The Times
October 04, 2006

Pope tries to win hearts and minds by saving souls of unbaptised babies
By Ruth Gledhill and Richard Owen

THE Pope will cast aside centuries of Catholic belief later this week

The Times
October 04, 2006

Pope tries to win hearts and minds by saving souls of unbaptised babies
By Ruth Gledhill and Richard Owen

THE Pope will cast aside centuries of Catholic belief later this week
by abolishing formally the concept of limbo, in a gesture calculated to
help to win the souls of millions of babies in the developing world for
Christ.

THE Pope will cast aside centuries of Catholic belief later this week

The Times
October 04, 2006

Pope tries to win hearts and minds by saving souls of unbaptised babies
By Ruth Gledhill and Richard Owen

THE Pope will cast aside centuries of Catholic belief later this week
by abolishing formally the concept of limbo, in a gesture calculated to
help to win the souls of millions of babies in the developing world for
Christ.

All the evidence suggests that Benedict XVI never believed in the idea
anyway. But in the fertile evangelisation zones of Africa and Asia, the
Pope - an acknowledged authority on all things Islamic - is only
too aware that Muslims believe the souls of stillborn babies go
straight to Heaven. For the Church, looking to spread the faith in
countries with a high infant mortality rate, now is a good time to make
it absolutely clear that stillborn babies of Christian mothers go
direct to Heaven, too.

Anyone who deludes themselves that Muslims do not know about limbo
would be wrong. Dante put Jerusalem's conqueror Saladin in limbo in
his Inferno, along with Ovid and Homer and other pre-Christian villains
and heroes.

Even though it has never been part of the Church's doctrine formally,
the existence of limbo was taught until recently to Catholics around
the world. In Britain it was in the Penny Catechism, approved by the
Catholic bishops of England and Wales, that declared limbo "a place
of rest where the souls of the just who died before Christ were
detained".

But its lack of doctrinal authority has long failed to impress the
Pope. who was recorded as saying before his election: "Personally, I
would let it drop, since it has always been only a theological
hypothesis."

This week a 30-strong Vatican international commission of theologians,
which has been examining limbo, began its final deliberations. Vatican
sources said it had concluded that all children who die do so in the
expectation of "the universal salvation of God" and the
"mediation of Christ", whether baptised or not.

The theologians' finding is that God wishes all souls to be saved,
and that the souls of unbaptised children are entrusted to a
"merciful God" whose ways of ensuring salvation cannot be known.
"In effect, this means that all children who die go to Heaven," one
source said.

The commission's conclusions will be approved formally by the Pope on
Friday.

Christians hold that Heaven is a state of union with God, while Hell is
separation from God. They have long wrestled, however, not only with
the fate of unbaptised children, but also with the conundrum of what
happened to those who lived a "good life" but died before the time
of Jesus.

THE Pope will cast aside centuries of Catholic belief later this week
by abolishing formally the concept of limbo, in a gesture calculated to
help to win the souls of millions of babies in the developing world for
Christ.

The Times
October 04, 2006

Pope tries to win hearts and minds by saving souls of unbaptised babies
By Ruth Gledhill and Richard Owen

THE Pope will cast aside centuries of Catholic belief later this week
by abolishing formally the concept of limbo, in a gesture calculated to
help to win the souls of millions of babies in the developing world for
Christ.

All the evidence suggests that Benedict XVI never believed in the idea
anyway. But in the fertile evangelisation zones of Africa and Asia, the
Pope - an acknowledged authority on all things Islamic - is only
too aware that Muslims believe the souls of stillborn babies go
straight to Heaven. For the Church, looking to spread the faith in
countries with a high infant mortality rate, now is a good time to make
it absolutely clear that stillborn babies of Christian mothers go
direct to Heaven, too.

Anyone who deludes themselves that Muslims do not know about limbo
would be wrong. Dante put Jerusalem's conqueror Saladin in limbo in
his Inferno, along with Ovid and Homer and other pre-Christian villains
and heroes.

