Limbo

Limbo had a nice, 800-year run, said Ian Fisher in The New York Times, but the final curtain is about to come down. After a recent review by a panel of leading Catholic theologians, the Vatican is moving to delete limbo as one of the realms of the afterlife. Limbo was never an official church teaching; it was invented by St. Thomas Aquinas and other medieval Catholic theologians as a destination for babies who died before they were baptized and cleansed of original sin. Rather than go to hell, Aquinas theorized, such babies—and worthy pagans and Jews—would go to a waiting room in the afterlife where no one suffered, but where God was not present. Today, though, limbo has fallen out of favor as an