Religion: Suffer the Little Children

“Unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” These words of Jesus in John 3:5, apparently slamming heaven’s door on all who have never been cleansed of original sin by baptism, have made perplexing problems for theologians through the centuries. As a loophole for adults who are pious but ignorant of the faith, such as savages and those who died before Christ, the Roman Catholic Church recognizes a “baptism of desire,” and Protestant churches in general let the question rest upon the mercy of God. But the case of unbaptized infants is a more poignant matter.

St. Augustine, for one, consigned them to the eternal flames of hell, though the thought distressed him. “I am, believe me, beset by no small difficulties,” he wrote, “and I am quite at a loss what to answer. Though I cannot define the nature of their damnation, yet I do not dare to say that it would have been better for them not to exist than to exist as they now are.” Martin Luther agreed with Augustine. John Calvin sidestepped the issue by stressing predestination; if an infant was elected for salvation, Calvin held, lack of baptism could not keep him from it, and if he was damned to hell, baptism could not save him. Beginning with Thomas Aquinas, Catholics began to consign unbaptized children to a fringe of hell called Limbo (from the Latin limbus, meaning hem or border), in which they exist in a state as happy as possible for worldly creatures but are denied for all eternity the supreme happiness of heaven.

The late Father Vincent Wilkin, S.J., Roman Catholic chaplain at England’s University of Liverpool, was agonized by the problem. “There must be a solution somewhere,” he wrote, and he left behind him a book, From Limbo to Heaven (Sheed & Ward; $3), in which he tried to puzzle out a solution for the dilemma of the children.

In Jesuit Wilkin’s solution, unbaptized babies get into heaven, but not until the end of the world. On the last day, when Christian dogma holds that Christ will come again to judge the living and the dead, the Gospel specifies that there will be a general resurrection of all who have died since the world’s beginning—including those in hell.

This in effect will put an end to the institution of death, which dogma says is a consequence of original sin. Thus, Father Wilkin argues, original sin will obviously be wiped from the books along with death. And since the only sin the unbaptized infants have against their account is original sin, they will then be free to enter into heaven. Grownups have committed other sins, and in the Last Judgment they will be condemned to expiate them in purgatory or suffer for them forever in hell, but not so the babies. “The unbaptized infants go to heaven.” writes Father Wilkin, plainly delighted to have found a just solution to a dilemma that has made Catholic theologians uneasy for centuries.