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Vatican Set to Abolish Limbo.

THE Catholic Church is preparing to abandon the idea of limbo, the theological belief that children who die before being baptised are suspended in a space between heaven and hell.

The concept, which was devised in the 13th century and was depicted in numerous works of art during the Renaissance, such as Descent into Limbo by the painter Giotto, and in Dante's masterpiece, the Divine Comedy, is of a metaphysical space where infants are blissfully happy but are not actually in the presence of God.

The idea of limbo was developed as a response to the harshness of early Church teachings which insisted that any child who died before he or she was baptised would still be stained by Original Sin and so would be condemned to hell.

The belief, which is unique to the Catholic Church, has fallen out of favour over the past 50 years. It is rarely mentioned and until recently has been left in its own kind of limbo.

However, an international commission of Catholic theologians, meeting in the Vatican this week, has been pondering the issue and is expected to advise Pope Benedict XVI to announce officially that the theological concept of limbo is incorrect.

Instead, the new belief is expected to be that unbaptised babies will go directly to heaven.

Pope Benedict had already expressed his doubts about limbo when, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he was head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Church's doctrinal watchdog.

In an interview in 1984, he said: "Limbo has never been a defined truth of faith. Personally, speaking as a theologian and not as head of the Congregation, I would drop something that has always been only a theological hypothesis."

First his declaration on homosexual priests, then this. The papacy of Benedict XVI is shaping up to be more interesting than we were first led to believe it would be. The Vatican of John Paul II focused outward on bringing Christ to a secular world. This Vatican seems to be looking inward, performing some long overdue doctrinal housecleaning.

The above article ends with this chestnut:

John Haldane, a professor of philosophy at St Andrews University and a consulter to the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Culture, said that the issue of limbo was "something of a medieval curiosity" that no longer preoccupies people. He said that the reason the Catholic Church was clarifying its position was that people still wrongly perceived heaven as a place and not as a state of being.

"The idea of limbo conjures up the image of God as some kind of government bureaucrat who says to people, not just babies, 'Sorry, you don't have your passport stamped with baptism, you'll have to wait over there'.

"Instead, God's powers are such that He can overcome the issue of Original Sin as He chooses, according to special circumstances."