Rite and Reason: It seems likely that limbo will be dropped as part of Catholic teaching. Nell McCafferty was taken aback.
I was there and I was glad for her. She sat, half blind and paralysed, in a wheelchair in winter on the windswept heights of Derry city cemetery, while the priest performed Catholic funeral rites over the grave of her first born.
The woman was by then 90 years old. The baby had died within hours of childbirth in 1937. The baby's father had left the corpse in a shoe box in the gate lodge of the cemetery, and it was interred by staff, between dusk and dawn, in unconsecrated ground. The baby and the ground were treated as rubbish in a rubbish dump, to be buried out of sight and out of mind.
At the feverish height of Ireland's first referendum on abortion in 1983, when the Catholic Church declared that a fertilised egg had the sacred status of a human being, bishops made up for lost ground by consecrating human rubbish dumps all over the place, giving some dignity to the little corpses and some relief to their parents.
The 90-year-old woman was deeply at peace while the priest performed, at last, funeral rites for the baby she had mourned for 53 years. "Eternal rest grant unto Mary Ann, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her; may her soul and the souls of all the faithful departed, rest in peace, amen." I said the words along with him and his parishioners, out of respect for those who believed and had asked me along.
The woman understood that the pronunciation of this prayer, by the priest, meant that her baby was now in heaven; that the concept of limbo had been quietly ditched, along with other holy man-made concepts, such as that which held if you ate meat on Fridays you would go to hell if you died before confessing.
I think the priest truly believed that day that Limbo had been ditched. I think the poor fellow was innocently ignorant - few priests know much about theology.
I am glad that my mother died deluded, believing that Mary Ann's place in heaven had finally been acknowledged, formally, by the church she believed in.
I wonder, if she was still alive, would I have told her that limbo has not been abolished, as revealed in The Irish Times a month ago? I always treated her beliefs seriously, as she treated mine. We teased it out over divorce, contraception and abortion.
The only time she found herself speechless was when I discussed with her the fact that I was born gay and that the Catholic Church had pronounced me "objectively disordered" at birth, with a tendency "towards an intrinsic moral evil". No baptism could change that disordered gene. I didn't tell her about the evil bit.
"Just think of me as one of God's freaks," I suggested.
"You're no freak," she said.
It never occurred to me that the fault for my alleged disorder was really the fault of my parents because I was the fruit of their gene pool. I wonder now, though, if my parents thought that, and stormed heaven secretly with prayers for our redemption.
Having seen how peaceful and humble and grateful she was, to her God and to the holy man, in the cemetery that day, I would not have disabused her of the notion that Mary Ann was finally in heaven.
One disordered child was burden enough for my parents but - two disordered children? I think I would not have laid that lash on my mother's old, bent back. Especially since the lash laid by the church on Mary Ann is worse than that which it laid on me when I was a believer. I was offered the chance to reform but Mary Ann, say the holy men, was "unregenerate".
The Oxford Dictionary defines unregenerate as "obstinately wrong or bad". Mary Ann, who lived for four hours, lived and died as a bad girl. She was born in sin, and died in sin. She was not regenerated by being "born again of water and the Holy Ghost".
And so she was buried in a rubbish heap.
President Mary McAleese was talking rubbish, in the eyes of her church, when she spoke at the refurbished Old Angels Plot in Glasnevin on June 19th, 2005. Fifty thousand unbaptised children are buried there, alongside paupers. If anyone wondered what the smile of 50,000 angels looked like, they had only to stare up at the sky, the President said. She was wrong, according to the holy men, as laid down in print in the Catholic Encyclopedia. The unbaptised children are not angels. Angels see God.
The theological point of limbo is that those unregenerate babies will never have that "beatific vision". The plot got its name "Old Angels" from the fact it was consecrated ground in which paupers were buried. The aul' ones had a chance of seeing God; the unregenerate infants never will.
Neither will those whom the Catholic Church call "the unborn". Because they were "unsealed" by baptism, the unborn, the stillborn and the unbaptised are no angels, any of them. They are bad, bad, bad, unsealed and unregenerate, according to the holy men.
I am glad, glad, glad that my Catholic mother died before the holy men took the opportunity to condemn, yet again, the fruit of her womb, Mary Ann.
Nell McCafferty is a journalist and author