LIMBO AND THE FATE OF UNBAPTIZED INFANTS

may 20, 2007

On April 20, 2007, the International Theological Commission (ITC), a group of 30 theologians from around the world selected by the Pope to advise him, released a study titled, The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptized. The document addressed issues of original sin, baptism, salvation, and limbo.

The study concludes that “there are theological and liturgical reasons to hope that infants who die without baptism may be saved and brought into eternal happiness, even if there is not an explicit teaching on this question found in Revelation.”

The Church’s renewed concern for the destiny of unbaptized infants stems from the growing number of infants who die without baptism due to any number of reasons.
What the ITC provided was a set of theological insights that point to the firm foundations for and offer support to the Church’s teaching that we may entrust the salvation of unbaptized infants to our loving God’s providential care in a way unknown to us, with serene and confident hope. The study points out that while baptism is the ordinary necessary means of obtaining salvation in Jesus Christ, it is secondary to God’s absolute desire to save all human beings through Jesus Christ.

Until the mid-20th century, the concept of limbo for unbaptized infants was common among theologians. Limbo (from the Latin limbus, meaning “border”), which has been obscurely understood to refer to a border state between heaven and hell, became a prominent theological conjecture, or opinion (and never anything more), when St. Augustine (d.430) found himself engaged in an intense doctrinal dispute with Pelagius, who claimed (and I oversimplify) that we were able to save ourselves from sin by freely choosing to renounce it and to live according to God’s moral law. Augustine countered, arguing rightly that human nature was damaged by original sin, so that we could not heal the wounds caused by sin or save ourselves, except with the aid of God’s grace, which was given through baptism. Augustine was forced by his own logic, however, into a theological corner. As a consequence of his insistence on the necessity of baptism for salvation, the conclusion was that even innocent infants could not enter heaven without baptism.

Augustine’s opinion has been opposed down the ages by other prominent theologians, and limbo has never been a revealed doctrine of the Church. The recent statement by the ITC hopefully helped to clarify these points to place our emphasis on faith and trusting in an all-loving, all-good, and providential God, whose will is the salvation of all.

Regarding infants, who cannot choose for or against truth, goodness, or God’s will in virtue of their lack of cognitive development, the Catechism of the Catholic Church (Catechism) states in #1261: “As regards children who have died without Baptism, the Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God, as she does in her funeral rites for them. Indeed, the great mercy of God who desires that all men should be saved, and Jesus’ tenderness toward children which caused him to say: ‘Let the children come to me, do not hinder them,’ allow us to hope that there is a way of salvation for children who have died without Baptism.” Again in #1283, it states that “With respect to children who have died without Baptism, the liturgy of the Church invites us to trust in God’s mercy and to pray for their salvation.”

The Catechism was only expressing what the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council had proclaimed, especially in their Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (16) and in their Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (22), which recalls that Christ died to save all, and affirms that he joins himself to every human being.

Why does the Church not declare as official doctrine that unbaptized infants, stained by original sin but innocent of personal sin, are saved? Because the Church cannot assert what God has not explicitly revealed. In a 1980 document from the Vatican on infant baptism, Pastoralis Actio (79) we read: "It must be clearly acknowledged that the Church does not have sure knowledge about the salvation of unbaptized infants who die... [T]he destiny of the generality of infants who die without Baptism has not been revealed to us, and the Church teaches and judges only with regard to what has been revealed. What we do positively know of God, Christ and the Church gives us grounds to hope for their salvation..."

God’s merciful love is the essence of our hope for the salvation of infants who die without baptism. As stated in the ITC study, “There are reasons to hope that God will save these infants precisely because it was not possible to do for them that what would have been most desirable – to baptize them in the faith of the Church and incorporate them visibly into the body of Christ.”

+Bishop Raymundo J. Peña

last updated 05-Jun-2008 9:48 sitemap