As the excerpt goes: “In order to address pastoral needs in the Church, it must be remembered that conformity with Christ is a more fundamental criterion of doctrinal development that continuity with the documentary tradition”. It makes its case by tracing the significant breaches of continuity in the common teaching of the Church in relation to unbaptised infants, and it proposes a new evaluation of the very notion of continuity.

Suffer the Little Children: The Fate of Unbaptised Infants and the Development of Doctrine

Dermot Roantree – link to article

In his Irish Journal, German Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll recounted his first time coming across the deserted village on the southern slopes of Slievemore on Achill Island in the mid-1950s.¹ When the locals gave him directions, they mentioned various landmarks to guide him – the church, the post office, the newsagents, the harbour with the shark fishery – but nobody thought to mention the string of nearly one hundred derelict houses perched on the slope of the mountain, looking down towards Keel and the sea cliffs of Minaun beyond. Why would they? The village hadn’t been permanently occupied since Famine times, and it was a good generation since it had even been used for booleying, an Irish form of transhumance, so it had lost any real meaning for them.

For Böll, however, it was a source of awe – enough that he and his family spent five hours there, inspecting each of the abandoned dwellings that lined the ribbon-like road running for several hundred metres between them. The experience brought his own native city of Cologne to mind, comparable in terms of the extent of the destruction but dramatically different in scale, of course. The places were different in another respect too: Cologne had been reduced to rubble by Allied bombers just a few years previously, but this village showed no trace of violence. Time and the elements were the perpetrators here, ‘… time, which patiently trickles over everything; twenty-four great drops of time a day, the acid that eats everything away as imperceptibly as resignation …’²

Seventy years have passed since Böll and his family were there, and time’s devastations are even more apparent now. The derelict houses have been reduced to broken rocky shells, and the road that passed between them is little more than a track, sodden, uneven, and dissected by stream gullies. Stand in this place now and you are likely to sense the almost unnavigable distance between your own world and the ‘lifeworld’ that these houses once sustained. What background understandings and attitudes did the inhabitants of this community take as self-evident, as just the way things are? How did they view life’s purpose? What was their understanding of the good life, or of freedom or responsibility or duty? How did they respond to the experience of love or of suffering – or indeed to the decisive moments of their lives: the emigration of close kin, a failed harvest, hunger, a birth? Or a death?

Remembering ‘the little ones’

There is a concrete indication of the strangeness of the familiar world of historic Irish Catholicism in the cemetery just below the village. Close to the gates there is a small circular memorial space, with a cross, a plaque, and a short bench. The inscription on the plaque reads ‘We remember here the little ones in our cillíní and all those laid to rest outside this consecrated ground.’ ‘The little ones in our cillíní’: the unbaptised infants that had to be buried outside the consecrated grounds of the church. That’s how it was for centuries. If a child died at birth, it would usually be taken from the mother and brought, often at night, to a local cillín, a patch of ground, most often at some borderland, some boundary, close to a cliff or a body of water, for example, and buried there. A slab of stone might mark the place, but the infants were unnamed, so they remained anonymous, unclaimed, in death.

What must this have been like for the mother of the infant? It wasn’t enough that she should suffer the indescribable loss of her child, she must also do without the comforts of the Church. She would never be with her child, and her child would never be with God. The governing theology was clear: one could be saved only through baptism, either in re (the actual imposition of the sacrament) or in voto (by an act of the will, by desire). As infants who died before they could receive baptism in re were incapable of baptism in voto, there was no means by which they could be admitted to heaven. There were two options – two and two only: the unbaptised infant went either to hell or to some third eschatological state, a borderland, just like the cillín in which they were buried, a limbus infantium, a children’s limbo. Heaven was out of the question.

