Does the Catholic Church fully understand its own revelation of God?

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I think of the Church as continuously growing in it’s understanding of divine revelation.
 
There is a reason why divine revelations and the participation in them are commonly referred to as Sacred Mysteries.
 
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I don’t think anyone can fully understand the whole revelation of God that has been given to it… Considering that almost all Catholic writings center upon God and His Revelation, trillions of words have been written concerning these things, and considering the good and holy portions of Protestantism, Judaism, Islam, and other religions… It’s absurd.
 
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Revelation is like the sun shedding light on the Earth- the sun is always there and does not change, but as the world slowly turns more of its landscape and features are made visible. Revelation is the ever-dawning light which continues to illuminate this world and guide us to the next.
 
And any deepening understanding must not contradict previous understanding. For example, God is Three Divine Persons in One God. We will probably never be able in our limited human way on earth to fully understand the Trinity, but our understanding will never change so that we say, “No wait, ‘Trinity’ is incomplete, God is really a quartet” or “God is an infinity of Persons, not limited to Three Divine Persons in One”.
 
What bothers me sometimes is that in spite of this acknowledgement of God as mystery we define some things as unchanging dogma and then are prepared to break with others over it. And we say or write so much about these mysteries that there is hardly any mystery left.
 
stpurl said:
And any deepening understanding must not contradict previous understanding. For example, God is Three Divine Persons in One God. We will probably never be able in our limited human way on earth to fully understand the Trinity, but our understanding will never change so that we say, “No wait, ‘Trinity’ is incomplete, God is really a quartet” or “God is an infinity of Persons, not limited to Three Divine Persons in One”
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True. But there was that time when the Church publicly changed it’s teaching about limbo, the idea that unbaptized children do not go to heaven but instead a place called limbo. They said the reason this change was possible was because it was entirely theoretical to begin with and not dogma. So how do we distinguish the difference?
 
Oh gosh. That doesn’t help at all. The catechism I memorized growing up taught that unbaptized babies go to Limbo. When I grew up I found out that’s not true.

What’s a person to do?

Sometimes I think you have to be the Pope himself to know for sure what the Church teaches.
 
The Baltimore Catechism, what you likely would have memorized, said this was a “common belief” not a definitive doctrine of the Church. The Church still holds it to be an acceptable belief (alongside other acceptable hopes and beliefs, like God gratuitous cleansing them of original sin as a gratuitous privilege). It’s simply not something that has been revealed.
 
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I’ve got my Baltimore Catechism #3 (Official Revised Edition 1949) right here. Looking up Limbo in the index, it only has three paragraphs that refer to it–
  1. What does it mean when we say in the Apostles’ Creed that Christ descended into hell?
  • When we say that Christ descended into hell we mean that after He died, the soul of Christ descended into a place or state of rest, called limbo, where the souls of the just were waiting for Him.
(a) Heaven had been closed by the sin of Adam. The just among the dead could not enter heaven until Christ satisfied for man’s sin and repaired its injuries. They awaited their redemption in limbo.

Scripture: “Put to death indeed in the flesh, he was brought to life in the spirit, in which also he went and preached to those spirits that were in prison” (I Peter 3:18-19)

“And Jesus said to him, ‘Amen I say to thee, this day thou shalt be with me in paradise’” (Luke 23:43)
  1. Why did Christ go to limbo?
  • Christ went to limbo to announce to the souls waiting the joyful news that he had reopened heaven to mankind.
  1. Where was Christ’s body while His soul was in limbo?
  • While His soul was in limbo, Christ’s body was in the holy sepulchre.
(a) Man dies when soul is separated from body. When Jesus died, His soul and His body were separated from each other but his divine Person remained united both to His body in the tomb and to His separated soul in limbo.

Scripture - “And Joseph, taking the body, wrapped it in a clean linen cloth, and laid it in his new tomb, which he had hewn out in the rock. Then he rolled a large stone to the entrance of the tomb, and departed” (Matthew 27:59-60)
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So, it came up in discussion when the 1992 Catechism came out and the theological concept of limbo-- a special place for the unbaptized good and righteous people, like infants, or those who had died before Christ’s coming-- had been dropped from it. But even in 1992-- before 99% of us were on the Internet-- it wasn’t a big deal, because everyone knew it was more of a working hypothesis than doctrine.
 
I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended to the dead.
On the third day he rose again;
he ascended into heaven,
he is seated at the right hand of the Father,
and he will come to judge the living and the dead.
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You’re not doing too badly if, after God incarnating as man, and dying to redeem us, and then rising from the dead, and then ascending into Heaven with a glorified body— and the part you’re not sure about is whether he took his body with him when he descended to the dead. 😉

Is there a particular reason why you think he needed to bring his body with him?
 
IWantGod said:
I think of the Church as continuously growing in it’s understanding of divine revelation.
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The Catechism of the Catholic Church has this:
Growth in understanding the faith

94 Thanks to the assistance of the Holy Spirit, the understanding of both the realities and the words of the heritage of faith is able to grow in the life of the Church:
  • “through the contemplation and study of believers who ponder these things in their hearts”; it is in particular “theological research [which] deepens knowledge of revealed truth”.
  • “from the intimate sense of spiritual realities which [believers] experience”, the sacred Scriptures “grow with the one who reads them.”
  • “from the preaching of those who have received, along with their right of succession in the episcopate, the sure charism of truth”.
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Ecumenical Councils of the past give explicit statements on what the Church teaches.

Something can be officially taught without it being dogma (this was the case with the Immaculate Conception for many long centuries).

The fate of infants is really just a subcategory on the fate of any soul imbued with the power of free will after death. On this side of eternity, we distinguish people as infants, children, teens, young adults, middle aged, elderly… but really, as long as we are in the womb of this world, it is as though none of us have been born yet; something that has been repeated many times over the past 2000 years. To a person in Heaven, a 100-year-old on Earth is like an infant in the womb. We aren’t given infallible knowledge on the fate of any individual soul, and this is so that we do not fall into either presumption or into despair. So, when a loved one or a stranger passes, we entrust them to God’s infinite mercy through prayer, which is one of the spiritual works of mercy. The exception to this is a saint that is raised to the altar, and this is so that we may have intercessors & guides, and these people also would have had prayers said for them at their passing.

The Catholic Church doesn’t fully understand its revelation of God, nor will any creature be able to contemplate fully God, including in Heaven.
 
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