What is the the churches teaching on "Limbo"?

[chris22104]

I belong to a group at my church and the question came up about Limbo, which is an older term. We couldn’t agree on the answer so we are looking for some guidance. Another question we had was did Jesus really descend to hell or was it purgatory? I believe I read somewhere that he went to hell to retrieve the souls of those from the old covenant. Some clarification on this subject would be greatly appreciated. Thank you and God bless!

 

[Fr.Charles_Grondin]

There was a theological concept in the Church that unbaptized infants and righteous pagans who never heard of Christ would go to a place called Limbo when they died. The idea was that it was a place of natural happiness but it lacked the supernatural happiness of beholding the Beatific Vision. It was never formally defined or declared by the Church and thus remained simply a very popular theological proposal. In the 20th century this idea quickly lost popularity amongst the laity and theologians. While the idea has never been formally accepted by the Church it has also never been formally condemned and thus remains a valid, if unpopular, theory.

As the International Theological Commission’s document The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptized notes:

This theory, elaborated by theologians beginning in the Middle Ages, never entered into the dogmatic definitions of the Magisterium, even if that same Magisterium did at times mention the theory in its ordinary teaching up until the Second Vatican Council. It remains therefore a possible theological hypothesis. However, in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992), the theory of limbo is not mentioned. Rather, the Catechism teaches that infants who die without baptism are entrusted by the Church to the mercy of God, as is shown in the specific funeral rite for such children.

1. Secondly, taking account of the principle lex orandi lex credendi, the Christian community notes that there is no mention of Limbo in the liturgy…

1. …Papal interventions during this period, then, protected the freedom of the Catholic schools to wrestle with this question. They did not endorse the theory of Limbo as a doctrine of faith. Limbo, however, was the common Catholic teaching until the mid-20th century.

1. Therefore, besides the theory of Limbo (which remains a possible theological opinion), there can be other ways to integrate and safeguard the principles of the faith grounded in Scripture…

As for the “hell” that Christ descended to, it was not hell as in the place of the damned but rather it was the abode of the dead who were awaiting Christ’s redemption so they could enter heaven.

Catechism of the Catholic Church:

633 Scripture calls the abode of the dead, to which the dead Christ went down, “hell” - Sheol in Hebrew or Hades in Greek - because those who are there are deprived of the vision of God. Such is the case for all the dead, whether evil or righteous, while they await the Redeemer: which does not mean that their lot is identical, as Jesus shows through the parable of the poor man Lazarus who was received into “Abraham’s bosom”: “It is precisely these holy souls, who awaited their Savior in Abraham’s bosom, whom Christ the Lord delivered when he descended into hell.” Jesus did not descend into hell to deliver the damned, nor to destroy the hell of damnation, but to free the just who had gone before him.