The recent article “Abandoning limbo would leave a serious gap in Church teaching” makes too strong a claim about the Church’s relationship to the theory of limbo. Far from an indispensable teaching, limbo is one proposal to a theological problem, and far from a necessary one.
The author writes that “some would argue that limbo is, to all intents and purposes, a dogma,” but cites little support for this position. The closest he comes is to say that an argument against limbo “seems hard to reconcile with the Council of Florence’s solemn teaching that ‘the only remedy available’ to infants ‘is the sacrament of baptism.’” And while Ludgwig Ott’s venerable Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma does list as de fide (dogma) the proposition that “souls who depart this life in the state of original sin are excluded from the Beatific Vision of God,” this quotation only begs the question: does this teaching necessarily apply to the case of an infant or unborn child who dies without baptism? Clearly not for Ott, as he writes that “theologians usually assume that there is a special place or state for children dying without baptism which they call limbus puerorum (children’s Limbo)” (emphasis added). Are assumptions the stuff of dogma?
