Thursday, December 01, 2005

Limbo on the way out? (No, not the dance!)

Looks like the Church is coming close to getting rid of the policy of "limbo", which is where the souls of non-baptized babies went (go?)--or at least where we believed they went, since they were seen as neither good nor bad, meriting neither Heaven nor Hell. Dante mentions it in his Inferno and the movie The Others plays with it a lot. But I think it's a good thing that we finally retired this idea; it was one of the things that made Catholicism even more alien to the general public. Not that I'm opposed to us looking "alien" if we're right, but this is one thing that even I found hard to explain, or stomach. Apparently JP the Great set up a commission to study this, which was led by B XVI (then Cardinal Ratzinger). Should be interesting to see how this turns out...I'll keep you posted.

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