IN FRATERNAM MEAM: LIFE AFTER LIMBO

IN FRATERNAM MEAM

Monday, January 09, 2006

LIFE AFTER LIMBO

Closing it will send more souls to heaven, but will baptism lose its primacy?

FORGET ABOUT THE CUTE HEADLINES PROCLAIMING THAT LIMBO IS IN LIMBO. In fact, Limbo, the incomplete afterlife postulated by the Roman Catholic Church for infants who die before being abptized, is on the skids. After a commission of top Catholic theolgoians wrapped up a December conference that examined the topic, the prognosis was apparently grim: the group's secretary general told Vatican Radio that the church's taching on Limbo was "in crisis".

Beyond being headline news (how often does a major faith admit to retooling its take on the afterlife?), the shift, telegraphed in 1994 Cathechism, should strike most believers as a very good thing. For centuries, Catholic couples lived in fear that in the tragic event that their newborns perished, the infants would not go to heaven, but to a cheery yet inaccessible outer parking lot, a locale where they would enjoy eternal happiness but denied the actual presence of God (and, presumably, of the parents, assuming they reached heaven).

That scheme had come to seem impossinle harsh. Says the Rev. James Martin, an editor at the Jesuit publication America who has performed many baotisms :"My idea of God is not a God who would condemn a baby to an imoperfect life for eternity". Many priests have down played Limbo out of similar concerns, and Martin lauds the Vatican panel for "bringing theological development in line with pastoral application".

Shutting down Limbo also aligns nicely with the church's activisim on abortion. On last weeks ' Feast of the Holy Innocents -- honoring children murdered by the evnil King Herod -- Pope Benedict XVI emphasized that the embryo is a "Full and complete" human being, despite being "shapeless". If you re going to call a fetus' termination murder, then it seems somehow inconsistent to deny heaven to the blamelss, full and complete victim.
In the finely balanced theological universe, however, it's hard to give in one area without taking away elsewhere. In this case, the loser is baptism -- or at least the rite's broadest, bluntest defintion. Limbo was conceived in the Middle Ages to solve a problem relating to original sin, the inherited stain of Adam and Eve's disobedience. Jesus death on the Cross is understood to have relieved humanity of the burden of that sin, an immunity Catholicsm still considers activated for each human as he or she unites with Christ in baptism.

The question arose. What about babies who died before they were baptized? The church father Augustine of Hippo (AD 354 - 430) applying more logice than compassion, said that without baptismal grace, they must got to hell. That proved too much for the theologians of the Middle Ages, who counterporposed Limbo. The Protestant reformers eliminated it form their theology along with several other postdeath constructs, but it remained a looming staple of Catholic understanding. Says Martin: "I've rarely ba[tized a babay where (Limbo) has not come up, at least as a joke".

Those nervous jests may now end. The orignal head of the theological commission that met in December was none other that Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who had written years earlier that Limbo was not actually church doctrine but only a "theological hypothesis" Elsewhere he called it "problematic" As Pope Benedict XVI, he will probably approve a document recognizing unbaptized babies full entree' into heaven.

Yet in the absence of Limbo, some theologians have noticed, the rite of baptism may not seem as imperative to many Catholics as it once appeared. Despite its continued centrality as the sacramental entry to the body of Christ, some of its ASAP urgency will presumably fade. Indeed, the expected Limbo rulign comes in addition to an older decision that appeared to downgrade baptism's gatekeeping role. The Second Vatican Council of 1962-65 ruled that in the case of some adult seekers of God - even non Christians -- the desire for the divine could take the place of the rite. Or, as the author of 2002 God and the World noted, "men who are seeking for God and who are inwardly sriving toward that which constitutes baptism will also receive salvation", The writer was again, Ratzinger.

Together, these developments invite an investivation of bapatism's importance beyond simply preventing the worst, and make a statement about the liberality of grace. Both the commission's work, which speaks of unbaptized adults, remind believers that, as Ratrzinger wrote in a paraphrase of his perdecessor John Paul II, Christians may hope that "God is powerful enough to draw to himself all those who were unable to receive the sacrament". Limbo was a vestige of an overfastidious exclusivity. Eliminating it afford a better view of God's many mansions, their doors wider than some of his followers have historically admitted.

(TIMEMAG ESSAY/ by: David Van Biema)

posted by infraternam meam @ 12:20 AM

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