Even though it has never been part of the Church's doctrine formally,
the existence of limbo was taught until recently to Catholics around
the world. In Britain it was in the Penny Catechism, approved by the
Catholic bishops of England and Wales, that declared limbo "a place
of rest where the souls of the just who died before Christ were
detained".

But its lack of doctrinal authority has long failed to impress the
Pope. who was recorded as saying before his election: "Personally, I
would let it drop, since it has always been only a theological
hypothesis."

This week a 30-strong Vatican international commission of theologians,
which has been examining limbo, began its final deliberations. Vatican
sources said it had concluded that all children who die do so in the
expectation of "the universal salvation of God" and the
"mediation of Christ", whether baptised or not.

The theologians' finding is that God wishes all souls to be saved,
and that the souls of unbaptised children are entrusted to a
"merciful God" whose ways of ensuring salvation cannot be known.
"In effect, this means that all children who die go to Heaven," one
source said.

The commission's conclusions will be approved formally by the Pope on
Friday.

Christians hold that Heaven is a state of union with God, while Hell is
separation from God. They have long wrestled, however, not only with
the fate of unbaptised children, but also with the conundrum of what
happened to those who lived a "good life" but died before the time
of Jesus.

The answer since the 13th century has been limbo. What remains in an
uncertain state, though, is the status of all the pre-Christian and
unbaptised adult souls held by some still to be in this halfway house
between Heaven and Hell.

The Pope is expected to abolish only "limbus infantium", where the
souls of unbaptised infants go. The precise status of "limbus
patrum", where the good people went who lived before Christ remains .
. . well, in limbo.

Although it is the latter that has been subject to such dramatic
representation in art and literature, no Christian mother today who
miscarries, has a stillborn child or otherwise loses a baby before
baptism can bear to view without a purgatorial shudder the traditional
images, such as those by Giotto, of Christ freeing Old Testament
figures from limbo.

In propelling limbo out of its own uncertain state, the Pope is merely
acknowledging the distress its half-existence causes to millions and is
bringing his characteristic Teutonic sense of righteous clarity to the
matter.

One of the reasons Baptists and some other Protestant denominations
resist infant baptism is because they believe the souls of babies are
innocent and that it is for adults to choose a life in Christ or
otherwise. The Early Church father Tertullian opposed infant baptism on
these grounds. But the teachings that took hold of the imagination and
the faith of the early Christians were those of the Greek fathers such
as Gregory of Nazianzus who wrote: "It will happen, I believe . . .
that those last mentioned [infants dying without baptism] will neither
be admitted by the just judge to the glory of Heaven nor condemned to
suffer punishment, since, they are not wicked."

This seems lenient compared with St Augustine, who in 418 persuaded the
Council of Carthage to condemn the British Pelagian heresy that there
was an "in between" place for unbaptised babies. He persuaded the
council that unbaptised babies share the general misery of the damned.
The most he would concede was that their misery was not quite as bad as
that of wicked dead adults.

VISIONS OF AN ETERNAL HALFWAY HOUSE

- Dante's The Divine Comedy describes limbo as the first circle of
hell, inhabited by unbaptised children and virtuous pagans born before
Christianity. Among them are Homer, Ovid, Socrates and Plato

- In his novel The First Circle, Alexander Solzhenitsyn compares life
in a Stalinist prison camp to limbo. The prisoners are unlikely to
reach "heaven", but still enjoy relative freedom within the Gulag
system, avoiding the worst of this "hell"

- Shakespeare uses "Limbo Patrum" (Limbo of the fathers) as a
metaphor for prison in Henry VIII

- To Samuel Taylor Coleridge, limbo is not a place, but a frightening
state, "where Time & weary Space Fettered from flight, with
night-mair sense of fleeing Strive for their last crepuscular
half-being"

- In The Rape of the Lock Alexander Pope locates the stage between
heaven and hell in the lunar sphere, where all things lost on earth
find their place. There, "smiles of harlots" are preserved with
"the tears of heirs", broken vows and prayers