Do any of you have grandchildren who are unbaptized as I do? This subject concerns me, and this article seemed to be a good one to post for a discussion.
They need to change that word....limbo.
Just doesn't sound dignified enough or something. :>)
But when we come to the penal sufferings of infants, I am embarrassed, believe me, by great difficulties, and am wholly at a loss to find an answer by which they are solved; and I speak here not only of those punishments in the life to come, which are involved in that perdition to which they must be drawn down if they depart from the body without the sacrament of Christian grace, but also of the sufferings which are to our sorrow endured by them before our eyes in this present life, and which are so various, that time rather than examples would fail me if I were to attempt to enumerate them.... Morever, who knows what may be given to the little children by means of whose sufferings the parents have their obdurate hearts subdued, or their faith exercised, or their compassion proved? Who knows what good recompense God may, in the secret of his judgments, reserve for these little ones? For although they have done no righteous action, nevertheless, being free from any transgression of their own, they have suffered these trials. It is certainly not without reason that the Church exalts to the honourable rank of martyrs those children who were slain when Herod sought our Lord Jesus Christ to put Him to death. (St. Augustine, Letter 166:16,18)
My wife and I lost our 1st child to miscarriage. While I do not know where exactly our baby is, I ask for his prayers every nite! He's closer to God than we are.
Much confusion over the entire topic of the afterlife consists of misunderstanding what it and its various components are.
First of all, there are not seperate places called "heaven" (where God is) and "hell" (where God is not). God is everywhere - omnipresent, so when we die, everyone comes before God and is with Him forever. The Bible says of going to hell "if I descend into hell, Thou art present" (Psalm 138.8). And the Bible, when speaking of the condemned, says clearly that they "shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the sight of the holy angels and in the sight of the Lamb" (Revelation 14.10). Thus, the wicked rich man in his torments clearly beholds Abraham and Lazarus in their glory (cf. St. Luke 15.19-31).
Hell is not a real place, but a state of mind and condition of a human who hates God - a sinner who has died. It certainly isn't something on the part of God, since God loves all humanity.
"For our God is a consuming fire." (Hebrews 12.29). The glorified - those who are baptized and persevere to the end - behold this fire as the light and love of God towards us, as the beatific vision. The damned, who hate God, behold this as an eternal burning torment from which they will never have any relief. Hell is the condition of eternal spiritual death, the state of human spiritual garbage once God has killed the souls of the wicked by allowing them to cut themselves off from His love - "fear him that can destroy both soul and body in hell" (St. Matthew 10.28), and "Behold all souls are mine: as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sinneth, the same shall die" (Ezekiel 18.4).
From this, the fate of the unbaptized infants is much clearer. They too, like everyone else, come before God upon death to remain before His face forever. But they neither behold His glory, since they were not united to Him in grace, nor are they tormented by His fire, since they were not seperated from Him by sins. Instead, they enjoy Him and His goodness in a natural manner fitted to their capacity as innocent spiritual beings deprived of grace. They do not grieve in loss like the damned because they never lost the gift of life, since they never had it. They dwell in the darkness of the absence of grace, but they enjoy the light of God given the just in the beatific vision as the Sun is enjoyed at night in the reflection of the full Moon, or as we enjoy the vision of God clothed in the bread of the Eucharist, or perhaps even as we enjoy basking in the light of the sun, even as we cannot look at the sun because of the fierceness of its glory. They know He is there, and rejoice at Him for making them and bringing them to Him, even if they cannot see Him directly face-to-face. What is more, they are able to interact with God and the saved, and rejoice with them, on a natural level again fitted to their capacity, just as we might interact with other people here on earth today on a natual level. Their lot is hardly intolerable, especially when compared to the fate of the damned to be burnt alive in eternal death forever.
If there is some other way besides Baptism for them to receive grace, we do not know it, and God has not chosen to reveal it to us; therefore, let us leave it at that.