Nor did I say that the Church teaches that all unbaptized infants go to heaven. I explicitly said that JPII did not say that, that he left it a mystery, but that Ratzinger and he think that the traditional hypothesis about limbo simply goes beyond what the Church can legitimately say about this.
You must have misunderstood what I wrote about Innocent III. Take a look at Ludwig Ott's note where he distinguishes between the poena damna and the poena sensus. The latter is Hell as it is normally known, externally sensed suffering. The former is what Aquinas meant by "natural bliss." Innocent III explicitly denies poena sensus for unbaptized infants. Poena sensus is what most people understand by Hell. Ott also is the one who says that most of the Greek Fathers rejected poena sensus (or its equivalent) for the unbaptized infants--that is, they believed in no external suffering for them, in what Aquinas would call natural bliss, which if translated into popular understandings of Hell, means not-Hell or hell in a technical sense only.
But all of this has little to do with Limbo. The three places where Hermann the Cherusker claims that Limbo was dogmatically taught (that was the issue we started with, was it not) do not teach Limbo in any definitive way but refer to something compatible with a limbo doctrine tangentially in the course of dealing with another issue.
In other words, precisely the argument we are having has been had for centuries in the Church and it has never been defined, resolved, put to rest. For that reason, JPII called for a formal examination of the question by the International Theological Commission; presumably Cardinal Ratzinger had a hand in that call since Ratzinger is on record many years ago as saying that the limbo hypothesis is not very helpful.
If as a result of JPII's call to visit the matter (not revisit) for the first time in a formal, specific, theological manner, a more definitive teaching is arrived at and that teach affirms something like Aquinas's limbus puerorum, then I would agree that Limbo has been definitively and dogmatically taught. But the topic has never, I repeat, never, been dealt with for its own sake by formal magisterial authority, which has left theologians free to argue, speculate, explore it. That's what Ratzinger meant 20 years ago when he said it is merely a theological hypothesis. And that's what I meant when I said it has not been dogmatically taught, pace the Lyons II, Florence, and Pius VI.
I am perfectly open to discussing the merits and demerits of the various solutions to the problem of unbaptized infants, but what I object to is the claim that a doctrine of limbo (as distinct from the various statements about poena sensus, poena sensus, carentia visionis beatificae etc.) has been taught magisterially as a doctrine.
Finally, I'll readily grant you the "necessity of baptism" as long as you grant that "saltem de voto" ("at least by intent") is a loophole big enough to drive St. Peter's Basilica through and that this blows out of the water a crypto-Feeneyite reading of "extra ecclesiam nulla salus." Baptism is necessary, yes, at least in intent. . . . that is, not absolutely necessary. One can affirm this without putting the unbaptized on a highway to heaven or making baptism peripheral or becoming a Pelagian.
All of the above theologians who speculated about various forms of a fate short of Hell-Hell for the unbaptized infants innocent of actual sin (poena damni, carentia visionis beatificae etc.) would have affirmed that baptism is necessary, saltem de voto because they usually took care to explain that only by some kind of desire on the part of parents, even a wish that the poor infant be spared damnation, and therefore only by some form of baptism of desire, could this "short of Hell-Hell" solution work. They were trying to combine both the necessity (sort-of) of baptism with the recognition that for the unbaptized who had not knowingly and deliberately sinned to be condemned for all eternity to Hell-Hell with poena sensus and all the rest would make God into an unjust monster. In other words, to them the doctrine of free will was non-negotiable, which meant that only actual sin could condemn to Hell. And that meant that, if one was to hold on to the "necessity of baptism" one had to create a de voto loophole.
We can hope that B16 will indeed pursue this after the ITC has done its work and teach something about it dogmatically, if only to teach definitively that we cannot say much at all about the fate of baptized infants except to entrust them to God's mercy.
Of course, that wouldn't be very definitive--some would read it as a cheap-grace highway to heaven and others would keep it an unknown quantity and they'd wrangle about it on FR threads and somewhere down the road B16's successor (I forgot--how many does Malachy say we have left?) will have to re-visit the matter.
Or, on the other hand, we could wrangle about more important matters. Wrangling is too important a human activity to waste.
Of course what one affirms by the word "limbo" is beyond this, and would include, for instance, the exclusion of those dying in original sin from the hell of the damned, which has never been dogmatically taught. And the Church does not teach, unless I'm mistaken, that those dying in original sin only are not aware of their loss of the beatific vision (as Thomas and the other theologians who defend the limbo of the children do).
I understand what you're trying to say about limbo not being "hell-hell," that is, a place of eternal torment with everlasting fire, the worm of conscience, and so on, but I don't see why you'd bring it up on this thread. Hermann was quite clear in the original post that he was using "hell" simply to encompass all those deprived of the Beatific Vision, whether they are punished with the pain of sense or not. Fr. Cantalamessa himself said the same thing: "If hell consists essentially in the deprivation of God, limbo is hell!" No one here was saying that infants are punished with the pain of sense. I think St. Robert Bellarmine was the last theologian to hold this opinion and Bl. Pius IX's Quanto Conficiamur Moerere effectively rules it out, albeit not dogmatically. So what's the point of bringing it up? Not being punished with the pain of sense doesn't translate into having everlasting life, which is what Fr. Cantalamessa here proposes.
St. Thomas does teach baptism of desire and also that baptism is absolutely necessary for salvation. So I don't think there's any problem with using "absolutely" here.
I don't see why you say that theologians held that a desire on the part of the parents was necessary to rescue children from the hell of torment into the children's limbo. St. Thomas makes no mention of such a theory and Innocent III's letter would rule it out; I've certainly never seen it anywhere else.
And what we are wrangling about here is Fr. Cantalamessa's assertion that all unbaptized infants go to heaven, just like the Holy Innocents did. That is not committing them to God's mercy. It is presuming on God's mercy, and such a teaching is sure to promote neglect of infant baptism. It's also heretical (I do not say he is a heretic) because it asserts that there is another ordinary means of salvation besides baptism: in this case, the means is dying unbaptized without having attained the use of reason. For the same reason theologians always rejected as heretical Cajetan's theory about saving unbaptized infants through the sign of the cross or some other external sign of faith on the part of the parents.
* :) We both know his "prophecies" are unreliable, are forgeries