Catholic parents aim for quick baptism of babies with or without limbo

Catholic Online ^ | 5/1/2007 | UCANews

[Alex Murphy]

TAGUM CITY, Philippines (UCAN) -- Ester Berayo never really believed the little she had heard about limbo, but all seven of her children were baptized within six months of their birth as a kind of "protection."

Baptism is "like an armor you give to infants to ward off spirits," Berayo told UCA News on April 24.

Infants are favorite targets of "mischievous elements of the other side," so baptizing them serves as a kind of "protection," she explained. The health worker in La Filipina, a village 945 kilometers (about 590 miles0 southeast of Manila, also volunteers as a catechist once a week for her Basic Ecclesial Community. Her parish is in Tagum Diocese.

Berayo disclosed that until her children were baptized, she put colored shell bracelets on them. Popular belief holds that the bracelets, sometimes sold outside churches, protect against spirits and elements.

Berayo, 50, recalled her late mother teaching her that the souls of infants who die without Baptism go to limbo, but she stressed that this is not why she had her children baptized as infants. Her eldest was baptized at three months, her youngest at one month.

"I believe that if infants die, they still go to heaven and God will receive them," she said. In her understanding, Baptism is "asking God to bless the child," so it is her "duty" as a parent to have her children receive the sacrament because it gives them their Christian "identity."

Even if she did not believe in limbo, she welcomed the International Theological Commission's stance in the new document The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptized. The Vatican commission identified "serious theological and liturgical grounds for hope that unbaptized infants who die will be saved and brought into eternal happiness."

Berayo described it as "good news," especially for parents who believed in limbo and "carried the cross of guilt."

Another mother, Leah Casilac, had all three of her children baptized before they were seven months old, to keep them "safe" from "spells, incantations and spirits lurking around" that make unbaptized babies sick.

"I make sure my child is baptized before I even let other people carry the baby," the 40-year-old mother told UCA News on April 24.

Casilac, who works in an appliance store, said she had not heard about limbo, and always believed that babies go "straight to heaven" if they die unbaptized. "An infant is innocent, and therefore is free from sin," she elaborated. "God will receive infants (in heaven) who are just unlucky to have not received Baptism. After all, he is a loving God."

Limbo is a concept based on "tradition beginning from Saint Augustine and picked up by medieval theologians, then incorporated into the popular life of the Church," Archbishop Leonardo Legaspi of Caceres told UCA News on April 23.

The theologian explained that the tradition produced two limbos. Infantium was for infants who died unbaptized, and patrum was for good people who could not receive Baptism because they "died before the coming of Christ."

The prelate, who formerly chaired the Episcopal Commission on Catechesis and Catholic Education of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), also acknowledged that limbo is not mentioned in the Catechism for Filipino Catholics, which he helped draft in the 1980s. Where the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which the Vatican issued in 1992, mentions limbo, he said, it "refers to the mercy of God but does not talk about limbo as a place.

Limbo is not a doctrine but a theological hypothesis, retired Bishop Teodoro Bacani, a theologian, told UCA News on April 24. "It was not official teaching, never was. It was speculation," he clarified.

Bishop Bacani, who teaches sacramental theology and ecclesiology at University of Santo Tomas and Loyola School of Theology, both in the Manila area, pointed out that Gaudium et Spes, the Second Vatican Council's Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, asserts that Christ died for all people. This includes unbaptized children, he noted.

Pope John Paul II wrote in Redemptor Hominis (redeemer of mankind) that, "Christ united himself with each man." This "applies precisely to babies," said Bishop Bacani, a member of the CBCP Commission on Doctrine of the Faith.

[sandhills]

I would love to bite my tongue on this one, but I just can’t.
Again, and admitted in interview by Sr. Sara Butler who is on the Theological Commission, Limbo is the common teaching of the Church. Limbo is not “of faith” but it is certainly not at the level of the hypothetical.
The theologian in this article is wrong. If anything is going to be called a hypothesis, it is the statement that unbaptized babies go to Heaven.

[Tax-chick]

This article is interesting mainly because of the information on the lingering animist and occultist beliefs in the Philippines. This is an issue for all Christian churches in Asia, Africa, and South America.