A clarification on the salvation of infants who die without baptism.

hen I was in RCIA, one of the stick­ing wor­ries I had was what the Church teach­es about the sal­va­tion of infants who die with­out bap­tism. The rea­son this was a wor­ry for me is the fact that my daugh­ter, Cait­lyn’s, hav­ing been still­born pre­clud­ed all pos­si­bil­i­ty of bap­tism. Even had I been Catholic at the time (and I was­n’t), the dead are not eli­gi­ble for bap­tism.

So when we had our ses­sion on bap­tism, and our team leader stressed the Church’s teach­ing about the neces­si­ty of bap­tism for sal­va­tion, and thus the prac­tice of bap­tis­ing infants, I decid­ed to approach her dur­ing break and ask what the Church would say about Cait­lyn. Is she in Heav­en? Now, in the prov­i­dence of God, it hap­pened that P.—a true woman of grace—had lost her own grand­daugh­ter to a still­birth not too many years before. She reaf­firmed for me a truth that Fr. George was often at pains to stress: God is not lim­it­ed by the sacra­ments. She told me about the bap­tism of desire, and that cer­tain­ly I would have had Cait­lyn bap­tized.

“So the waters of birth,” she said, “were Cait­lyn’s bap­tismal waters.”

Thus it gave me great com­fort to be able to visu­al­ize that, when Cait­lyn was born, Jesus was there, and He bap­tized her.

gregory gropes in the dark

Nor­mal­ly I would not crit­i­cize the blog of anoth­er Catholic. But in this case, I decid­ed to go ahead and pub­lish this post, not mere­ly because the sub­ject of Lim­bo hap­pened to come up in this arti­cle on the Tra­di­tion­al­ist, Dal­las-area blog Venere­mur Cer­nui, but because it also hap­pened to be pub­lished on April 18, which is Cait­lyn’s birth­day as well as the day I pub­lished my mem­oir about her here.

The post begins with a quo­ta­tion from St. Gre­go­ry of Nys­sa’s On Infants’ Ear­ly Deaths, in which Gre­go­ry spec­u­lates on the rea­son why God per­mits such painful events to hap­pen:

It is rea­son­able … to expect that He Who knows the future equal­ly with the past should check the advance of an infant to com­plete matu­ri­ty, in order that the evil may not be devel­oped which His fore­knowl­edge has detect­ed in his future life, and in order that a life­time grant­ed to one whose evil dis­po­si­tions will be life­long may not become the actu­al mate­r­i­al for his vice. … [T]his, we sus­pect, is the cause of the deaths of new-born infants. He Who does all things upon a Plan with­draws the mate­ri­als for evil in His love to the indi­vid­ual, and, to a char­ac­ter whose marks His Fore­knowl­edge has read, grants no time, to dis­play by a pre-emi­nence in actu­al vice what it is when its propen­si­ty to evil gets free play.

The author of the blog arti­cle says, “I don’t know if peo­ple will find it com­fort­ing, or capri­cious, or what, but it’s an inter­est­ing thought.” Frankly, I can’t imag­ine it being very com­fort­ing to imag­ine that my daugh­ter would have grown up to “indulge a propen­si­ty to evil.” I don’t exact­ly find it capri­cious, though I do find it strik­ing­ly dumb; no dis­re­spect intend­ed to a saint and a Church Father, but he is not the infal­li­ble Mag­is­teri­um. Gre­go­ry rather begs the ques­tion why it is that God did­n’t take Ted Bundy or Osama bin Laden as an infant. He begs the ques­tion why God does­n’t just pre­vent evil alto­geth­er by tak­ing us all in the first breath of our life. If Gre­go­ry is right, why these chil­dren, and not those? He rais­es more ques­tions than he answers about the death of infants.  “Our Rea­son in this mat­ter,” he admits, “has to grope in the dark”; and indeed, lit­tle is more evi­dent than that Gre­go­ry is grop­ing in the dark through­out the entire work.