Most Catholics know now, of course, that the Church no longer speaks routinely of limbo. It remains a ‘possible theological hypothesis’,³ but it doesn’t have many advocates. Things began to change in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council. In 1970, the Roman Missal introduced a Mass for unbaptised infants;⁴ in 1980, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) validated the hope that there is a ‘path to salvation’ for them;⁵ in 1983, this was codified in the new Code of Canon Law;⁶ and in 1992, the Catechism of the Catholic Church confirmed the change, making no mention of limbo.

All the Church can do for these infants, the Catechism says, is entrust them to the mercy of God, as she does in her funeral rites for them. Indeed, the great mercy of God who desires that all men should be saved, and Jesus’ tenderness toward children which caused him to say: ‘Let the children come to me, do not hinder them,’ allow us to hope that there is a way of salvation for children who have died without baptism.⁷

And lastly, a much fuller treatment of the change in mind of the Church on this subject was issued by the International Theological Commission (ITC) in 2007, under the title ‘The hope of salvation for infants who die without being baptised’. ⁸ It provides a comprehensive history of the subject and outlines the reasons for the changes; and while the ITC is not a magisterial body, it is closely connected to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (the DDF, a new title for the CDF) and so its publications are official and contribute to the ordinary teaching of the Church.

So, in recent decades – effectively for the first time in its 2,000-year history – the Church has encouraged Catholics to hope for the eternal beatitude of their unbaptised children.

A significant shift in teaching

I have rarely seen this shift receive the attention it deserves as an illuminating instance of doctrinal progress – not to say ‘change’. Limbo isn’t the issue, of course. That was never a doctrine of the Church. The core issue is that it was a longstanding theological conclusion that unbaptised infants cannot attain the beatific vision, one that was often taken to be certain and, in the lead-up to Vatican II, even a teaching of the ordinary universal magisterium and therefore definitive; and now that teaching has been dramatically revised. True, the Church never defined the proposition that these infants are excluded from heaven, but it was all but an inevitable conclusion from multiple magisterial pronouncements from the fifth century to the twentieth. So, what happened that led to the change?

The answer to that question, I think, lies in good part with Vatican II itself. War was the backdrop and the setting for the Council. Vatican II was convened in 1959, less than fifteen years after the end of the second massive global conflict of the century, a world war that brought the death of well over fifty million people and atrocities such as the Holocaust, the saturation bombing of European and Asian cities, and the nuclear explosions that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And just five days after Pope John XXIII opened the Council, in October 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis began, perhaps the nearest the world has ever come to total nuclear devastation.

In his opening address, Pope John warned of ‘the constant danger of fratricidal wars’⁹. And surely his metaphors in describing the tone of the Council were carefully chosen: ‘As for the present time, the Bride of Christ prefers to use the medicine of mercy rather than take up the weapons of severity …’¹⁰ A time for medicine, not for weapons; a time for mercy. The Council was to be pastoral, rather than narrowly dogmatic, which did not mean, as many Vatican II critics have supposed, that its documents were not authoritative or binding. It meant, rather, that the Church had been led by the murderous divisions and disunity between nations and by the many other causes of suffering afflicting humankind to approach the Council in a different frame of mind – to see itself first and foremost not as a hierarchical and juridical entity but as a pilgrim People of God that ‘dwells among creatures who groan and travail in pain’.¹¹ Such a transformed perspective was bound to have a deep impact on its teaching. When you bring mercy to the fore, a number of teachings and disciplines take on quite a different hue. They need to be revisited.

Is it the claim then that the truths of revelation – objective, timeless, and universal – are historically mediated and that the Church’s apprehension of them is subject to the influences of human experience, intellectual movements, and ‘the signs of the times’? Well, yes – to a much greater extent, at least, than many of the critics of the Council would concede. Which is not to relativise truth itself. Truth is absolute, but our access to it is mediated by our means of communicating and understanding, and these are always conditioned by our historical situatedness. Such is incarnate life.

