The Roman Catholic Church has an amazing need to figure everything out, like whether the souls of babies go to heaven if they die without a baptism. Its not something that many other faiths seem concerned with.The Catholic News Services recently reported that a Vatican advisory board met for five days in early October and worked out a statement regarding the churchs longtime position that the souls of non-baptized babies were assigned to limbo.While no on can be certain of the fate of unbaptized babies who died, Christians can and should trust that God will welcome those babies into heaven, said members of the International Theological Commission, according to the front page article in a recent issue of The Catholic Sun.St. Augustine, in the fifth century, is considered the first to say that the unbaptized could not get to heaven. For the next eight centuries, that was the teaching. Then came St. Thomas Aquinas who said each deceased baby not baptized went into limbo, or an eternal state of natural joy. Peter De Rosa, writing about the issue, noted, For the next 700 years, Rome taught that limbo is a kind of play center for babies without any adult supervision. It was far more densely populated than heaven or hell. Stories abound how the bodies of unbaptized babies could not be buried in church cemeteries, but were relegated to pauper cemeteries or in burial plots set aside for derelicts. Doctors and nurses attending women in childbirth were told to baptize a baby in the womb if it was likely to die before birth, using a syringe, De Rosa writes. A devout Catholic couple told me of their terror at the thought of their baby being run down by a car on the way to church for baptism. They’d never see him again in this life or the next.Protestants dont accept the concept of limbo, saying it is nothing that can explicitly be found in the BibleThe Vatican commission last month looked at why the idea of limbo entered common teaching, why it was never officially defined as Catholic doctrine and why hope for their salvation makes more sense, explained the Rev. Paul McPartlan, a commission member and professor at The Catholic University in Washington, D.C. He said no one can know for certain what happens to babies who perish without baptism, but we have good grounds to hope that God, in his mercy and love, looks after these children and brings them to salvation.That certainly makes sense and it begs the question, Why should this have ever been an issue? The 30 commissioners are fine-tuning their statement, then voting on it by mail, for formal release next year. They say the statement will take great pains to explain the Christian belief that baptism is necessary to guarantee salvation and urges parents to baptize their children to avoid such a quandary. McPartlan explained that his commission began to explore the issue because bishops and priests around the world had asked Pope Benedict XVI, while he was still Cardinal Ratzinger, for an updated Catholic statement in response to the distressing human situation of parents mourning the loss of a baby before baptism. That also includes fetuses from abortion.Realizing some people could misinterpret the statement as saying that baptism is unnecessary for infants because they are incapable of sinning, the document reaffirms church teaching about the reality of original sin, the article said. Catholics are taught that only Jesus and his mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary, were unborn unmarked by the stain of original sin. Everyone else comes smirched with sin. Ratzinger had first said in 1985 that focusing on hope made more sense theologically than upholding the idea of limbo where unbaptized babies would enjoy natural happiness for eternity, but would not be in heaven in the presence of God. Kudos to the church for seemingly changing its thinking on such a morbid issue where their obviously has been plenty of rigid insensitivity.Fascinating debate, but it really seems to be far-fetched theology, not to mention all the parents who have anguished over the centuries when their young offspring died too soon.

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