Word: vaticans
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...thanks to Andrew Sullivan for his thoughtful essay, "The Vatican's New Stereotype," on the Roman Catholic Church's new rules barring gays from the priesthood [Dec. 12]. He expressed so well how I have been feeling--like an outsider in the church that was my home for 67 years. Although I have at times disagreed with church teachings, I have always felt like part of the fold. But the new exclusion cuts me to the core. I don't recognize Jesus in the new rules. It is more than a homosexual issue; it wounds my heart, which is aching...
...fact, limbo, the incomplete afterlife postulated by the Roman Catholic Church for infants who die before being baptized, is on the skids. After a commission of top Catholic theologians wrapped up a December conference that examined the topic, the prognosis was apparently grim: the group's secretary-general told Vatican Radio that the church's teaching on limbo was "in crisis...
...Says the Rev. James Martin, an editor at the Jesuit publication America who has performed many baptisms: "My idea of God is not a God who would condemn a baby to an imperfect life for eternity." Many priests have downplayed limbo out of similar concerns, and Martin lauds the Vatican panel for "bringing theological development in line with pastoral application...
...many Catholics as it once appeared. Despite its continued centrality as the sacramental entry to the body of Christ, some of its ASAP urgency will presumably fade. Indeed, the expected limbo ruling comes in addition to an older decision that appeared to downgrade baptism's gatekeeping role. The Second Vatican Council of 1962-65 ruled that in the case of some adult seekers of God--even non-Christians--the desire for the divine could take the place of the rite. Or, as the author of the 2002 book God and the World noted, "men who are seeking...
Together, these developments invite an investigation of baptism's importance beyond simply preventing the worst, and make a statement about the liberality of grace. Both the commission's work, which speaks for unbaptized infants, and the Vatican II language, which speaks for unbaptized adults, remind believers that, as Ratzinger wrote in a paraphrase of his predecessor John Paul II, Christians may hope that "God is powerful enough to draw to himself all those who were unable to receive the sacrament." Limbo was a vestige of an overfastidious exclusivity. Eliminating it affords a better view of God's many mansions, their...