ex limbus infantium
“I've done everything the Bible says, even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff,” Ned Flanders, The Simpsons.
As religions that have helped shape the last two thousand years go a recent change within the laws of the Catholic Church got me wondering what exactly is going on behind closed doors.
The appeal of Catholicism has always been a bit of a mystery to me, though I recognize that despite its tenets not making a whole lot of sense many, many people have been happy to go along with the story about an invisible sky father and ghost and son who is sometimes a lamb and sometimes not and how we should all follow these religious laws given to us, written in stone no less, because it is what the father and ghost and son who is sometimes a lamb wants. In polite society you are not suppose to question any of this because these laws are fixed and unchanging and things in an organic world that don't change are either cancerous or divine but usually not both. So it doesn't really matter if you are cynical or a true believer since we still base large parts of our Western society and government around these laws. The Anti-Choice movement is very fond of saying that their battle to restrict the rest of us from free and safe birth control and sex education is justified because of these same laws, since without them they'd just be sex-fearing, women-hating bigots and who wants to wake up in the morning and have to admit that?
And yet here is the problem, the Pope recently did away with one of a theological concept of their faith, Limbo, claiming “it has never been a definitive truth” and that it is a “theological hypothesis.” Still, a lot of people believe in the idea, Thomas Aquinas writes about it. It was the place Dante banished the philosophers to. The place where the souls of children “go if they die before they can be baptised” and a major part of the argument the Anti-Choice proponents use to try to ban medical abortions for women, since they say it damns the unborn soul to Limbo. Except that there isn't a Limbo now and that [the] “Vatican concluded that all children who die do so in the expectation of the universal salvation … whether baptised or not.” Which means that these laws aren't fixed and unchanging. One day at the whim of an old man one belief that yesterday an entire religion claimed to be true gets thrown out the window because it is a “theological hypothesis.” What other beliefs that grossly limit our personal freedoms will one day get overturned as pure religious speculation as well? Why is Limbo wrong and a ban on gay marriage right?
Part of me knows it doesn't really matter if Catholic fine print gets changed or not. There will always be men and women who fear the human body and all its desires strong enough to use any excuse to keep it in chains. And yet part of me is also intensely curious how this will effect all those people who feel they are on first name basis with the divine mysteries of the world.
How can you un-damn damned Gallileo?
How can you get rid of Hell's first circle,
Limbo, where all the unborn children go?
One more reason to vote Pro-Choice. Menstrual
blood beats Papal Law; one never changes,
one flip-flops – Oi! mellow! it's just belief.
Who cares if the God-wad cuts whole pages
from the Catholic faith? Sure it's a relief
to say, “oops, me bad.” After all, the Fall?
Limbo? Hell? — so 3rd century zealous.
So what if you never believed in all
of this? Rule 1: never name the Nameless.
Damn! Show some respect, it's a mystery.
No ghost or lamb or law for me, just She.