Ann Druge grew up in a Catholic family with eight children and the haunting knowledge that a ninth was stillborn. Because the baby, named Mary Ellen, had not been baptized, she was denied a Catholic burial.
“When we would go to the cemetery … we’d always stop where they threw the dead flowers. That’s where the little one was buried,” said Druge, 80, of Storrs, Conn. “My mother and father were very upset every time. She was stillborn, so she couldn’t be buried in the consecrated ground. We were told she was in limbo.”
No more.
After three years of study, a Vatican-appointed panel of theologians has declared that limbo is a “problematic” concept that Catholics are free to reject. The 30-member International Theological Commission said there are good reasons to believe instead that unbaptized babies go to heaven, because God is merciful and “wants all human beings to be saved.”
“We emphasize that these are reasons for prayerful hope, rather than grounds for sure knowledge,” said the commission’s report, published recently with the pope’s approval.
Late-night television hosts and Internet satirists have had their yuks over this change, but the idea of limbo was a real anguish to many Catholic parents and grandparents grieving over miscarriages or stillbirths. Its abandonment may say something about the afterlife, but it also says something about the current pope, who is turning out to be more pastoral and less rigid than many expected.
For about 750 years, from the beginning of the 13th century until the middle of the 20th, the common Catholic teaching was that babies who died without baptism – as well as adults who lived holy lives but in ignorance of Jesus – would spend eternity in limbo, which is neither heaven nor the full fury of hell.
Because babies are guilty of no personal sins (only the taint of original sin), the thinking went, surely God would not consign them to perpetual torment. But because the church teaches that baptism is a necessity, theologians also asserted that unbaptized babies could not enjoy eternal life in God’s presence.
To faithful Catholics, the Vatican’s pronouncement does not mean that limbo once existed and suddenly is abolished; it means there are grounds for hope that unbaptized babies are in heaven – and have been all along.
Druge said she felt long ago that her sister was in heaven and sees no need to move the 75-year-old grave.
“Years ago, everything you heard at the church you believed,” she said. “But limbo never made sense to me. I always thought that if the baby came from God, it would go right back to God. I think that’s what my mother believed, too.”
The Vatican commission stressed that there is no mention of limbo in the Bible and that it was never a part of church dogma. Nor, by the way, is the commission’s own advisory opinion.
Although the Catholic Church still adheres to the related idea of purgatory – a period of punishment and purification before the full joy of heaven – it has been inching away from limbo for decades.
In 1969, the Catholic Church introduced a funeral rite for unbaptized babies, doing away with the severe policy that had kept Druge’s sister from being buried in consecrated ground.
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