CrossCurrents A Catholic Reflects on Faith in Our Times

Bernard F. Swain, Ph.D. www.CrossCurrents.us

Who’ll Miss Limbo?

Jane knew exactly what she had to do.

There was no doubt in her mind. She was not about to risk her newborn’s destiny. No way would she consign her baby to an eternity without God. Nor was she willing to spend her own life striving for heaven, only to find its gates closed to her own child.

Her resolve was crystal clear, from her very first baby right through to her last. Each time, once alone with her newborn, she took whatever water was available right there in the hospital recovery room – from a water glass, or a pitcher, or even a bathroom sink – and poured it over the child’s head, softly speaking the critical words:

“I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”

Weeks later, at a more formal version of the same ritual, her baby would be officially baptized, while Jane herself waited patiently at home, her child’s salvation already secured.

Jane’s problem was not lack of faith; she was a good Catholic. Her problem is simple: Limbo was not good enough for her child.

Most Catholic mothers agreed. Back in the days (not so long ago!) when Catholic identity centered above all on the fear of hell, Limbo was a teaching with grave consequences – literally. Babies who died without benefit of baptism were routinely denied burial on “consecrated ground” because their soul had not been “washed clean” of the inborn stain of original sin. The only consolation offered the anguished parents was that such children had gone to “Limbo,” where, though deprived of the sight of God, there would be no suffering.

I still remember my childhood catechism with its dueling milk bottles: one black, symbolizing the soul in the state of sin – including the original sin we all inherited at our birth into a fallen human race. The other bottle was white, symbolizing the “washed-clean” effect of baptism.

It was this idea of baptism cleansing the stain of original sin that created the problem Limbo was supposed to solve: the unbaptized could not enter heaven, but did not deserve hell—so they ended up somewhere in between.

And now, after generations of agonized parents, the Limbo solution itself has been dropped from Catholic teaching. The International Theological Commission is ready to release a statement on “the fate of babies who have died without baptism.” It will suggest that God’s love can supplant the absence of ritual baptism through an “original grace.” And one commission member explained that while Limbo was “the common teaching of the church until the 1950s, it was just quietly dropped.”

This will surprise many average Catholics – and even some leaders who continued to believe that limbo was official (even definitive) Catholic doctrine even well after Vatican II (1962 – 1965), well into the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

But it turns out that Pope John Paul II believed that unbaptized babies go to heaven. The same is true for Joseph Ratzinger, the commission’s chair before his election as Pope Benedict XVI. As early as 1985, he made his position clear:

Limbo was never a defined truth of faith. Personally, I would abandon it, since it was only a theological hypothesis…It formed part of a secondary thesis in support of the truth which is absolutely of first significance for faith, namely, the importance of baptism.”

And so, he said, Limbo was used “to justify the necessity of baptizing infants as early as possible.”

It worked, too – and maybe too well. Isn’t it obvious that Jane was probably not the only mother who took matters into her own hands? Is it shocking to suggest, in fact, that an emphasis on Limbo actually shifted control of baptism from clergy to women, as generations of mothers took “the necessity of baptizing infants as early as possible” quite literally – and created an underground “mothers’ movement” which covertly provided private infant baptisms and made the “official” baptism ritual redundant (remember, a mother could perform a valid baptism too)?

All this throws ironic light on the punishment meted out several years ago to a nun, fired from her pastoral associate’s position for having an active role as minister of the baptism during Sunday liturgy at Boston’s Jesuit Urban Center. Cardinal Bernard Law was obviously troubled that a woman might do publicly precisely what the Church’s teaching on Limbo had been unwittingly encouraging women to do privately for generations!

But dropping Limbo also exposes three deeper problems that the teaching caused:

Suffering. I recently spoke with a priest shaken by his own efforts to comfort parents of a stillborn child. Imagine how much worse their suffering would be if priests were still refusing Christian burial, and were telling parents the child could never be with God?

Inconsistency. All the while the Church taught the sacred value of unborn life, it never taught how God’s grace included the unborn. Not only were unbaptized babies denied consecrated ground, but miscarried babies were ignored completely, and the stillborn often were neglected as well. Legions of women grieved in private over such losses while the church’s incoherent, self-contradictory approach victimized them. We can be grateful that time is gone, but we should not forget it.

A Distorted Faith. Pope Benedict is totally correct to say that Limbo was “only a theological hypothesis” while the importance of baptism is, by contrast, “the truth of first significant for faith.” But millions of Catholics were taught nearly the opposite, for they were formed in a fraudulent version of Catholic faith in which both teachings had equal rank.

The additional fraud was that baptism itself had already been reduced to the ritual that washed away original sin. We had long lost its more basic, fundamental meaning as the act of putting on Christ, of dying in rising with him, of becoming a part of the body of Christ – in other words, the act of becoming a Christian and joining the Church itself!

This fraud demoted baptism, and blinded Catholics to its meaning. Holy Orders became the main sacrament of Christian vocation, as if God only called a select elite few to serve him and his Church. We became too dependent on clergy—a condition we suffer from still. Maybe now, with Limbo gone, we can retrieve the basic truth of Catholic identity: baptism is the prime sacrament of vocation, and because we all share it, vocation belongs to us all.

Some Catholics still pine for a time when Catholic teaching was undisputed, when Catholic authorities enjoyed total compliance, when Catholic identity seemed firm and clear. The sad truth is, too often those comforting calm times depended on distorting Catholic faith itself.

The hopeful truth is that as we “abandon” (in Benedict’s words) pieces of our past that caused suffering, confusion, and distortion, we come closer to the renewal of authentic Catholic faith that Vatican II promised.

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2006

Send Your Comments and Questions to bfswain@juno.com

Dr. Swain’s opinions do not represent the views of this parish or any other official body.

Bernie Swain has devoted more than 30 years to adult spiritual formation in dioceses in the US, Canada, and France. Since 1991 he has maintained a private practice as trainer, teacher, and consultant to leaders in parishes and other religious organizations. He holds degrees in theology and political science from Holy Cross, Harvard, The University of Paris, and The University of Chicago.

His writings include Liberating Leadership (Harper & Row, 1986) and more than 200 articles in periodicals such as The National Catholic Reporter, Commonweal, The Miami Herald, The Catholic Free Press, The Pilot, Harvard Theological Review, and Liturgy.

A lifelong layperson, he lives in Boston with his wife and three children. Visit his website at:

http://www.CrossCurrents.us

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