Madam, - Anthony Redmond has every right to be angry that so-called Catholic Church "teaching" caused his mother so much unnecessary suffering from 1945 until 2003 (November 2nd). She is only one of thousands of such mothers within living memory, and hundreds of thousands through many centuries, who suffered similarly; and until very recently the church had no word of consolation or pastoral care for them.
The concept of "limbo" has never been a matter of faith. It came into being as a solution to a theological problem. It was thought that infants who died without baptism could not enter heaven because of Augustine's notion of original sin, but neither could they be condemned to hell since they were not guilty of personal sin. Two councils of the Church (II Lyons in 1274 and Florence in 1439) declared that "those who die only with original sin" go to hell but that "their condition would be different from that of those in mortal sin". In the Middle Ages theologians consigned them to a state of "purely natural happiness", without the supernatural happiness of the beatific vision of God.
This makes little sense in today's world, when we know that over a third of all human conceptions are naturally aborted by nature. Unbaptised babies could not be buried in consecrated ground, and it was not unknown that a bereaved father would take the tiny corpse in a shoe-box to bury it privately in the dead of night. It is small consolation to know that the Cardinal in charge of the church's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith as early as l984 expressed his "purely personal belief" that the concept of limbo made no sense. There is still no official statement from the church.
Large numbers of responsible, committed Catholics have learned to trust their God-given creative intelligence to recognise when something makes no sense. The church still needs to teach, but this means explaining and convincing, rather than simply declaring what we are obliged to think and to hold. Aristotle's dictum is still valid: that no teaching takes place until someone has actually been taught. - Yours, etc,
SEAN FAGAN SM, Lower Leeson Street, Dublin 2.