I’m unhappy to see the high percentage of Catholics who are answering my limbo poll by saying that they believe that all unbaptized infants go to heaven. Their response reflects the post-Vatican II confusion affecting the human dimensions of the one true Church. (Please don’t think that I reject Vatican II! The answer to the confusion is to implement the real teachings of Vatican II!)
True, limbo is not a Catholic dogma. It is a theological deduction.
It is more than a theological deduction. **Limbo is a doctrine of the Catholic faith. ** It is not a dogma, which is a doctrine that has been defined; but it is a doctrine that’s been taught since the earliest years of the Church.
It is almost certianly
heresy to deny Limbo, just as it was a heresy for Pope John XXII to deny that the souls who die will not possess the beatific vision until after the resurrection of the body.
At the time, what Pope John XXII denied was not a defined dogma (the next Pope defined it). It was merely a doctrine that, like Limbo, had always been believed.
This error of John XXII, in which he denied a doctrine that had not yet been defined, has gone down in history as one of the few times that a Pope taught heresy. Of course, he renounced the error on his death bed.
The doctrine of Limbo is on the same level as the doctrine denied by John XXII in the 1300’s.
The only question about Limbo that is unanswered is whether the unbaptized go to the fires of hell (which is what St. Augustine, St. Robert Bellarmine, and many others taught), or whether they go to a state of natural happiness, which is what St. Thomas taught and what most people believed before we entered the great apostacy we are now going through, in which
most deny the doctrine.
As you correctly pointed out, the Council of Forence and Lyons both taught that those who die in original sin only go to hell, but to be punished with different torments than those who have sinned.
If you read a few of the earlier posts, you will see that most people consider this - God sending a person who has committed no actual sin to hell - contrary to God’s “justice and mercy”…
yet it is a dogma.
In an article written by Fr. Harrison, after quoting official magisterial text after magisterial text supporting Limbo, he concludes by saying:
Fr. Harrison: “It should be clear from the above survey of relevant Catholic magisterial statements that those who now talk about Limbo as only ever having been a mere “hypothesis”, rather than a doctrine, are giving a very misleading impression of the state of the question. They are implying by this that the pre-Vatican II Church traditionally held, or at least implicitly admitted, that an alternate ‘hypothesis’ for unbaptized infants was their attainment of eternal salvation — Heaven. Nothing could be further from the truth. Limbo for unbaptized infants was indeed a theological “hypothesis”; but the only approved alternate hypothesis was not Heaven, but very mild hellfire as well as exclusion from the beatific vision! In short, while Limbo as distinct from very mild hellfire was a ‘hypothetical’ destiny for unbaptized infants, their eternal exclusion from Heaven (with or without any ‘pain of sense’) — at least after the proclamation of the Gospel, and apart from the ‘baptism of blood’ of infants slaughtered out of hatred for Christ — this was traditional Catholic doctrine, not a mere hypothesis. No, it was never dogmatically defined. But the only question is whether the doctrine was infallible by virtue of the universal and ordinary magisterium, or merely "authentic”.
), I must respectfully disagree with calling limbo a “doctrine of the Catholic faith.” It is a theological deduction and hypothesis that logically flow from a Catholic dogma, i.e., the next-world punishment of those who die in original sin only. I defend limbo in that sense, and, in that sense, I maintain that it cannot be “abolished” or “dropped.”