HONG KONG -- Theologians of the Roman Catholic Church are recommending the abolition of a special place that has existed for more than 2,000 years and enriched the world of literature and politics, as well as theology. Pope Benedict XVI himself has given his clear opinion, as an eminent theologian, that he agrees that limbo should be banished.
That will leave literature and politics poorer and put the theology of what happens to the unbaptized, I might have said, in a dangerous limbo.
Limbo, as the theologians originally conceived it, was a place of loss or deprivation for the unbaptized. There were two groups of inhabitants: the first were the holy people who died before Jesus Christ's death, for whom limbo was a halfway house from which they were released to heaven by the salvific force of Christ's death on the cross; the other and continuing group is babies who died before they could be baptized.