Changing The Rules
Culture Ghost wonders about this decision regarding Limbo by the Catholic Church, and most people just missed it. If you have never discussed the abortion issue in a group that included pro-Choice Catholics, you might not understand the importance of this: the Church leaders are plugging a major vulnerability in their justification for their stance on abortion.
Limbo has been a very hurtful thing for centuries for the parents of children who died before baptism. The Church held they were not going to Heaven because they had not been cleansed of their “original sin,” therefore they could not be buried in consecrated ground nor have the last rites performed. Such children were consigned to Limbo.
Many convents got around this policy by creating a “garden of innocents” on their grounds, which lead to major misunderstandings when convents were sold and the remains of multiple newborns were found buried on the premises during construction work. Sympathetic priests often “overlooked the technicalities” and baptisms were given to “unusually well behaved newborns.”
The fact remained that the Church was saying you were not a member until you had been baptized, but you were a human being at conception. The question was simple, if the unborn were valued, why weren’t they eligible for the Sacraments until after they were born and had been baptized. If they were children of G-d, why did G-d’s Church reject them?
Couples have left the Church over this issue, so it isn’t as insignificant as it seems to outsiders. The Church needed to “fix” this gap in its argument, and they are doing it. I hope they will forgive those of us who believe this has more to do with politics than theology.
12 comments
The catholic church and me parted company when I was about 17, Having said that I still stay abreast of what is going on and this is one of these stupid anomalies that should ahve beena addressed an age ago – a bit like repealing laws about it being legal to shoot a welshman in the precincts of Hereford cathedral on a Sunday.
I know I’m being rather flippant with that sort of comparison, but I can’t see a political slant to the concept of limbo – Rigid adherence to a hugely outdated dogma, yes. To be honest I don’t recall limbo being mentioned except in passing.
This is probably a very American issue, Jams. It has been part of the abortion debate for decades. It’s one of the things that makes no sense to anyone who isn’t involved in the process. In most of the Church world-wide it is a tiny part of Church teaching, but it has been a sore point here. There’s no accounting for what people will seize on as an issue.
Thank you for taking the time to explain this and the possible political motivation behind it.
I’ve been involved on a personal and a professional level with this issue, but most non-Catholics have never heard of it.
It must be an american issue – I have not seen a sentence written about it here.If I were to ask my parents, both elderly and devout Irish catholics, they would consider the idea of limbo to be pretty absurd!
Limbo died as doctrine 40 years ago at the Second Vatican Council–if not before.
It was a problem in at least one diocese in 1980 to my own personal knowledge. The case is sealed but the situation was nasty.
Therein lies one of the great contradictions of the Catholic Church. Popularly believed by outsiders to be, and painted by the hierarchs who have a vested interest in making it appear to be so, as monolithic and marching in lockstep. The reality on the ground is considerably different. Probably always has been, and certainly seems likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future.
I assume that every Bishop is more or less a power onto himself, as has always been the case, and priests in isolated parishes do what suits them until they die or get caught.
That is true Michael. Whatever the Pope or the church hierarchy says, it is generally honoured in the breach by the faithful!
Bryan–Yes. And even more so with the ultra-conservative types that JPII and Ratzi the Nazi have been appointing. The pastoral types we used to get didn’t set quite such a store on their status as successors of the Apostles in their dioceses, but most of the new guys in fancy purple drag surely do! And yeah, priests also have a fair amount of leeway as long as they keep their heads down. They have to be concerned about the RCIA (not the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, or the mechanism by which adult converts are brought into the Church; I mean the Roman Catholic Intelligence Agency) sitting out in the pews with tape recorders or notepads. People seem a lot more willing to snitch to the bishop these days than they used to. I once heard a priest (newly ordained, so he may have been floundering in flopsweat, which is why I didn’t turn him in to the bish, but did mention it to his pastor) openly espouse heresy in one of his homilies (one of the Christological doctrines declared heretical somewhere back in the fifth century, though I no longer remember which one: might have been Docetism).
Jams–Yes, thanks be to God for “cafeteria Catholics” (which is pretty much all of us). The magisterium tells me I have to listen respectfully to the hierarchy, but also that I’m expected to use my own good judgement in determining the worth of what they say–and if they’re wrong, I’m not bound to obedience.
Micheal, there seem to be a lot of people dusting off old concepts and trying to bring them back lately, intent on restoring the “good old days” that never existed. Most of the younger generation in my family is nominally Catholic, but you wouldn’t know it from Mass attendance.
I know that “Catholic” means radically different things in Rochester, New York, San Diego, California, and the Eiffel region of Germany.