Michelle Tsai, Explainer, Slate, April 24, 2007
The Vatican announced on Friday the results of a papal investigation of the concept of limbo. Church doctrine now states that unbaptized babies can go to heaven instead of getting stuck somewhere between heaven and hell. If limbo doesn’t exist, what happened to everyone who was supposed to have been there already?
They’ve probably been in heaven all this time, but no one knows for sure. Until the recent announcement, the limbo crowd was thought to include anyone who hadn’t been baptized but would otherwise deserve to go to heaven – like infants (including aborted fetuses), virtuous pagans, and pre-Christian Jews. Those who had been baptized, on the other hand, either joined God in heaven, made up for their sins in purgatory, or suffered forever in hell.
If limbo never existed in the first place, you might assume that these souls passed straight through St. Peter’s gates. But the carefully worded document from the Vatican’s International Theological Commission stops short of certainty in this regard, arguing only that there are “serious theological and liturgical grounds for hope,” rather than “sure knowledge.”
The fate of unbaptized babies has confounded Catholic scholars for centuries. According to church catechisms, or teachings, babies that haven’t been splashed with holy water bear the original sin, which makes them ineligible for joining God in heaven. At the same time, as innocent beings, they surely don’t deserve eternal torment. St. Augustine concluded in the fourth century that the babies must be punished in the fire of hell, but only with the “mildest condemnation.” Eight centuries later, Thomas Aquinas thought infant souls wouldn’t go to heaven, but they wouldn’t suffer in the afterlife, either (and they wouldn’t even know what they were missing). Theologians eventually settled on limbo as a hypothetical compromise – a state of natural, though incomplete, happiness.
Dante depicted limbo in his Divine Comedy as a pastoral setting of forests with green meadows, flowing streams, and tall castles. Biblical figures like Noah and Moses live in Dante’s limbo, as do Ovid, Homer, Aristotle, a parade of characters from Greco-Roman mythology, and even some Muslims, like Saladin, who managed to fight the crusaders and gain their respect at the same time.