At the end surely everyone must be in either Heaven or Hell?

[Nelka]

When the world has ended and Purgatory is empty and the general judgement is completed, everyone must then be in either Heaven or Hell for eternity.

There cannot then be a third place for those that couldn’t sin but were unbaptised; they must be in one of those two places?

Why don’t we know?

 

[Jerome7]

The idea of a third final destination has fallen out of favor as a theological opinion. It is perhaps (barely) tenable today. In all likelihood, when the Magisterium answers this question definitively, there will be only two final destinations: heaven or hell.

 

[LilyM]

What do you mean we don’t know?

Those who, without having had the opportunity to be baptised, desired during their lives to know God and served Him to the best of their understanding and ability, certainly can be saved. We can be confident, for example, about the righteous of the OT and the Good Thief.

Likewise those who have done the opposite and deliberately disobeyed God’s natural law which is imprinted on every heart and soul are condemned.

This is settled teaching. What makes you think otherwise?

 

[Nelka]

Sorry but it has nothing to do with desire as these no nothing about it due to their lack of capacity.

 

[Wesrock]

“Hell” has a broader definition than it’s given in popular use. It’s been used to denote any place or state where a person doesn’t have the beatific vision. Painful punishment is not necessarily included.

This is all speculative, mind, but Saint Thomas Aquinas was of the opinion that unbaptized babies and the righteous unbaptized would not have the supernatural good of the beatific vision but would still have all kinds of natural goods available to them after the resurrection. A naturally good eternal life. And one in which they weren’t grieving for the “loss” of the beatific vision, but one in which they were still naturally (if not supernaturally) joyful and happy in God’s gift and inclusion of them in the goods they received.

The Church has no formal position on this matter, and we may hope that unbaptized infants are still graced by God and so may enjoy the beatific vision.

 

[LilyM]

Has it ever been taught that there is such a thing as a third destination? My understanding of teaching on various kinds of limbo are that they have been considered either to be impermanent (such as the ‘hell’ whose gates were opened by Christ after His death) or essentially Hell but without the suffering. No-one was arguing that the babies in limbo were either saved or in a temporary purgative state.

 

[Lee1]

This is an extract from a far longer text re unbaptised infants. The full text explains.
(Apologies, I struggled with this editing)

http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/c...aith_doc_20070419_un-baptised-infants_en.html

INTERNATIONAL THEOLOGICAL COMMISSION

THE HOPE OF SALVATION FOR INFANTS
WHO DIE WITHOUT BEING BAPTISED *

“…

The International Theological Commission has studied the question of the fate of un-baptised infants, bearing in mind the principle of the “hierarchy of truths” and the other theological principles of the universal salvific will of God, the unicity and insuperability of the mediation of Christ, the sacramentality of the Church in the order of salvation, and the reality of Original Sin. In the contemporary context of cultural relativism and religious …

The conclusion of this study is that there are theological and liturgical reasons to hope that infants who die without baptism may be saved and brought into eternal happiness, even if there is not an explicit teaching on this question found in Revelation. However, none of the considerations proposed in this text to motivate a new approach to the question may be used to negate the necessity of baptism, nor to delay the conferral of the sacrament. Rather, there are reasons to hope that God will save these infants precisely because it was not possible to do for them that what would have been most desirable— to baptize them in the faith of the Church and incorporate them visibly into the Body of Christ. …”