The early Church

Before returning to the Church’s recent change of mind on the fate of unbaptised infants and explaining why I think it is an especially important development, I want to pre-empt the suspicion that the shift since the Council marks a breach in continuity. In one sense, it plainly does. Yet viewed historically, continuity proves to be more complex than often assumed. Must a doctrine always be interpreted in accordance with prior consensus? Does longevity confer legitimacy? Is development merely a matter of drawing out the implicit meaning of settled teachings? Is an appeal to the textual tradition sufficient to determine the legitimacy of a changed or new judgement? These questions are more fraught than might be supposed.

At the beginning of the Christian dispensation, Christ left no room for doubt about the need for sacramental baptism: ‘No one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit.’¹² This was a critical text for St Augustine – utterly unambiguous and an unanswerable repudiation of Pelagius’s denial of original sin and his separation of nature from grace. Adam’s sin, Augustine thought, left human nature fallen, such that the whole person – mind, will, and body – was cut off from God from the start and incapable of being restored to the divine life without the grace of baptism. So newborn babies have an absolute need for the sacrament. Without it they stand condemned. In the afterlife, there is heaven and there is hell. It is certain that unbaptised infants are excluded from heaven, so hell it must be. And hell with punishment too, even if it is of the mildest kind.

It should be noted, though, that Augustine’s stance on this issue would have been viewed by some of the most prominent Fathers that came before him, especially the Cappadocians and the Alexandrians in the East, as theologically troubling, at best. Where they thought Adam’s fall left humans corrupted, Augustine believed it left them condemned. His framing of the question was juridical and forensic, relying on the notions of guilt, debt, condemnation, and punishment that he drew from his knowledge of Roman law. But this was a novel understanding of original sin. It certainly did not satisfy St Vincent of Lérins’s criterion of orthodoxy – quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est (‘that which has been held everywhere, always, and by everyone’).

Nevertheless, it was Augustine who prevailed. In spite of the magisterial authority of Irenaeus, John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nazianzen, Origen, and even Augustine’s own mentor, Ambrose of Milan – none of whom would have countenanced the notion of God punishing with the poena sensus (pain of the senses, as opposed to poena damni, the loss of the beatific vision) where there was no personal agency – it wasn’t long before Augustine’s account of sin and grace became the dominant teaching of the Church. It was echoed in Pope Innocent I’s letter to the synod fathers at Milevum (AD 417), in the canons of the Council of Carthage (AD 418), and by many Latin Fathers over the following centuries. Gregory the Great, for example, writing at the end of the sixth century: ‘For they even receive everlasting torments, who never sinned by their own will. And hence it is written, “Even the infant of a single day is not pure in his sight upon earth.”’¹³

And so things stood at least until the thirteenth century. That’s 800 years! For 800 years at least, Christians understood the sacraments, grace, Christ’s salvific death, and God’s love, justice, and mercy in a way that made it credible that unbaptised infants could pass from the womb directly into the eternal pains of hell. A woman might pray for a child, be overjoyed to find herself pregnant, and offer thanksgiving for God’s goodness and mercy; but then the child might die in utero, and she would have to take it on faith that her infant’s eternal punishment was infinitely just, infinitely merciful, infinitely loving, and that it was for the greater glory of God. A ‘hard saying’ to be sure, but one that churchmen accepted for all that time.

Challenging St Augustine

The first serious challenge to the Augustinian view came from Peter Abelard, who worked within a very different conceptual framework. Twelfth-century France underwent a remarkable renaissance, characterised by what Colin Morris has termed a ‘discovery of the individual’,¹⁴ a heightened attentiveness to agency, intentionality, subjective consciousness, and self-awareness – what Morris calls ‘inwardness’.¹⁵ The arrival of translations of Aristotle contributed a good deal to this shift. Augustine remained the preeminent theologian in the Western Church, but the logical tools and the empirical sensibility of the Aristotelean texts enabled his judgements to be subjected to a scrutiny and at times criticism they had not met before. On unbaptised infants, Abelard insisted, against Augustine, that while the infant may be contaminated by their first parents, they contract the penalty but not the guilt; and not being guilty of ‘contempt of God’, they should not suffer as if they were.¹⁶ And so they are indeed excluded from the beatific vision, but they are not subjected to sensory punishment.

