Opinion: Limbo in limbo
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Pope Benedict XVI’s decision to do away with limbo, the nether world to which popular Catholic teaching consigned unbaptized babies, comes too late for my mother. Anxiety about limbo led her to perform a “kitchen baptism” on a grandson who subsequently went through the ritual in the conventional way.
Yet my mother was also the one who told her six children that it was inconceivable that God would dispatch anyone to hell—or limbo, Purgatory or the Phantom Zone, for that matter—simply because he hadn’t been lucky enough to be born into a Christian family. She passed along to us what she had been told by one of the nuns who taught her as a child—that the ‘savage’ who doesn’t know any better than to worship a rock could still go to heaven.
Nevertheless, Mom hedged her bets with her grandson, emulating my favorite poet X.J. Kennedy, who wrote (in “Cross Ties”) that:
...When I spillThe salt I throw the Devil some, and stillI let them sprinkle water on my child.
In her own folksy way my mother was recapitulating a development in Catholic theology that foreshadowed the junking of limbo. I’m referring to the doctrine of ‘baptism of desire,’ which according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church can lead to salvation even for unbaptized persons who ‘would have desired Baptism explicitly if they had known its necessity.’
Lawyers would call this a loophole (it bears an amazing similarity to a legal fiction known as a ‘quasi-contract’) and fundamentalists an abomination, but Jesus probably would approve.
Still, you don’t have to be Thomas Aquinas to see that cutting some slack for the unbaptized could lead to a lessening of missionary zeal. I’m not sure Mom the Baptist would think that was such a bad thing.