The author of the blog arti­cle is uncom­fort­able too, but for dif­fer­ent rea­sons; name­ly, that pro-choicers could use Gre­go­ry’s words as a (hyp­o­crit­i­cal) argu­ment for abor­tion: Look at all the evil you’d be spar­ing the world just by killing your baby and send­ing him or her off to Heav­en. It’s true that that’s what Gre­go­ry’s words, tak­en to their log­i­cal con­clu­sion, might lead to, but pay atten­tion to what fol­lows in the blog arti­cle:

[The pro aborts start] with an error—that babies that die very young, before bap­tism, or in utero, go to Heav­en. … Catholics believe that such chil­dren, who have com­mit­ted no sin of their own but have also not been bap­tized, go to lim­bo, a place of per­fect nat­ur­al hap­pi­ness that is tech­ni­cal­ly part of hell but where there is no suf­fer­ing.

ratzinger: limbo never a defined truth

In char­i­ty: That is not true. The author attempts to soft­en these words by say­ing, “Offi­cial­ly, this is not doc­trine [and] not a required belief,” but that hon­est­ly strikes me as a poor qual­i­fi­ca­tion when the ear­li­er state­ment char­ac­ter­izes Lim­bo as what “Catholics believe,” as if this were offi­cial teach­ing and dog­ma that was uni­ver­sal­ly accept­ed.

The fact is, not only does the Catholic Church not teach any belief in Lim­bo today, but it nev­er did. That this is true is the asser­tion of no less an author­i­ty than Pope Bene­dict XVI (when he was still Car­di­nal Ratzinger). Quot­ed by Jim­my Akin here, this is what Car­di­nal Ratzinger says:

Lim­bo was nev­er a defined truth of the faith [and] I would aban­don it since it was only a the­o­log­i­cal hypoth­e­sis. It formed part of a sec­ondary the­sis in sup­port of a truth which is absolute­ly of first sig­nif­i­cance for the faith, name­ly, the impor­tance of bap­tism. [Note care­ful­ly here, because this is impor­tant.] [T]he very the­olo­gians who pro­posed “lim­bo” also said that par­ents could spare the child lim­bo by desir­ing its bap­tism through prayer.

In the com­box of the Venere­mur Cer­nui arti­cle, “Dis­mas” sug­gests that to say abort­ed souls go to Heav­en is “warped Catholi­cism.” Although (as will be clear­er below) one can­not know with infal­li­ble cer­tain­ty that any soul is in Heav­en, with respect to abort­ed babies, or still­borns, one can indeed have the assur­ance of faith and hope that they are with the Lord. Since Bene­dict XVI’s words make this clear, to use the char­ac­ter­i­za­tion “warped” strikes me as deeply prob­lem­at­ic.

Indeed, if “Lim­bo was nev­er a defined truth of the faith,” in the words of Car­di­nal Ratzinger him­self, it is hard­ly accu­rate to refer to it, as the author of the arti­cle does, as what “Catholics believe.”

So where did the idea of Lim­bo come from? The arti­cle by Mr. Akin I linked to above goes into great detail on this point, but the gist of it is that it arose as a hypoth­e­sis of medieval the­olo­gians, which may be stat­ed in the form of the fol­low­ing syl­lo­gism:

• Bap­tism, as Christ taught (John 3:5), is nec­es­sary for sal­va­tion.
• There are, how­ev­er, infants who die with­out hav­ing received the sacra­ment of bap­tism.
• Hell is only for unre­pen­tant sin­ners.
• Pur­ga­to­ry is only for the bap­tized who are ulti­mate­ly des­tined for Heav­en.
• There­fore, there must be a fourth state for infants who die with­out the sacra­ment of bap­tism, and this we call Lim­bo.

