now, how can we believe that God accepts everyone no matter what...the Bill Clinton's with Mother Theresa....without a hint of discrimination....
why would humans ever pray, ever do what's right without the knowledge that our actions and our prayers actually MEAN something .....
thus, we have "heaven" and we have "hell" and we have places in between....purgatory or limbo, as we Catholics believe....
I have to tell you, that going to a very conservative nun's school, the little ones who never got baptized were always thought of as heaven bound, just like people that never learned the Word of God were heaven bound for the most part....
we were always taught that our God was a wonderful, loving Father......
Um, it was God that arranged it for him to be born as a Buddhist. I don't think Christ will have too much a problem with his own arrangements.
Not using them as an authority just to show that the canon was settled. There is nothing in the Apocryphal books that would attest to the Messiahship of Christ. If that was there and they left them out I could see your point.
The most important thing theological in the Deuterocanonical books is the understanding of the lot of the dead, with prayers and offering for atonement for the sins of the dead in 2 Maccabbees.
This adds something crucial to our understanding of the relationship between the living, the dead, and God.
It tells us that prayers for the dead are efficacious, that when people die, we should not forget them and leave them out of our prayers, because prayers can affect the living and the dead.
Now, taken to an absurd extreme, this led to the selling of indulgences and wildly spun doctrines of grades of Purgatory, etc. 2 Maccabees is not so systematized.
The simpler, better answer is that the dead still exist, their souls still matter, and prayers for them matter. It is good for those who are dead to still be prayed for. It is not a meaningless gesture. God hears the prayers for the dead, as for the living.
Indeed, this ongoing relationship between the living and the dead is one of the key differences between Catholicism and much of Protestantism, and it is BIBLICAL.
Slashing 2 Maccabbees out of the Bible silences our inclination to maintain the link of prayer without our departed ones and ancestors, and that is a tragedy of sizeable proportions. Because without 2 Maccabbees, there are only hints about the relationship between the living, the dead, and God (the fellow in Abraham's bosom and the condemned fellow who wants to go back and tell his brothers in the parable; the Witch of Endor...)
Your correct in that Jerome didn't want them in the Vulgate at all. Rome, in this instance, won the day and included the Apocryphal books but did not consider them as inspired but instead as edifying. They were to be read in the Church but not depended on for doctrine. A far cry from the Council of Trent.
"men who had been given the authority by God to finally interpret the Torah, and they were the High Priest and the Sanhedrin.
Jesus said, "The scribes and the Pharisees have seated themselves in the chair of Moses" (Matthew 23:2). Nowhere did the Hebrew Scriptures instruct the Jews to set up the Sanhedrin, to submit to the teaching of the scribes and Pharisees, or to recognize the authority of oral Tradition alongside Scripture. Nevertheless, in the first century, that is the way it was, and most Jews submitted without question.
Matthew 7:6-9
He replied, "Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written: " 'These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.' You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men." And he said to them: "You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions!
This is not exactly a ringing endorsement of the Sanhedrin. I agree with your comparison regarding the authority of the Sanhedrin and High Priest to interpret the Torah, and "the Pope and the Vatican Curia". Christ gave neither the authority to blend men's traditions with Holy Scripture.
Yep, which is why I have never believed in 'Limbo'.
Apparently there is no money attached to indulgences anymore, however, how did the RC Church wildly spin this as doctrine? Where did the authority come from?
N.1. An indulgence is the remission before God of the temporal punishment due sins already forgiven as far as their guilt is concerned, which the follower of Christ with the proper dispositions and under certain determined conditions acquires through the intervention of the Church which, as minister of the Redemption, authoritatively dispenses and applies the treasury of the satisfaction won by Christ and the saints.
N.2. And indulgence is partial or plenary according as it removes either part or all of the temporal punishment due sin.
N.3. Partial as well as plenary indulgences can always be applied to the dead by way of suffrage.
N.4. A partial indulgence will henceforth be designated only with the words "partial indulgence" without any determination of days or years.
N.5. The faithful who at least with a contrite heart perform an action to which a partial indulgence is attached obtain, in addition to the remission of temporal punishment acquired by the action itself, an equal remission of punishment through the intervention of the Church.
N.6. A plenary indulgence can be acquired only once a day, except for the provisions contained in No. 18 for those who are on the point of death. A partial indulgence can be acquired more than once a day, unless there is an explicit indication to the contrary.
N.7. To acquire a plenary indulgence it is necessary to perform the work to which the indulgence is attached and to fulfill three conditions: sacramental confession, Eucharistic Communion and prayer for the intentions of the Supreme Pontiff. It is further required that all attachment to sin, even to venial sin, be absent. If this disposition is in any way less than complete, or if the prescribed three conditions are not fulfilled, the indulgence will be only partial, except for the provisions contained in No. 11 for those who are "impeded."
