It arises from theological speculation, not revelation. If you find the speculation convincing, you may believe in limbo. If you find the speculation unconvincing, you have the option of not believing in limbo. Yes, there are also fewer writing in favor of purgatory — or about purgatory at all — but that is an indictment of them, not of the doctrine. Why is there less said about purgatory? A Vatican committee that spent years examining the medieval Catholic doctrine states that because all humans are tainted by original sin thanks to the experience of Adam and Eve, baptism is essential for salvation.
But the idea of limbo has fallen out of favor for many Catholics, who see it as harsh and not befitting a merciful God. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Augustine declared that all unbaptized babies went to hell upon death.
He believed that unbaptized children would be sent to Hell since they did not merit Heaven due to Original Sin and not to Purgatory since that period of purification eventually leads to Heaven.
However, he conceded that their punishment would be the mildest of all De peccatorum meritis , I, xxi. Dissatisfied with St. Anselm d. Thomas Aquinas d. He emphasized that Original Sin was a sin of nature inherited from our parents rather than a sin freely committed. Since Hell was the place of eternal punishment for unrepentant mortal sinners who had rejected God and since the unbaptized could not enter Heaven, those unbaptized infants should be in another place, perhaps in a place and state of limbo.
Thomas was received in the schools , almost without opposition, down to the Reformation period. The very few theologians who, with Gregory of Rimini , stood out for the severe Augustinian view, were commonly designated by the opprobrious name of tortores infantium. Peter speaks 2 Peter will be their happy dwelling place for eternity.
At the Reformation , Protestants generally, but more especially the Calvinists , in reviving Augustinian teaching , added to its original harshness, and the Jansenists followed on the same lines. This reacted in two ways on Catholic opinion, first by compelling attention to the true historical situation, which the Scholastics had understood very imperfectly, and second by stimulating an all-round opposition to Augustinian severity regarding the effects of original sin ; and the immediate result was to set up two Catholic parties, one of whom either rejected St.
Thomas to follow the authority of St. Augustine or vainly try to reconcile the two, while the other remained faithful to the Greek Fathers and St. The latter party, after a fairly prolonged struggle, has certainly the balance of success on its side. Besides the professed advocates of Augustinianism , the principal theologians who belonged to the first party were Bellarmine , Petavius , and Bossuet , and the chief ground of their opposition to the previously prevalent Scholastic view was that its acceptance seemed to compromise the very principle of the authority of tradition.
As students of history , they felt bound to admit that, in excluding unbaptized children from any place or state even of natural happiness and condemning them to the fire of Hell , St. Augustine , the Council of Carthage , and later African Fathers , like Fulgentius De fide ad Petrum , 27 , intended to teach no mere private opinion, but a doctrine of Catholic Faith ; nor could they be satisfied with what Scholastics , like St. Bonaventure and Duns Scotus , said in reply to this difficulty, namely that St.
Neither could they accept the explanation which even some modern theologians continue to repeat: that the Pelagian doctrine condemned by St. Augustine as a heresy see e. Moreover, there was the teaching of the Council of Florence , that "the souls of those dying in actual mortal sin or in original sin alone go down at once mox into Hell , to be punished, however, with widely different penalties.
Thomas and the Schoolmen generally were in conflict with what St. Augustine and other Fathers considered to be de fide , and what the Council of Florence seemed to have taught definitively. Hence he names Catharinus and some others as revivers of the Pelagian error , as though their teaching differed in substance from the general teaching of the School , and tries in a milder way to refute what he concedes to be the view of St.
Thomas op. He himself adopts a view which is substantially that of Abelard mentioned above; but he is obliged to do violence to the text of St. Augustine and other Fathers in his attempt to explain them in conformity with this view, and to contradict the principle he elsewhere insists upon that " original sin does not destroy the natural but only the supernatural order.
Petavius , on the other hand, did not try to explain away the obvious meaning of St. Augustine and his followers, but, in conformity with that teaching, condemned unbaptized children to the sensible pains of Hell , maintaining also that this was a doctrine of the Council of Florence.
Neither of these theologians , however, succeeded in winning a large following or in turning the current of Catholic opinion from the channel into which St.
Thomas had directed it. Besides Natalis Alexander De peccat. Only professed Augustinians like Noris and Berti , or out-and-out Jansenists like the Bishop of Pistoia , whose famous diocesan synod furnished eighty-five propositions for condemnation by Pius VI , supported the harsh teaching of Petavius.
The twenty-sixth of these propositions repudiated "as a Pelagian fable the existence of the place usually called the children's limbo in which the souls of those dying in original sin are punished by the pain of loss without any pain of fire"; and this, taken to mean that by denying the pain of fire one thereby necessarily postulates a middle place or state, involving neither guilt nor penalty, between the Kingdom of God and eternal damnation , is condemned by the pope as being " false and rash and as slander of the Catholic schools " Denz.
This condemnation was practically the death-knell of extreme Augustinianism , while the mitigate Augustinianism of Bellarmine and Bossuet had already been rejected by the bulk of Catholic theologians. It is true , on the other hand, that some Catholic theologians have stood out for some kind of compromise with Augustinianism , on the ground that nature itself was wounded and weakened, or, at least that certain natural rights including the right to perfect felicity were lost in consequence of the Fall.
But these have granted for the most part that the children's limbo implies exemption, not only from the pain of sense, but from any positive spiritual anguish for the loss of the beatific vision ; and not a few have been willing to admit a certain degree of natural happiness in limbo. What has been chiefly in dispute is whether this happiness is as perfect and complete as it would have been in the hypothetical state of pure nature , and this is what the majority of Catholic theologians have affirmed.
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