It’s times like these I get the feeling the Catholic Church just drifts about wherever they think is the most politically acceptable while still seeming “holy”. I never understood the concept of “limbo,” since it seems like a random assumption to answer the question of what happens to those who die before they get a chance to be saved. Fortunately, I don’t have to worry about it any more, because they decided to get rid of it.

The document stressed that its conclusions should not be interpreted as questioning original sin or “used to negate the necessity of baptism or delay the conferral of the sacrament.”

Limbo, which comes from the Latin word meaning “border” or “edge,” was considered by medieval theologians to be a state or place reserved for the unbaptized dead, including good people who lived before the coming of Christ.

“People find it increasingly difficult to accept that God is just and merciful if he excludes infants, who have no personal sins, from eternal happiness, whether they are Christian or non-Christian,” the document said.

You know, frankly, I don’t think what people find difficult to accept should have the slightest bearing on anything. If there’s a limbo, there’s a limbo. Just because it seems hard to accept by the public doesn’t mean jack unless God himself sent down the decree that it’s no good.

In writings before his election as Pope in 2005, the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger made it clear he believed the concept of limbo should be abandoned because it was “only a theological hypothesis” and “never a defined truth of faith.”

Now this I agree with 100%, and thus agree with it as a reason to eschew it from the faith. It does beg the question of how infallible popes can be if they disagree with each other over time. You’d think that, since each one has the express track to God’s meaning and intentions, they shouldn’t get things like that wrong. Yet, somehow, they do. Curious.