Jim Corkery SJ discusses the questions about limbo.
Question: We don’t hear much nowadays about Limbo. At school we learned it was the place where souls who die without baptism go? But we only hear of heaven, hell and purgatory now? Has Limbo been scrapped? And if so, why?
Limbo is not talked about much today, as Christians now are aware on the one hand that they constitute only a minority of the world’s population and, on the other hand, that God wills everyone to be saved.
Now if they are in a minority, but God wills the salvation of all, then there must be ways, other than direct Christian baptism, by which God brings about the salvation of human beings. And if this is so, then the notion of limbo as a place where good, unbaptised people (and in particular innocent unbaptised babies) are sent is not so necessary any more. And that is why it is talked about less today.
A Christian instinct
Even when limbo was commonly talked about as the place (or state) of unbaptised infants who die, many efforts were made to show that an infant who dies without being explicitly baptised could nevertheless have received baptism in some other, extra-sacramental way. One such way was by means of the desire of those who loved and prayed for the child, such as parents and close relations. Another was by means of the shedding of blood, as in the case of the Holy Innocents, for example. (See the story in Matthew’s gospel, Chapter 2, verses 16-18).
So even at a time when talk of limbo was common, Christians balked at the idea that God would consign babies, who had never committed a single personal sin, to an eternity of never seeing God’s face. There has always been an instinct among Christians that, in a God who is kind and merciful, love finds a way to bring an innocent child into God’s eternal embrace.
It should now be clear that, for a Christian, there are excellent grounds for hoping that an infant who dies without baptism is not deprived of seeing God. And surely this must be particularly true in the case of an infant who has never seen the light of day alive.
Historical development
The teaching office of the Church has never taken any official position on the question of limbo. Unofficially, limbo may have enjoyed a certain favour for a time, especially when the only alternative to it seemed to be that unbaptised infants were sent to hell. But, as I have said, Christians have always had a certain difficulty believing that.
It is true that Saint Augustine, to be consistent with the teaching about baptism being necessary for salvation, did think it. But he went on to say at once that the suffering of such infants was of the very mildest kind. Medieval theologians lessened this suffering still further, arguing that it meant the loss of the beatific vision, but not of natural happiness.
The tendency of theologians since the sixteenth century and up to modern times has been to point out other extra-sacramental ways which can compensate for the lack of baptism.
A theological argument
What I have written about Christians no longer holding that good people are damned simply because they have never had the opportunity of receiving baptism was first brought to my attention in a homily by Cardinal Ratzinger, the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome. In that homily Ratzinger showed himself to be sympathetic to the view that good people can be saved, even if they have not been explicitly baptised. In later writings he developed a theological argument in support of this view.
He argued that, just as Jesus lived for us, and was the one for the many, so too do Christians, joined to Jesus, live for others, and become the few for the many. This few, joined to Jesus as part of his Body the Church, is given a share in Jesus’ work of saving the many. There is thus no salvation without baptism; but the baptism of one person can ‘stand in’ for another, just as the baptism of Jesus (his dying and rising) ‘stood in’ for us all. Christianity is a connected religion: they are saved who are connected to the Body of Christ.
I have attempted to show that an ingeniously loving God finds ingeniously loving ways to confer baptism and its effects on those who, through no fault of their own, are not in a position to receive the sacrament explicitly.
This article first appeared in the
Messenger, a publication of the Irish Jesuits.
