Puppies, Flowers, Rainbows and Kittens

from Vatican abolishes the concept of limbo (Seattle Times)

A church decision to abolish limbo has long been expected.

Benedict and his predecessor, the late Pope John Paul II, expressed misgivings about the concept. Benedict, when he was still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and the church’s top enforcer of dogma, said he viewed limbo as a mere “theological hypothesis.”

The document published Friday said the question of limbo has become a “matter of pastoral urgency” because of the growing number of babies who do not receive the baptismal rite. Especially in Africa and other parts of the world where Catholicism is growing but has competition from other faiths such as Islam, high infant-mortality rates mean many families live with a church teaching them that their babies could not go to heaven.

I can understand the concept in a religion where scholars are always researching and interpreting the documents of the faith and are continually presenting and debating the meanings.

That isn’t the way the Catholic church (or for that matter, any main-line Christian church that I can think of) works. The church is infallible, the interpretation of the bible via the leaders of the faith is always correct.

So when the leaders change their mind on a central tenant of the faith like this to make it easier to recruit new members, it leads to an existential crisis of faith for everyone. What about those horrified mothers in previous decades whose children died before baptism preventing them from going to heaven. Does this rule change mean that their children actually went to heaven, or are still stuck in limbo, or are in hell?

What hard and fast rule that has been a continual test of belief for the last couple hundred years are they going to change next?

Two new articles came out recently that show that the administration is uncowed in their attempts to control the truth and eliminate the perception of dissent.

First of all is this article from the Seattle Times describing how the defense in a 1st ammendment case stemming from the 2005 ejection of a George Bush “town hall” meeting of two people for having a “liberal” bumper sticker on their car is legal because “the president’s staff can lawfully remove anyone who expresses points of view different from his.” (quote from the Times, not the lawyers)

Secondly is this opinion piece, from the New York Times, which makes a convincing argument that the lawyer firing case is really about the perception that the Bush administration was trying to plant that the Democrats have been tampering with elections (possibly to deflect the view that the Republicans have been tampering with elections).