Watch out for the forest

I pray that Fr. McBrien realizes how beautiful the forest is when one isn't focused on how many trees his ego can chop down.

Anamchara: FR. RICHARD MCBRIEN AND LIMBO

It reminded me of watching an old horror film from the thirties: the creaking and groaning of an opening coffin. I expected to see the corpse of Pelagius, disgraced Celtic monk (who denied Original Sin) rising from the dead, but it was just Fr. Richard McBrien offering us his take on the rescinded Limbo teaching from the Vatican. As always, he gets it wrong and takes us back to Pelagianism: his quote:

"If there's no limbo and we're not going to revert to St. Augustine's teaching that unbaptized infants go to hell, we're left with only one option, namely, that everyone is born in the state of grace," said the Rev. Richard McBrien, professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame.

Nothing upsets me more than a fellow priest and theologian twisting Catholic teaching to mean whatever he wants it to mean. The new Vatican line on Limbo has to do with God's mercy, not the reality of Original Sin. The bottom line is, we do not know what happens to unbaptized infants or adults who die. We just don't know for certain. Never have, never will until we enter, hopefully, eternal glory. Just like Pelagius, Fr. McBrien negates the necessity of Baptism to wipe away Original Sin, and just like Pelagius, he is wrong.

The bottom line is this, the Mercy of God is bigger than we can fathom. We can't presume to judge what God is doing outside the normal means of salvation (Baptism). A recent article in the Crisis Magazine stated this quite well regarding friends and family who die outside the Church or in the state of Mortal Sin. Justice is reserved to God and He alone can judge the heart of another. We certainly can't, so for us they only need is to pray for their souls.