simmo
Senior Jockey
From the BBC website.
The Pope may be about to abolish the notion of limbo, the halfway house between heaven and hell, inhabited by unbaptised infants.
Pope Benedict XVI's anticipated pronouncement on limbo will have been informed by the International Theological Commission - a group of leading Roman Catholic theologians who have been meeting to consider the issue.
The Pope, himself, has been quoted in the past as saying that he would let the idea of limbo "drop, since it has always been only a theological hypothesis".
He was quoted as saying that limbo has never been a "definitive truth of the faith".
So what is limbo?
According to the BBC's Religion and Ethics site, the church held that before the 13th Century, all unbaptised people, including new born babies who died, would go to hell. This was because original sin - the punishment that God inflicted on humanity because of Adam and Eve's disobedience - had not been cleansed by baptism.
This idea however was criticised by Peter Abelard, a French scholastic philosophiser, who said that babies who had no personal sin didn't even deserve punishment.
It was Abelard who introduced the idea of limbo. The word comes from the Latin "limbus", meaning the edge. This would be a state of existence where unbaptised babies, and those unfortunate enough to have been born before Jesus, would not experience pain but neither would they experience the Beatific Vision of God.
Pope Benedict was quoted as saying he would let limbo drop, while he was a cardinal. But limbo has long been a problem for the Church. Unease has remained over reconciling a Loving God with one who sent babies to limbo and the Church has faced much criticism.
The current review of limbo began in 2004, when Pope John Paul II asked the commission to come up with "a more coherent and enlightened way" of describing the fate of such innocent babes.
This review is part of a wider re-examination of the notion of salvation that has been taking place within the Church.
Many Catholics would see the abandonment of limbo as a good thing - there is little doubt that some interpretations of the teaching may have caused untold misery to the millions of parents whose children have died without being baptised.
But there are those who argue that it is not simply a "hypothesis" that can just be swept aside; that the notion that unbaptised children do not go to heaven has been a fundamental part of Church teaching for hundreds of years.
I was under the impression that the Pope was the mouthpiece of God on earth. I think they might need to get their connection checked out if it has taken 2000 years for God to pass on the message to Il Papa about this.
The Pope may be about to abolish the notion of limbo, the halfway house between heaven and hell, inhabited by unbaptised infants.
Pope Benedict XVI's anticipated pronouncement on limbo will have been informed by the International Theological Commission - a group of leading Roman Catholic theologians who have been meeting to consider the issue.
The Pope, himself, has been quoted in the past as saying that he would let the idea of limbo "drop, since it has always been only a theological hypothesis".
He was quoted as saying that limbo has never been a "definitive truth of the faith".
So what is limbo?
According to the BBC's Religion and Ethics site, the church held that before the 13th Century, all unbaptised people, including new born babies who died, would go to hell. This was because original sin - the punishment that God inflicted on humanity because of Adam and Eve's disobedience - had not been cleansed by baptism.
This idea however was criticised by Peter Abelard, a French scholastic philosophiser, who said that babies who had no personal sin didn't even deserve punishment.
It was Abelard who introduced the idea of limbo. The word comes from the Latin "limbus", meaning the edge. This would be a state of existence where unbaptised babies, and those unfortunate enough to have been born before Jesus, would not experience pain but neither would they experience the Beatific Vision of God.
Pope Benedict was quoted as saying he would let limbo drop, while he was a cardinal. But limbo has long been a problem for the Church. Unease has remained over reconciling a Loving God with one who sent babies to limbo and the Church has faced much criticism.
The current review of limbo began in 2004, when Pope John Paul II asked the commission to come up with "a more coherent and enlightened way" of describing the fate of such innocent babes.
This review is part of a wider re-examination of the notion of salvation that has been taking place within the Church.
Many Catholics would see the abandonment of limbo as a good thing - there is little doubt that some interpretations of the teaching may have caused untold misery to the millions of parents whose children have died without being baptised.
But there are those who argue that it is not simply a "hypothesis" that can just be swept aside; that the notion that unbaptised children do not go to heaven has been a fundamental part of Church teaching for hundreds of years.
I was under the impression that the Pope was the mouthpiece of God on earth. I think they might need to get their connection checked out if it has taken 2000 years for God to pass on the message to Il Papa about this.