How­ev­er, as Car­di­nal Ratzinger point­ed out, the Church nev­er gave its Mag­is­te­r­i­al approval to this as a divine­ly-revealed dog­ma, and even those the­olo­gians who posit­ed a Lim­bo (St. Augus­tine; Peter Abelard) affirmed the real­i­ty of the bap­tism of desire.

god made the sacraments for man

On April 22, 2007—ironically, near­ly a year to the date after Cait­lyn was buried—the Church issued a final report, orig­i­nal­ly com­mis­sioned by Pope John Paul II, on this ques­tion. Enti­tled “The Hope of Sal­va­tion for Infants Who Die With­out Bap­tism,” here is part of what it said:

[M]any fac­tors … give seri­ous the­o­log­i­cal and litur­gi­cal grounds for hope that unbap­tized infants who die will be saved and enjoy the beatif­ic vision. We empha­size that these are rea­sons for prayer­ful hope, rather than grounds for sure knowl­edge. There is much that sim­ply has not been revealed to us. … What has been revealed [N.B.] is that the ordi­nary way of sal­va­tion is by the sacra­ment of bap­tism. … [But we have] strong grounds for hope that God will save infants when we have not been able to do for them what we would have wished to do, name­ly, to bap­tize them into the faith and life of the Church.

Indeed these words echo the Cat­e­chism of the Catholic Church, par. 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 shall 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.”

God made the sacra­ments for man, not man for the sacra­ments. They are the ordi­nary means of sal­va­tion, and no one should believe that the sacra­ment of bap­tism can be put off because God is mer­ci­ful. But some people—stillborn infants, or infants who die by abortion—simply have no oppor­tu­ni­ty, through no fault of their own, to receive them. God is not going to send infants to some hypo­thet­i­cal Lim­bo because of a tech­ni­cal­i­ty. God insti­tut­ed the sacra­ments, but the sacra­ments do not bind his hands.

That is not “warped Catholi­cism.” It is the teach­ing of John Paul II (cf. Evan­geli­um Vitae 99), the future Pope Bene­dict XVI, and the Cat­e­chism of the Catholic Church. The Cat­e­chism is “what Catholics believe.”

St. Cait­lyn Elis­a­beth Alt, pray for us.

POSTSCRIPT

An ear­li­er ver­sion of this arti­cle sug­gest­ed that “Dis­mas” (one of the com­menters on the Venere­mur Cer­nui arti­cle) held to a belief in Lim­bo, and unchar­i­ta­bly stat­ed that Dis­mas felt him­self “more Catholic than the pope.” After an exchange in the com­ment sec­tion on the oth­er blog, I have rewrit­ten that para­graph to (I hope) more faith­ful­ly rep­re­sent what Dis­mas meant by the com­ment.

Dis­mas’s real con­cern seems to be that a state­ment that abort­ed babies are def­i­nite­ly in Heav­en is inim­i­cal to efforts to curb abor­tion. That is a legit­i­mate con­cern, though one that I think is unfound­ed for two rea­sons. The first is that, if a woman is con­sid­er­ing an abor­tion but con­cedes that the eter­nal des­tiny of her child’s soul is a real mat­ter, then she already accepts the human­i­ty of the unborn child and can be per­suad­ed not to have the abor­tion on moral grounds alone.

The sec­ond is that many women who have had abor­tions lat­er regret it, are deeply wound­ed, and are in repen­tance and seek­ing for­give­ness. They are most under­stand­ably con­cerned about where their child is and whether there is hope for even­tu­al reunion in Heav­en. Speak­ing per­son­al­ly, the same is true for par­ents who have lost their child to a still­birth. Although I con­cede that there is no divine rev­e­la­tion on this point, I also put a great deal of trust in the mer­cy of God and in the state­ments the Church has made about the bap­tism of desire and the “seri­ous the­o­log­i­cal and litur­gi­cal grounds for hope.”

These points can be used to com­fort moth­ers who are in repen­tance, and Pope John Paul II says as much, when address­ing moth­ers who have had abor­tions, in para­graph 99 of Evan­geli­um Vitae. The fact that the Church’s report from 2007 used the expres­sion “seri­ous the­o­log­i­cal and litur­gi­cal grounds for hope” implies that this is not mere­ly a mat­ter of pas­toral sym­pa­thy. And even tak­ing pas­toral sym­pa­thy into con­sid­er­a­tion, if men can have that love and con­cern for griev­ing par­ents, how much greater is the love and mer­cy of God Him­self?

In any case, I hope that Dis­mas will for­give my ear­li­er unchar­i­ta­ble expres­sions, which were the prod­uct of of my own under­stand­able pas­sion on this sub­ject.