Abelard’s position, importantly supported by his contemporary Peter Lombard, replaced Augustine’s over the following century. Even as early as 1201 it was articulated in a papal document. Writing to the Bishop of Arles, Pope Innocent III stated that ‘the punishment of original sin is the deprivation of the vision of God, but the punishment of actual sin is the torment of eternal hell …’¹⁷ But this mollification of Augustine still left unbaptised infants aware of their loss of the vision of God, which was often held, from the early Church on, to be hell’s greatest pain. By this reckoning, the deceased infants still suffered.

With St Thomas Aquinas, a more comprehensive and generous perspective took shape.¹⁸ The full Aristotelean corpus was available by Aquinas’s time, and it gave him an understanding of the relation between nature and grace that differed in important respects from Augustine’s. He distinguished sharply between the natural end of human life, which could be achieved by reason and virtue, and the supernatural end, which required elevation by grace. Hence, unbaptised infants are kept from fulfilling their supernatural end by the inherited sin of Adam, so they are indeed deprived of the beatific vision; but they don’t have rational agency, so it would be unjust for them to suffer sensory torment, a punishment for wilful acts against right reason and divine law. It would, to invoke the Aristotelean category that guided Aquinas, be disproportionate. Then, going beyond Abelard, Aquinas surmised that when unbaptised infants are excluded from the beatific vision, it doesn’t bring them pain. Knowledge of our supernatural destiny, he held, is a gift of grace, and as unbaptised infants don’t have that grace they quite literally don’t know what they’re missing. They enjoy a state of perfect natural happiness. It’s not heaven, but it’s not strictly hell either. It’s a marginal state, a borderland: limbo. This is an easier prospect for a grieving mother to bear, but it’s cold comfort all the same when your dead child is taken from you in the darkness and buried away from the consecrated cemetery, out by the cliff, in an unmarked grave.

Over the following centuries, beginning as early as the Second Council of Lyons in 1274, the year of Aquinas’s death, the core idea of limbo, that is that unbaptised infants would experience perfect natural happiness but without the beatific vision, became the common teaching of the Church. And it remained so, right up to the Second Vatican Council – that’s another 800 years.

Breaches in continuity?

A pattern is repeated, then, and it holds for instances of doctrinal development on many matters: an event, a change in the intellectual climate, a heresy, new conceptual tools, a brilliant scholar – any of these can be the cause of a shift in how the Church perceives a doctrine. If an emergent interpretation is well grounded, if it honours the full system of Christian thinking and appears to succeed in correcting a problematic or defective aspect of prior formulations, then it may in turn become the dominant understanding, even if the earlier view was (to use a favourite phrase of Newman’s) ‘in possession’ for a very long time.

Do these shifts not amount to breaches in doctrinal continuity, however? Interestingly, it was concern over this very issue that led some of the leading Counter-Reformation figures, especially two Jesuits, Robert Bellarmine and Denis Petau, to try to narrow the gap between the scholastics and Augustine. Bellarmine in particular had built his defence of the Church against the Reformers on the notion of the consensus patrum, the normative moral unanimity of the Fathers. Rome, he insisted, was faithful to this consensus, but the Reformers had abandoned it. It didn’t help Bellarmine’s case that the scholastics had deviated from Augustine, so he tried to re-read Aquinas on unbaptised infants back into conformity with Augustinian doctrine. Essentially, he argued that the infants did indeed experience some pain – they felt sadness at the loss of the vision of God.¹⁹

Importantly, though, this return to Augustine was not taken up by the Church. In fact, in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, popes condemned the Jansenists, who clung to a more austere reading of the Augustinian theology of sin and grace, accusing the post-Tridentine scholastics (especially the Jesuits) of departing from tradition. What the controversy showed, however, was that the Church’s apprehension of tradition was more complex and stratified than a simple appeal to the rule of St Vincent might suggest – a reality Newman would later diagnose with particular clarity. The anthropology and apophatic sensibility in the Greek Fathers, Augustine’s grand vision of the economy of grace, the precise application of rational principles in the scholastics – all of these would contribute to the texture of the Church’s intellectual tradition even when each of them had been tempered by later lines of enquiry.

