Limbo

The Daily Show's This Week In God is too funny.

Limbo. 1st up on the God machine.

Apparently, the Vatican has decided that Limbo is a goner. There will be no more Limbo. For the non-Catholics of the world, Limbo is the place unbaptized babies go when they die. It's not hell, so no suffering, but it's not heaven either. That is, since the babies weren't baptized, they can't go through the pearly gates and sit at the right hand of God. No, they get to spend eternity in Nowhere Land. It's worse than purgatory, since minor sinners can eventually get to heaven after some "penance." But for infants who never did anything wrong, other than to have the misfortune of dying before they got baptized, it's Limbo, with no way out.

Limbo also touches on a topic that brings back memories of childhood and the Catholic Church. At least according to my memory bank, Limbo is probably the beginning of my fall from Church theology.

I had a younger sister who died when she was an infant. This was an off limit topic of discussion in my family, obviously because of the grief involved in losing a child. However, for me growing up, there were lots of questions and gaps in my understanding of what happened to her, etc.

As a product of Catholic school, I learned all about Limbo and my big concern was that my sister may have died before she was baptized and was stuck in Limbo. I was afraid to ask my parents if she was baptized before she died, because it would just bring back bad memories. But that thought just drove me crazy. I thought it was so unfair, since she never did anything to deserve that, so why should she have that fate? And if so, and God did that, then I didn't want any part of God.

As it turns out, as I got older and learned what happened, she died when she was about a year old, so she had in fact been baptized. But at that point, my view of the Church's teaching was fairly well formulated.

The change in the concept of Limbo also raises another an interesting thought. What will the Church say happens to all of those babies who have been in Limbo? Do they get the call from God to proceed directly to heaven, without passing GO? Or is Limbo just closed to new members? Just wondering.