N.8. The three conditions may be fulfilled several days before or after the performance of the prescribed work; nevertheless it is fitting that Communion be received and the prayers for the intentions of the Supreme Pontiff be said the same day the work is performed.
N.9. A single sacramental confession suffices for gaining several plenary indulgences, but Communion must be received and prayers for the Supreme Pontiff's intentions recited for the gaining of each plenary indulgence.
N.10. The condition of praying for the Supreme Pontiff's intentions is fully satisfied by reciting one Our Father and one Hail Mary; nevertheless the individual faithful are free to recite any other prayer according to their own piety and devotion toward the Supreme Pontiff.
N.11. While there is no change in the faculty granted by canon 935 of the Code of Canon Law to confessors to commute for those who are "impeded" either the prescribed work itself or the required conditions [for the acquisition of indulgences], local Ordinaries can grant to the faithful over whom they exercise authority in accordance with the law, and who live in places where it is impossible or at least very difficult for them to receive the sacraments of confession and Communion, permission to acquire a plenary indulgence without confession and Communion provided they are sorry for their sins and have the intention of receiving these sacraments as soon as possible.
N.12. The division of indulgences into "personal," "real' and "local" is abolished so as to make it clearer that indulgences are attached to the actions of the faithful even though at times they may be linked with some object or place.
N.13. The "Enchridion of Indulgences" is to be revised with a view to attaching indulgences only to the most important prayers and works of piety, charity and penance.
N.14. The list and summaries of indulgences special to religious orders, congregations, societies of those living in community without vows, secular institutes and the pious associations of faithful are to be revised as soon as possible in such a way that plenary indulgences may be acquired only on particular days established by the Holy See acting on the recommendation of the Superior General, or in the case of pious associations, of the local Ordinary.
N.15. A plenary indulgence applicable only to the dead can be acquired in all churches and public oratories -- and in semipublic oratories by those who have the right to use them --on November 2. In addition, a plenary indulgence can be acquired twice a year in parish churches; on the feast of the church's titular saint and on August 2, when the "Portiuncula" occurs, or on some other more opportune day determined by the Ordinary. All the indulgences mentioned above can be acquired either on the days established or--with the consent of the Ordinary--on the preceding or the following Sunday. Other indulgences attached to churches and oratories are to be revised as soon as possible.
N.16. The work prescribed for acquiring a plenary indulgence connected with a church or oratory consists in a devout visit and the recitation of one Our Father and the Creed.
N.17. The faithful who use with devotion an "object of piety" (crucifix, cross, rosary, scapular or medal) properly blessed by any priest, can acquire a partial indulgence. But if this "object of piety" is blessed by the Supreme Pontiff or any bishop, the faithful who use it devoutly can also acquire a plenary indulgence on the feast of the holy Apostles Peter and Paul, provided they also make a profession of faith using any legitimate formula.
N.18. To the faithful in danger of death who cannot be assisted by a priest to bring them the sacraments and impart the apostolic blessing with its attendant plenary indulgence (according to canon 468, sec.2 of the Code of Canon Law) Holy Mother Church nevertheless grants a plenary indulgence to be acquired at the point of death (in articulo mortis), provided they are properly disposed and have been in the habit of reciting some prayers during their lifetime. To use a crucifix or cross in connection with the acquisition of this plenary indulgence is a laudable practice. This plenary indulgence at the point of death can be acquired by the faithful even if they have already obtained another plenary indulgence on the same day.
N.19. The norms established regarding plenary indulgences, particularly those referred to in N.6, apply also to what up to now have been known as the "toties quoties" ["as often as"] plenary indulgences.
N.20. Holy Mother Church, extremely solicitous for the faithful departed, has decided that suffrages be applied to them to the widest possible extent at any Sacrifice of the Mass whatsoever, abolishing all special privileges in this regard.
Transitional Norms
These new norms regulating the acquisition of indulgences will become valid three months from the date of publication of this constitution in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis.
Indulgences attached to the use of "objects of piety" which are not mentioned above cease three months after the date of publication of this constitution in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis.
The revisions mentioned in N.14 and N.15 must be submitted to the Sacred Apostolic Penitentiary within a year. Two years after the date of this constitution, indulgences which have not been confirmed will become null and void.
We will that these statutes and prescriptions of ours be established now and remain in force for the future notwithstanding, if it is necessary so to state, the Apostolic Constitutions and Directives published by our Predecessors or any other prescriptions even if they might be worthy of special mention or should required particular repeal.
Given at Rome at St. Peter's on January 1, the octave of the Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ, 1967, the fourth year of Our Pontificate.
POPE PAUL VI
Apparently the Church knew better than Augustine because these books were not taken as inspired only edifying.
Martin Luther merely returned these books to where they had been in Jerome's Vulgate - they were not to used as inspired works for purposes of doctrine.
So you believe that God did not inspire the writing of the New Testament?
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