As Newman repeatedly stressed, a living organism should change over time. And if that organism has an intellective life – as the Church of Christ does – if it has a psychology, if it ponders in its heart and grows in wisdom, then its life will require repeated qualifications, clarifications, the rectification of distortions, the articulation of new judgements, and so on – and all this without rupturing the fundamental ‘type’ that guides it. Newman compared this to the progress of a ‘popular leader’. He may go through a variety of professions, he may court parties and break with them, he may contradict himself in words, and undo his own measures, yet there may be a steady fulfilment of certain objects, or adherence to certain plain doctrines, which gives a unity to his career, and impresses on beholders an image of directness and large consistency which shows a fidelity to his type from first to last.²⁰

So, yes, the Church has changed on the matter of unbaptised infants, as it has changed on many other fronts. The history of the development of Christological and trinitarian doctrines, of purgatory, the canonical form of marriage, baptism, atonement, slavery, papal supremacy, and religious freedom – all of these show aspects of this same pattern of change. Yet in each case, Newman’s ‘large consistency’ shows throughout the narrative, even if it is not clear at the time.

The critical question

Whatever about the question of the natural happiness of deceased unbaptised infants, on one issue the tradition was decisive: they were excluded from heaven. Without defining the matter explicitly, the sixteenth-century Council of Trent (1545–1563) echoed early councils like Carthage (418) and the medieval councils of Lyons (1274) and Florence (1431–1449) in defending infant baptism on the grounds of John 3:5: ‘unless one is born of water and the Spirit, one cannot enter the kingdom of God.’²¹ It had to follow, then, that infants who remained unbaptised at death were excluded from God’s kingdom, so this remained the undisputed common teaching of the Church for the following 400 years. No surprise then that there were moves to have it defined explicitly at each of the two Vatican councils. A draft constitution of the Church at Vatican I proposed this, but it was never voted on.²² And at Vatican II, the Preparatory Theological Commission urged that it be addressed, not because the matter itself was so serious, but in order to defend the Church’s ordinary and universal magisterium. ²³ In the first decades of the twentieth century there had been many theological efforts to find a way to beatitude for unbaptised infants – something the commission considered to be ‘by no means an innocent matter’, which is why they thought the common teaching needed to be put beyond question.²⁴ Pope Pius XII had been unequivocal about the teaching in his allocution to Italian midwives in 1951:

The state of grace is absolutely necessary at the moment of death. Without it salvation and supernatural happiness – the beatific vision of God – are impossible. An act of love is sufficient for the adult to obtain sanctifying grace and to supply the lack of baptism; to the still unborn or newly born this way is not open.²⁵

Having it declared in the constitution of an ecumenical council would surely copper-fasten the matter. Clearly, if this doctrine couldn’t be placed beyond all doubt, what doctrine could? But the council fathers didn’t take the question up. So here we are, fifty years after Vatican II and the Church no longer thinks it must believe that unbaptised infants cannot enter heaven. It is not saying that they are certainly with God, but for the first time, through its prayer, its liturgy, and its theological judgements, it acknowledges the possibility and encourages the hope that they are. That hope alone marks a significant change in teaching. You cannot hope for something that cannot be. And it should be added that theological hope is not the same as ordinary human hope. It is more than a mere aspiration, an act of optimism, or a projection of desire for a future outcome. It rests in the promise and the fidelity of God. In other words, it is not merely psychological; it is covenantal.

