Posted on 12/06/2005 4:34:25 PM PST by peyton randolph
THE Pope is set to abolish the concept of Limbo, overturning a belief held by Roman Catholics since the Middle Ages.
Limbo has long been held to be the place where the souls of children go if they die before they can be baptised. However, a 30-strong international commission of theologians summoned by the late John Paul II last year to come up with a “more coherent and illuminating” doctrine in tune with the modern age is to present its findings to Pope Benedict XVI on Friday....
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
LOL. Now consigning that type of Limbo to history books would be a tragedy.
Good God, what's next? the Hully Gully?
I found some "limbo" pictures that couldn't be posted on Free Republic.
Rush is MAKING history instead of being history.
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
I usually rely on the Times for an accurate rendition of what the Church teaches. (Yes, that's sarcasm.)
Let's see what's in the current Catechism, just for laughs:
1261 As regards children who have died without Baptism, the Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God, as she does in her funeral rites for them.
Golly. No unwarranted speculation. What a shock.
As long as they don't involve Janet Reno, Helen Thomas or Hillary, I'll do a Google image search for them.
Limbo never was official doctrine. It is just a theory.
The Church never taught the doctrine of limbo. It was always simply theological speculation.
I love Elmo. He is so sweet and polite.
Nope. Purgatory is doctrine. The state of limbo is a hypothesis.
> Purgatory is doctrine. The state of limbo is a hypothesis.
Quick, somebody tell Dante.
Whatever may be wrong or right with this, that is one of the wittiest headlines of the year.
I would venture to say that human life lived without Hope is pretty bleak, and while on earth we can pretty successfully distract ourselves from the emptiness of a destiny without a culmination in which the meeting of righteousness and peace, of justice and mercy come true in and for us. We can use all sorts of grand words like "stern" and "heroic" to describe what is, at best an ultimately tragic, but more likely a finally pathetic view of things. As I read Dante, Hell, built by Love, reveals the truth and peels away the distractions.
So we're left with the problem of Baptism as effective ex opere operato on the one hand and the difficulty in assigning anything but formal viciousness to infants on the other. I look forward to hearing what the nabobs come up with.
> I would venture to say that human life lived without Hope is pretty bleak..
Why sure. Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate. Last time I read the Divine Comedy it was like trying to learn the Italian phone book, 70 BC-AD 1300. Talk about hopeless :)
> So we're left with the problem of Baptism as effective ex opere operato on the one hand and the difficulty in assigning anything but formal viciousness to infants on the other.
I'm not a Catholic, so I don't worry about it. God loves unbaptized infinks too.
It's not just Catholics who hold that Baptism is efficacious in itself. And, as the above suggests, it's not a failure of Divine Love that consigns people to Hell.
It's just a theological knot to struggle with, over here the rebirth of Baptism, over there il primo amore and the unbaptized.
> It's just a theological knot to struggle with, over here the rebirth of Baptism, over there il primo amore and the unbaptized.
But I thought the pope was about to resolve the problem by consigning limbo to...well...
> fecemi la divina podestate,
la somma sapienza e 'l primo amore.
Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create
se non etterne, e io etterno duro.
Do you know the Princeton Dante Project? A truly wonderful resource.
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