Heaven’s Lounge

Has Limbo ever really solved the theological question it was supposed to answer?

In 2004, a year before  becoming Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger commissioned a study on a thorny question: What happens to babies who die before they’re baptized?

If you think you already know — that they spend eternity as cherubs in a sort of half-Heaven — you’re relying on a theological notion that the church never officially taught: Limbo.

A group of scholars working for the International Theological Commission issued a document in response to the question in 2007: “The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptised.” Their conclusion, that “there are theological and liturgical reasons to hope that infants who die without baptism may be saved and brought into eternal happiness,” didn’t make for the best copy. Instead, Catholic and most other news outlets who covered it went with snappier headlines: “Catholic Church Buries Limbo After Centuries” and “Pope Closes Limbo.” 

What the Church and the theologians actually said is that there is no need for a concept such as Limbo (which is derived from the Latin word limbus, for “edge,” as in existing on the edge of Hell). We don’t put limits on God’s mercy or actions, most of which are a mystery to us anyway, and so we can’t definitively say what the divine plan is for such souls; rather, we teach and believe “that infants who die without baptism are entrusted by the Church to the mercy of God.” Cardinal Ratzinger himself, no softie when it came to church doctrine, even told a reporter in 1985 that Limbo “was never a defined truth of the faith.”

So why did Limbo enter the Church’s theology in the first place? Simply put, it answered two thorny theological questions that have been around for 20 centuries.

The first is the one from above: Do we really think that a baby is condemned to Hell if it dies before it is baptized? The “Limbo of the Infants,” the limbus infantium, was an attempt to keep intact the Church’s insistence on baptism as necessary for salvation and thus heaven; what if unbaptized babies spent eternity in a sort of halfway place, knowing “natural happiness” but not truly unmediated participation in the life of God? Everyone from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas proposed some version of this solution, one which made God seem less of a capricious tyrant. In other words, as a 20th century theologian once put it: “Such children were, in short, damned — but gently so.”

The second deals with the belief that Jesus Christ, when he descended to the dead and rose, “harrowed Hell” of all the holy men and women who had the misfortune to be born before the Incarnation, including the Church Patriarchs. If they had been instead temporarily in a “Limbo of the Patriarchs,” a limbus patrum, until that time, we don’t have to believe that Moses, et al., spent several millennia in the fires of Hell. Because of Scriptural references to Jesus dwelling among and preaching to the dead — who presumably would receive no benefit from it if already condemned for eternity — this second kind of Limbo was more broadly accepted throughout much of Church history than the first.

As the 2007 theological commission also noted, the Church’s growing historical awareness and appreciation of other religions has also made the notion of “saving pagan babies” a somewhat attenuated one. “In the contemporary context of cultural relativism and religious pluralism the number of non-baptized infants has grown considerably, and therefore the reflection on the possibility of salvation for these infants has become urgent,” the scholars wrote.

At the same time, they warned, this didn’t mean baptism wasn’t necessary or could be done when convenient. Rather, they wrote, “there are reasons to hope that God will save these infants precisely because it was not possible to do for them what would have been most desirable — to baptize them in the faith of the Church and incorporate them visibly into the Body of Christ.”

There’s a pastoral dimension to that reliance on God: It means no parent who has lost a child must live with the fear their child is in torment, or can never be with God; similarly, it means no Christian need look back on their unbaptized ancestors and conclude they, too, are out of luck.

There’s something refreshing about the Church’s answer in this case, because it hasn’t always been true in Church history, even recently. The Church is saying that there can be no easy answer, no full-throated declaration of “Here is God’s plan.” Rather, it offers words of comfort and a confession that some of God’s works are ineffable. And implicit within it, of course, it allows the hope that all might be saved.

James T. Keane ’96 is the literary editor of America magazine and the author of “Reading Culture Through Catholic Eyes: 50 Writers, Thinkers & Firebrands Who Challenge & Change Us.” His “Hunting Demons,” a reflection on exorcism, appeared in the winter 2023 issue of LMU Magazine.