Of all shifts in the understanding of the fate of unbaptised infants, this one is undoubtedly the largest. Going from holding out no real hope of beatitude (though not defining the loss dogmatically) to asserting the grounds for hope and actively encouraging it – one can understand why it might be taken to be a breach in continuity. Yet Newman warned against jumping to such conclusions based only on how things seem:

Ideas may remain, when the expression of them is indefinitely varied; and we cannot determine whether a professed development is truly such or not, without some further knowledge than an experience of the mere fact of this variation. Nor will our instinctive feelings serve as a criterion. It must have been an extreme shock to St Peter to be told he must slay and eat beasts, unclean as well as clean, though such a command was implied already in that faith which he held and taught … ²⁶

The critical point here is that the seeds of change were contained all along in the governing principles. Sometimes it just takes a new set of circumstances to bring forth new fruit.

Why change now?

The new set of circumstances regarding the fate of unbaptised infants, as I have said, was the unprecedented scale of violence and human suffering in the first half of the twentieth century and the lingering prospect of even greater ruination. What mattered in the face of all that was that the Church in council should attend firstly, as the opening sentence of Gaudium et Spes puts it, to ‘the joys and hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted’.²⁷ In other words, the pastoral dimension had to be brought to the fore.

It is this, I think, that makes the recent changes regarding unbaptised infants exceptional and significant. Multiple efforts to find a theological route to heaven for them had proved unsuccessful, yet the Church went ahead and paved a way in any case.²⁸ Pastoral considerations and a bold confidence in God’s mercy took the lead, and theology and law were left to catch up. It’s not as if there was no theological premise for the change, but the usual reliance on a linear, cumulative trail of proof-texts was not in evidence.

In the 2007 document of the ITC, the authors explain that it was ‘pressing pastoral needs’ that made the matter urgent.²⁹ They mention the drop-off in the number of children being baptised, as well as abortion and in vitro fertilisation. Also, a new attentiveness to the voices of women who had undergone miscarriages, including in circumstances like the ones in Achill’s past. ‘Parents experience great grief and feelings of guilt’, the document says, ‘when they do not have the moral assurance of the salvation of their children, and people find it increasingly difficult to accept that God is just and merciful if he excludes infants, who have no personal sins, from eternal happiness, whether they are Christian or non-Christian.’

Another critically important feature is introduced in this document, namely the role of the ‘hierarchy of truths’ in the determination of doctrine. Derivative doctrines may not be read against the accepted meaning of higher order truths. When issues arise in relation to divorcees or migrants or transgender people or schismatics or whoever else, whatever judgement the Church makes it must not run against or compromise the most profound truths of revelation – God’s infinite and indefatigable love of every human soul, God’s burning desire that every soul be saved, God’s infinite justice and mercy, the absolute dignity of every person, Christ’s special attention to children and to the poor, and so on. If the documentary tradition suggests otherwise, well then, it needs to be reinterpreted! The ITC conveys this idea as follows in relation to the salvation of the unbaptised:

From a theological point of view, the development of a theology of hope and an ecclesiology of communion, together with a recognition of the greatness of divine mercy, challenge an unduly restrictive view of salvation. In fact, the universal salvific will of God and the correspondingly universal mediation of Christ mean that all theological notions that ultimately call into question the very omnipotence of God, and his mercy in particular, are inadequate.³⁰

Extending this sense of things to the rest of the document’s contents, the commission is effectively saying something along these lines: We acknowledge that the necessity of baptism is a de fide doctrine of the Church. But it is also certain that God wants every soul to be saved, that God provides all the grace needed for this, that punishing infants who are not guilty of actual sin offends against justice, and that God is not limited by the sacraments. And even though we have no clear idea of how to reconcile these doctrines, we leave that to God and make our judgement anyway, guided by the priority of God’s mercy and by pastoral needs.

