Thoughts from Another Life on Limbo

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This is the opening paragraph from the article on Limbo:

" Fourteen years ago (or was it an eternity ago?), during my short stint in the Roman Catholic Church, I did a goodly amount of reading on the doctrine of limbo and wrote five articles on the subject for my old blog Pontifications."

This priest obviously did not learn much in his short time with the Catholic Church.

Limbo is not and never has been a doctrine of the Catholic Church. If it were doctrine Catholics would be obliged to believe it. It was only ever a theological hypothesis which we are free to believe or not.
 
Priests who leave the Church are inherently untrustworthy IMHO.
I also agree with Montrose’s comment.
Limbo isn’t and wasn’t ever a doctrine of the Church. This priest doesn’t seem to understand that.
I’m not inclined to read articles by an ex-priest who did not bother to properly learn about his faith.

Edited to add, he seems to have started off as an Anglican and then briefly stopped off at Catholicism before deciding to be Orthodox. Not a good sign.
 
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Tis_Bearself said:
Priests who leave the Church are inherently untrustworthy IMHO.
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Hmm… I didn’t see where he claimed to be a Catholic priest. I got the impression that he looked into Catholicism, took a pass and went to Orthodoxy (and became a priest there).
 
Here’s his bio where he talks about how he was an Episcopal priest for 25 years, then him and his wife converted to Catholicism and he became a chaplain in Newark, then after 2 years he decided he made some big mistake and decamped for the Orthodox church, where he seems to be practicing some kind of unconventional theology.


Not interested in this guy’s confused word salad. Hope he finds what he’s looking for, but he frankly still seems very Episcopalian in his approach. And with a poor understanding of Catholicism.

We have plenty of good Catholic priests to read without having to bother with his stuff.
 
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Tis_Bearself said:
Here’s his bio where he talks about how he was an Episcopal priest for 25 years, then him and his wife converted to Catholicism and he became a chaplain in Newark, then after 2 years he decided he made some big mistake and decamped for the Orthodox church
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Still not seeing it. He talks about “continuing his priestly ministry”… but he wasn’t a validly ordained priest in the eyes of the Catholic Church. He doesn’t say that he was ordained in the Catholic Church. (To tell the truth, he doesn’t say that he was ordained in the Orthodox Church, either!)

In any case, two red flags: Newark and college chaplaincy. The latter doesn’t necessarily imply that he was a Catholic priest, right?
 
He advocates for universalism, like Dr. David Bentley Hart, who comments on his blog at times, a lot. That is the beginning and end of his being unconventional. Other than that he post interesting meditations and tidbits from all through Church history.
 
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He fully understands this, and quotes Ratzinger saying: Limbo was never a defined truth of faith. Personally—and here I am speaking more as a theologian and not as Prefect of the Congregation—I would abandon it since it was only a theological hypothesis.

These are just his meditations on it from when he was Catholic. He is using doctrine in the other sense of the word, he knows it was never an official dogma.

He also says: It may well be that many of the doctors of the council took for granted the possibility, and indeed the reality, of an infant dying “in original sin only”; but this still does not allow us to state that this opinion was formally proposed by the council. That all who die in the state of original sin are excluded from the beatific vision is indeed de fide dogma; but this does not necessarily exclude the possibility that God may regenerate souls by nonsacramental means, even though this possibility might not even have been entertained by the council fathers.

Showing he well understood it, you need to read beyond the beginning (or not at all, no one has to read anything they don’t care for).
 
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