Thanks to Pope Benedict XVI unbaptized children are saved. Does this mean that the ruling is retroactive and twenty-one centuries of unbaptized infants have been promoted out of “no mans land” and into communion with the rest of the faithful departed? I hope so. Limbo is a concept that never really made any sense to me, but it was one of those concepts that we were taught as young children. Meat on Friday’s, 12 hour fasts before receiving the Eucharist and a host of other regulations have gone by the board in the last forty years since the end of Vatican II. There will no doubt be a number of Catholics who will reject this teaching. I know some who want to return to a Latin Mass and put nuns and priests back in those special suits and habits they used to wear. These radical changes will unnerving to some, but other will welcome them. I’m grateful that the Pope has made this change. Maybe sometime before we don’t have any priests left to say Mass they’ll loosen up a bit and let the clergy get married like the rest of us. I never could find the celibacy argument and the no meat on Friday in the Gospels.
Another five hundred years and the church will accept gays and maybe they’ll re-think original sin. Maybe eventually they’ll get back to a more Scotian view of theology. There is always reason to hope.
hi, i just came across your blog on my way to philosophy entries. i hope you don’t mind me linking you up…
None of the rules and restrictions you have mentioned as having gone overboard seem very onerous.
How difficult is it to fast for 12 hours or abstain from meat of fridays?
It seems to me that we do far too little in solidarity with the poor and that we owe the poor, in justice, some empathy. The must be a time when we feel for ourselves what it is to be hungry. If we shy away so much from walking with the poor in their hunger by failing to observe the occaisional fast, it seems that we do not love them so much as we just talk about loving them. And isn’t the gesture of solidarity so much more enhanced and solidified if we make it in common? And who better to help us make this gesture together than Our Mother the Church?
As for the clothes of religious, it seems that they too should be a sign of God’s love. Surley they are secondary. What is most important is that vocations are lived out in spirit and truth. But how comforting it is to see some of these habits in our day to day lives. I am espicially fond of the common ropes the capuchins (both the brothers and sisters) use as a belt. To me this is a sign that God is concerned with the most everyday and ordinary items in our lives, and sanctifies everything, even the impliments of unskilled labor like rope.
I don’t have much to say about Limbo. Just that the Church has always taught that God loves children more than their parents do, and that He continues to love them more than their parents do for eternity, even if they die without baptism. I have always been content just to trust that Love.
As for original sin. When I look at the world with all of its hunger, wars and degradation….I see a world that needs Jesus. I don’t just see a world that merely needs to listen to Him, but a world that needs to be rescued by Him and sustained by Him and uplifted by Him–every minute. We cannot save ourselves from this pit of poverty, war and dispair. We need Him to save us. Only He can rescue us from the pit. I certainly have no power of myself to overcome evil.