Dali House

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The Catholic Church is such an easy target. Fish in a barrel. As a recovering Catholic, I knoweth how easy it is.

So there I was in a corner, losing still more remnants of my religion while reading Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion”, and I learned to my shock — I must have been in the toilet at the time — that Pope Benedict LMXCCVIIXI jettisoned Limbo last year!

Pardon me while I temporarily fill Dali House with fumes. I’ll soften the tirade with beautful art as I go along: These are all great paintings of Jesus visiting Limbo. Well, not all of them — you can tell which ones I did.

“Christ in Limbo” by Agnolo Bronzino, 1552

Admittedly the Limbo that’s now been stricken from the faith is limbus infantium — the Limbo where babies that died before they could be baptised supposedly had to spend eternity — whereas the preferred subject matter for artists down the centuries has been limbus patrum, the Limbo of the Fathers — that is, all the good guys who ought to have gone to heaven but couldn’t because they died, you know, before Jesus was born!

(There’s a sign at the door: “You don’t know Jesus, you don’t get in.”)

But still, if Baby Limbo didn’t actually exist, it’s just a matter of time before Born Too Early Limbo vanishes. And then what are we supposed to make of these paintings?

“Christ in Limbo” by Paul Cezanne

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I had to look it up to make sure it was true, and yes, all the big papers carried a story about the abolishment of the Catholic Church’s “policy” on Limbo. One or two asked rhetorically, “Is Purgatory next?” but for the most part there it was, a bald fact all by itself:

An international commission of theologians set up by the Vatican had advised the pope to dump the idea. It was headed by William Levada, who as archbishop of San Francisco was slagged for blocking the release of documents about priests buggering parishioners, then in 2006 became the first Cardinal named by the new pope, and then succeeded the new pope as chief of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

“Christ in Limbo” by Albrecht Durer

How can the Vatican pull this off? By using a WMD-class rationale: Limbo was never official Church policy — it was just a “hypothesis”.

Commission member Tony Kelly, an Australian priest, told Catholic News Service that the hypothesis was “just quietly dropped” during the last 50 years. I remember when our priest announced that we no longer had to eat fish on Fridays because beef and pork were now, uh, okay. Bacon on a Friday was no longer a sin — it was suddenly Catholic kosher.

“Christ in Limbo” by Friedrich Pacher

Now, back in junior school, if I had told Father Otger and Father Zeno, both eucharist-flogging priests of the Order of the Extreme Discipline of St Marquis the Sade, that what they were teaching me about Limbo was mere “hypothesis”, I would have been assigned a form of penance that involved the loss of blood, and not in any miraculous way.

Limbo was presented to me as official doctrine, as dogma. And you didn’t fuck the dogma.

“Christ in Limbo” by Giotto

Nuking Limbo was evidently John Paul II’s idea, with his minister of war Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger whispering in his ear. The latter is, of course, now Pope Rat (I didn’t invent that appellation).

The official spin is that every dead infant can expect salvation whether he’s baptised or not. The theologians talked it through and decided that God wants all souls to be saved, because he’s, you know, merciful.

“Somehow God in his great love and mercy would ensure that unbaptised babies enjoyed eternal life with him in Heaven,” as Father Kelly of Oz put it.

“Descent into Limbo” by Andrea Mantegna

God wasn’t merciful back in the good old Dark Ages, of course, because mediaeval serfs didn’t deserve any mercy. Those were simpler times: You don’t lick the wafer, you rot in Hell.

“Christ in Limbo” by Sebastiano del Piombo

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They went easy on babies, though, redirecting them upon their premature death to what St Thomas Aquinas described as an “eternal state of natural joy”, a delightful Neverland where no one would ever be allowed to tell them that, actually, there was even more joy in Heaven, just up there and to your left, on the other side of that cloud.

Before Thomas, in the fourth century, St Augustine reckoned that unbaptised kids went straight to hell, but suffered only the “mildest condemnation”. The commission, red-faced, calls this notion “out of date”. Surely newborns are innocent, right?

It found “serious theological and liturgical grounds for hope”, but only hope — nothing for sure. Best to baptise just in case, but don’t sweat it if the kid dies before the water flies.

There is nothing about Limbo in the Bible. Thomas Aquinas and the other script rewriters were just making this stuff up. Purgatory’s roots lie in the Old Testament’s reference to “the bosom of Abraham”, a safe house for the “righteous dead” awaiting their Heaven visas. Limbo? Nothing there.

“Christ in Limbo” by Fra Angelico

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As recently as a century ago, Pius X was affirming that Limbo was the designated destination for the unbaptised, where they “do not have the joy of God but neither do they suffer … They do not deserve Paradise, but neither do they deserve Hell or Purgatory.”

Someone must have asked John Paul II about aborted foetuses, and it got him thinking. The Church, he decided, “does not know the fate of unbaptised infants” and can only “trust in God’s mercy and love”.

“Harrowing Hell”, unknown artist

What’s really going on amid all this regime change?

Theories range from Limbo’s evacuation being a slap upside the heads of born-again Christians who insist that you go to Hell if you don’t accept Jesus, to being an equity shift because Islam says unbaptised babies are welcomed in Heaven, to being a grab for votes in Africa and Asia, with their higher infant-mortality rates.

Dante put Limbo in the first circle of Hell and populated it with “virtuous pagans” like Plato, Socrates and the Old Testament prophets such as Moses and Abraham, who were unfortunately ahead of their time and thus missed out on Jesus’ big redemption spectacular.

You search for great paintings of limbus infantium in vain. Were the artists at a loss as to how to depict a place crawling with babies, or did they realise that the whole idea was just plain stupid?

Know your hellish hierarchy. Below, Barry Mosher’s map of damnation. Below that, a particularly nasty nightmare that Bartolomeo once had, common enough.