M.J. Rose

Think again Dante, there ain’t no nice place to have a chat with Aristotle anymore…

Whoa! Who said it was okay to change the structure of heaven? So where do all the “good pagans”, little unbaptised babies, jovial buddhists, and zebras and puppy dogs go if the church is going to insist on taking away limbo? And what exactly happened to limbo anyway? Wasn’t this pleasant, balmy, intellectually stimulating zone a place we could count on landing just in case those Christians were right about everything after all?

“Newspapers have been full of news about the abolition of limbo. How much of this is true?

A few weeks ago the International Theological Commission, an advisory panel for the Catholic Church, published a 41-page document entitled “The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptized”. When this news was faxed to Reuters, I thought that it would furrow the editor’s brow: “The who published what?”. Perhaps through her mind would flit a brief recollection of Nichole Kidman as a neurotic mother in The Others, followed by the rapid processing of the fax into a crumbled ball and its trajectory into the the limbo of the wastepaper basket.

But that is not what happened. Catholic teaching on the afterlife suddenly became a hot topic. Why?”…

(by Dr Richard Umbers, Catholic priest, for MercatorNet)

Read the rest at MercatorNet.

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He hoped and prayed that there wasn’t an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn’t an afterlife.
– Douglas Adams