Question about Limbo

A reader writes:

I have a question about what happens to babies who die without baptism. I was always taught that limbo was a theological speculation, but never an official doctrine, and that God could give them the grace of baptism if he wanted. Basically, since God hasn’t revealed what happens, we should just trust in His mercy.

But somebody in the Internet recently showed me some quotes that seems to say Limbo is infallibly taught by the Church. Supposedly Pope Pius VI said:

“Pope Pius VI, Auctorem fidei, Aug. 28, 1794: “26. The doctrine which rejects as a Pelagian fable, that place of the lower regions (which the faithful generally designate by the name of the limbo of the children) in which the souls of those departing with the sole guilt of original sin are punished with the punishment of the condemned, exclusive of the punishment of fire, just as if, by this very fact, that these who remove the punishment of fire introduced that middle place and state free of guilt and of punishment between the kingdom of God and eternal damnation, such as that about which the Pelagians idly talk” – Condemned as false, rash, injurious to Catholic schools”

So now I’m confused. I admit, I don’t really understand what the quote by Pius is saying. It’s worded really weird. But this person is convinced it means that limbo is official doctrine. So now I don’t know what to believe. Did the Church change her teaching??? Why does it say now that limbo isn’t doctrine?

Can you help me make sense of what Pius is saying here? This is really bothering me.

It sounds like Pius is saying that limbo can’t be definitively denied, not that it must be definitively affirmed. That remains true. You can believe it if you like, but you don’t have to. Be very leery of people grabbing obscure documents, written primarily about other issues, and pressing them into some modern agenda to attack the Church.

Thanks Mark. That makes sense and puts my mind at ease.

And yeah, after I wrote you I realized this guy was someone who thought the modern day Church lost her authority or something. He went on to say anyone not physically baptized in the Catholic Church was damned, and said the idea that people can be saved *through* the Church without necessarily being an actual member of the Church was a modernist invention. That’s when I realized what this guy was doing.

Actually, the way he was going around using obscure papal texts as proof texts kind or reminded me of some Protestants use of the bible. He didn’t care how the Church interpreted her own words, it was only how he interpreted it that mattered. I’m not sure if he realized the irony of that though.

Indeed, one of the ironies of the Greatest Catholics of All Time is the way in which they mirror Protestant Fundamentalism. Only their proof texts are encyclicals, or beloved mystics, or favorite passages from some saint or theologian. But the purpose is always the same: to insist on a flat contradiction between the pre- and post-Vatican II Church (typically on some matter where there is not really a contradiction, as here) and then to demand that we choose betwen the Real Church (i.e., the Church of the Reactionary’s imagination) or the alleged heretical “modernist” Church (i.e. the actual Catholic Church).

Curiously, this is almost always driven by a burning rigorist *need* to believe that virtually the entire Church, as well as the entire world beyond the Church, is damned. Not a fear of their damnation, but an intense desire for it. Sure they may *say* they don’t want people to go to hell. But the reality is that they deeply desire it and make very clear that if it doesn’t happen, then “it was a *waste* to be a Catholic.” It speaks of a relationship founded entirely on servile fear of God on the one hand and of a seriously loveless approach to neighbor on the other.

The healthy Catholic approach is that the fear of the Lord is the beginning, not the end of wisdom. Love is the end and goal of wisdom. Our approach to our neighbor is to commend him into the hands of God, neither presuming his salvation nor, God forbid, hoping that he will be damned just to make our membership in Club Catholic feel validated. We are to hope–and to bear witness out of love. The approach to the sacraments as though they are reducing valves designed to keep out the riff raff is foreign to the mind of Christ.