No, the Council of Florence did not teach Limbo.

e olde debate over Lim­bo has been res­ur­rect­ed because Fr. Richard Heil­man shared this arti­cle of mine from the Nation­al Catholic Reg­is­ter. “Four Rea­sons I Don’t Believe in the Lim­bo of Infants”—that was the title. I can’t remem­ber whether the title was mine or the Reg­is­ter chose it; it does­n’t mat­ter. Imme­di­ate­ly the Lim­bo apol­o­gists crawled like spi­ders over Fr.’s post, and one declaimed that it was a scan­dal indeed to share my arti­cle on this, since the INFALLIBLE Coun­cil of Flo­rence had declared oth­er­wise.

Uh. No. It did not. Let’s look at what the Coun­cil did say. This was at the sixth ses­sion on July 6, 1439. I quote from Flo­rence:

Also, the souls of those who have incurred no stain of sin what­so­ev­er after bap­tism, as well as souls who after incur­ring the stain of sin have been cleansed whether in their bod­ies or out­side their bod­ies, as was stat­ed above, are straight­away received into heav­en and clear­ly behold the tri­une God as he is, yet one per­son more per­fect­ly than anoth­er accord­ing to the dif­fer­ence of their mer­its. But the souls of those who depart this life in actu­al mor­tal sin, or in orig­i­nal sin alone, go down straight­away to hell to be pun­ished, but with unequal pains.

Now, the idea of Lim­bo is that it is a part of Hell, and that abort­ed infants or mis­car­ried infants or infants who oth­er­wise had no oppor­tu­ni­ty to be bap­tized will go there, and it rep­re­sents the least of all the pains of Hell. Indeed, it’s a place of per­fect nat­ur­al hap­pi­ness, only with­out the Beatif­ic Vision. This the Lim­bo apol­o­gists say.

But you can only get that idea out of Flo­rence if you bring to the text the very pre­sup­po­si­tion that is in dis­pute in the first place, and which nei­ther Flo­rence nor any oth­er Coun­cil says any­thing about. And that pre­sup­po­si­tion is that bap­tism is the only way pos­si­ble for God to remove orig­i­nal sin. In the absence of that sacra­ment, God is pow­er­less to act.

Those, like myself, who deny the Lim­bo of Infants do not say that an abort­ed baby, or a mis­car­ried baby, will get to Heav­en still hav­ing the stain of orig­i­nal sin. Orig­i­nal sin must be removed; that’s not in dis­pute. What we do say is that, in the absence of any pos­si­bil­i­ty of bap­tism, God will remove orig­i­nal sin through some dif­fer­ent means, known to Him alone. He cer­tain­ly has the pow­er to do that; God is not lim­it­ed by the sacra­ments.

So by cit­ing the Coun­cil of Flo­rence, the Lim­bo apol­o­gist is avoid­ing the real debate. He, or she, has made a high show of telling us what no one denied in the first place. Very embar­rass­ing. And in the process the Lim­bo apol­o­gist has made the sacra­ment of bap­tism greater than God. And at the back of it all is sacra­men­tal legal­ism.

I point out in clos­ing that Pope Bene­dict XVI, who was Car­di­nal Ratzinger at the time, said that Lim­bo “was nev­er a defined truth of the faith.” It’s curi­ous to me how, if the Coun­cil of Flo­rence real­ly did teach Lim­bo infal­li­bly, a the­olo­gian of the stature of Ratzinger missed it.

You can read my oth­er arti­cles on Lim­bo here and here.