Limbo: Pope abolishes first circle of Hell

It’s official: as of today, “limbus infantium” is no more, having been formally abolished by the Catholic Church.

The concept, based upon the theological belief that children who die before being baptised are suspended in a space between heaven and hell, was developed in the 13th Century in response to the harshness of earlier Church teachings, which held that such children are stained by Original Sin and so are condemned to hell.

 Joe “the rat” Ratzinger, a.k.a. Pope Benedict XVI, never believed in the idea anyway. In a pre-papal interview circa 1984, he said:

“Limbo has never been a defined truth of faith. Personally, speaking as a theologian and not as head of the Congregation, I would drop something that has always been only a theological hypothesis.”

However, Joe (or Ben, as he is now), being an acknowledged expert on all things Islamic, and with his eye on Africa and Asia, zones with a high infant mortality rate and ripe for evangelisation, must be intensely aware that Muslims believe the souls of stillborn babies go straight to heaven.

Hence the new edict: stillborn Christian babies do as well. 
  
The status of “limbus patrum”, where those “good people” went who were unfortunate enough to have died before the coming of Christ, on the other hand, remains… well, in limbo, so to speak.

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