Whatever happened to limbo?

The car phone jangled as I was driving home on Route 41. I fumbled with the buttons. "Yes?" I said.

"Jean just called from Lake Forest Hospital. The doctor told her that the baby she's carrying is dead. How quickly can you get there?" "Ten minutes," I replied.

I blessed the man who invented the car phone, turned west on Deerpath Road, and a few minutes later walked into Jean's room. Her husband, Dave, stood at her bedside. They stared at me. "We just called the rectory," they said in unison. Then she went on:

"Our baby wasn't baptized. Won't she go to heaven?"

"Of course, she will," I replied. "Jesus himself told us that little children have the secret of the kingdom."

But that is not the answer we Catholics gave to that question for most of our 2,000-year history.

Saint Augustine taught that because of original sin, unbaptized babies were condemned to hell (albeit the coolest part of it!). It was centuries before theologians opted for a middle ground between heaven and hell called limbo. (The Latin word limbus means "threshold," i.e., the threshold of hell.) Originally viewed as dark and gloomy, limbo became a place of "natural happiness" in the gentle hands of Saint Thomas Aquinas. The only thing these children lacked, he said, was the vision of God, and none of us has a specific right to that.

Fifty years ago, Catholic theologians began to express their dissatisfaction with the notion of limbo. If God truly wants all people to be saved, as Saint Paul insists, then surely there must be a way for the most innocent of human beings to find their way to heaven. Following this intuition, they have proposed several solutions to the age-old question posed by unbaptized children. Here is one of them.

Some suggest that death itself provides the answer. Death is a unique moment in the human story. That one indivisible instant is both the first moment of eternity and the last of our earthly journey. That first characteristic means that the child is freed from the limitations of her tiny, still developing body. The second means that any choice she makes is still part of her earthly pilgrimage. At the instant of death her mind will open out to the entire world, which in its elemental reality is a glowing image of divine love. She can see this reality with a clarity and freedom that is beyond our comprehension. Unburdened by any history of sin, she is able to embrace the God imaged there with a fiery purity.

As I said, that is just one answer given to the question of "How?" The Catechism of the Catholic Church doesn't pretend to know how it happens. It is content to simply quote Jesus: "Let the children come to me and do not hinder them" (1261).

FATHER GEORGE DYER is founding editor of Chicago Studies and writer and editor of Androgogy, The Three-Minute Theologian, and Catholic Educator.