So, the prospective logic of the logician is upended. A different logic comes into play. A theo-logic, so to speak.³¹ Time must pass, as Newman always insisted, before the coherence and the aptness of the Church’s judgement is made apparent. This is precisely what he meant by ‘logical sequence’ as one of the notes of legitimate development of doctrine – not, as conservative appropriations of Newman often suggest, a norm that prospectively guides and restrains magisterial judgements, but the clarity of hindsight whereby we can look back and see what was happening with developments that were contested or seemed ambiguous at the time.³² It is with retrospect, Newman thought, that we can see the Spirit working in the Church.

Conclusion

Newman began his Essay on the Development of Doctrine by moving away from the full reliance on St Vincent of Lérins’s rule that had sustained his Anglican life. He didn’t reject it altogether, of course, but he noted ‘a general defect in its serviceableness’.³³ How helpful is it to say that orthodoxy is a matter of holding only to ‘what has been believed everywhere, always, and by everyone’? The terms are unclear, and it doesn’t necessarily help in distinguishing between legitimate and corrupt developments. Applying it requires ‘practical judgement and good sense’. The same, I think, should be said of the criterion of continuity. There’s an implicit note of caution about it, perhaps, in Pope Benedict XVI’s famous address to the Roman Curia in 2005, where, talking about Vatican II, he distinguishes between a ‘hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture’ and … not a ‘hermeneutic of continuity’, as you might expect and in spite of the fond misremembrance of some commentators, but a ‘hermeneutic of reform’, one that contains a ‘combination of continuity and discontinuity at different levels’.³⁴ Telling those levels apart is a difficult task, but the concept of a hierarchy of truths provides some guidance.

Another interpretive principle should accompany the hierarchy of truths. It is that the definitive self-disclosure of God is Jesus Christ. All revelation is ordered to and culminates in him. Which means, of course, that whatever useful work the criterion of continuity might do, it is subordinate to the ultimate norm of conformity with Christ – specifically, as St Paul tells the Corinthians, ‘Jesus Christ and him crucified’.³⁵ Christ the victim, the sufferer, the afflicted, has absolute hermeneutical priority in Christian reflection.

In the Gospels, Christ unfailingly shows tenderness to the afflicted – to the poor, the ill, the persecuted. Also, in a special way, to children. ‘Suffer little children, and forbid them not to come unto me,’ he says, ‘for of such is the kingdom of Heaven.’³⁶ It is this moment of Christ’s tenderness, as well as his express desire that all be saved, that the Church invokes to justify departing from the teaching that unbaptised infants are excluded from heaven.³⁷ It seems remarkable – not to say scandalous – that it took it 2,000 years to do so.

Dr Dermot Roantree works in communications for the Irish Jesuit Province and is the current editor of Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review.

