The Pontificator on limbo: Part V

While the ITC's report on limbo impends, the Catholic blogosphere has been abuzz with discussion of the once-common teaching. As I anticipated when I posted my own article on the topic more than a year ago, theological traditionalists have been coming out of the woodwork not only to defend the permissibility of belief in limbo but to insist that Catholics retain that increasingly unpopular belief. In the fifth installment of his series on the topic, Al Kimel the Pontificator takes two of them on.

I could not agree with his incisive critique more than I do. The gathering defense of limbo reminds me of why I could never be a true-blue Catholic trad: like the Pharisees, they limit God's love and mercy in the name of that Tradition which proclaims it to us. But what I've called "the curve of authentic development" of doctrine is away from them. Limbo was itself an amelioration of St. Augustine's doleful theory of massa damnata; the only ostensible Catholics who still insist on that theory are known as Jansenists. There are still a few of them around.

Kimel has conveniently condensed his limbo articles into one page at Pontifications called "Limbo." That page has already grown into an article worthy of conventional publication. I hope to see it as such.