Notes

1. Heinrich Böll, Irish Journal (Melville House, 2011), chapter 5, ‘Skeleton of a Human Habitation’. Originally published in German as Irisches Tagebuch (Cologne, 1957).
2. Böll, Irish Journal, ch. 5.
3. International Theological Commission, The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die without Being Baptised (The Holy See, 2007), introduction.
4. Ordo Exsequiarum (1969), arts. 231–237.
5. Pastoralis Actio (The Holy See, 1980).
6. Code of Canon Law (The Holy See, 1983), can. 1183, art. 2.
7. Catechism of the Catholic Church (The Holy See, 1993), art. 1261.
8. International Theological Commission, The Hope of Salvation.
9. Pope John XXIII, ‘Address of His Holiness at the Solemn Opening of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council’, 11 October 1962, www.vatican.va/content/john-xxiii/it/speeches/1962/ documents/hf_j-xxiii_spe_19621011_opening-council.html
10. Pope John XXIII, ‘Address’: ‘Quanto al tempo presente, la Sposa di Cristo preferisce usare la medicina della misericordia invece di imbracciare le armi del rigore …’
11. Lumen Gentium (The Holy See, 1964), ch. 7, art. 48.
12. John 3:5.
13. St Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job, IX, art. 32.
14. Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual: 1050–1200 (Harper & Row, 1972). See also Walter Ullmann, The Individual in Medieval Society (The Johns Hopkins Press, 1966), especially for the significance of this new humanism in relation to the public sphere – from the individual as subject to the individual as citizen.
15. Morris, Discovery of the Individual, p. 4.
16. See, for example, D. E. Luscombe (trans.), Peter Abelard’s Ethics (Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 21–27.
17. Heinrich Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum: Compendium of Creeds, Definitions, and Declarations on Matters of Faith and Morals (Ignatius Press, 2012), art. 410: ‘Poena originalis peccati est carentia visionis Dei, actualis vero poena peccati est gehennae perpetuae cruciatus …’
18. St Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Abelard, II, D. 33, Q. 2, A. 2; Summa Theologiae, Supplement, Q. 71, art. vii; De Malo, V, art. iii.
19. This notion had already appeared in Dante’s Inferno (canto 4, lines 26–28). In the first circle of hell, the poet sees the unbaptised who have not sinned, including infants, uttering ‘sighs which caused the eternal air to tremble; these resulted from grief without torture’ (sospiri / che l’aura etterna facevan tremare;/ ciò avvenia di duol sanza martìri). So, even with the Church’s embrace of the Thomistic position, there long remained an unease with the idea of souls feeling no sorrow at the loss of the beatific vision.
20. John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, ch. 5, sect. 1, para 3.
21. See Council of Trent, Fifth Session, Decree on Original Sin (Decretum de peccato originali), ch. 4.
22. Francis A. Sullivan, ‘The Development of Doctrine about Infants Who Die Unbaptised’, Theological Studies, 72 (2011), p. 4.
23. Giuseppe Alberigo (ed.); English version edited by Joseph A. Komonchak, History of Vatican II, Volume 1: Announcing and Preparing Vatican Council II toward a New Era in Catholicism (Orbis; Leuven, 1995), p. 310.
24. For an impressively detailed account of these efforts, see William Van Roo SJ, ‘Infants Dying without Baptism: A Survey of Recent Literature and Determination of the State of the Question’, Gregorianum, 35:3 (1954), pp. 406–473. Van Roo assesses multiple approaches, ones that rested on the faith of the parents or on the faith of the Church, or ones which viewed death in infancy as a kind of baptism of blood, or others that proposed that these infants could harbour an unconscious desire for the sacrament. His conclusion, though, was that none of them succeeded in explaining how the salvation of unbaptised infants could make theological sense. ‘The nub of the whole question’, he wrote, ‘is the impossibility of baptism in voto.’
25. Pope Pius XII, ‘Address to Midwives on the Nature of Their Profession’, 29 October 1951, https:// www.papalencyclicals.net/pius12/p12midwives.htm
26. Newman, Essay on Development, ch. 5, sect. 1, para. 7.
27. Gaudium et Spes (The Holy See 1965), art. 1.
28. See Van Roo, ‘Infants Dying without Baptism’.
29. International Theological Commission, The Hope of Salvation, introduction, art. 1.
30. International Theological Commission, The Hope of Salvation, introduction, art. 2
31. Jan Hendrik Walgrave, in Unfolding Revelation: The Nature of Doctrinal Development (Hutchinson & Co., 1972), distinguishes between logical and theological theories of development. See especially chapters 7 and 9.
32. See Newman, Essay on Development, ch. 5, sect. 4 and ch. 9.
33. Newman, Essay on Development, introduction, para. 8.
34. Pope Benedict XVI, ‘Address to the Roman Curia’, 22 December 2005, www.vatican.va/content/ benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2005/december/documents/hf_ben_xvi_spe_20051222_roman-curia. html
35. 1 Corinthians 2:2.
36. Matthew 19:14 (twenty-first century King James Version).
37. International Theological Commission, The Hope of Salvation, introduction, art. 5.