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Perhaps you might publish the following letter on your website?
The controversy over an unmarked Midlands burial site for unbaptised babies should serve as a sad and chilling reminder of the heartache generated by the Catholic Church’s cruel teaching on “Limbo”.
Up to quite recently, it was more or less Catholic teaching that babies who died before receiving the sacrament of baptism were dispatched by God to this brooding, shadowy place, a kind of Industrial School in the sky for infants who didn’t qualify for Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory.
You could pray for the souls in Purgatory to persuade God to commute their sentences or give them time off for good behaviour. But you could do nothing for babies that happened to miss out on the clerical abracadabra routine.
Many of the hundreds of babies buried on what the Church calls “unconsecrated” ground on that stretch of land in Sligo- and other similar burial grounds throughout Ireland- received no final farewell or blessing from the Men in Black.
What a strange and downright sadistic God we Irish were asked to believe in. At around the same time that innocent babies were being blacklisted by the Holy Men, a lot of allegedly Unholy Women were serving their sentences in the Magdalene Laundries. They had given birth to babies out of wedlock, which was a crime in the eyes of the Church whether the babies were baptised or not.
The effect of the crazy Limbo teaching on parents who had lost babies must have been horrendous. I like to think that most of them refused to accept- in their hearts if not openly- this hideous stigmatisation of innocent human beings.
The idea that an all-wise creator would punish babies is even more absurd and incongruous than the spectacle of the Pope’s singing duet in Galway preaching the One True Faith to the “Young people of Ireland.”
Bishop Casey and Father Cleary had on many occasions underlined the sweet virtues of the celibate priestly life, while both of them had secret lovers, contrary to Catholic teaching. While denying women the right to be ordained as priests, the two lads had no problem using them as “bits on the side”.
I believe in an afterlife, and I believe that the babies whose bodies were shunned by the Church are angels of the highest order. I certainly don’t believe that they had to wait around in Limbo until such time as the Church decided the place didn’t exist.
It had just thought Limbo existed, owing to what might be deemed a rather serious clerical error.
I respect the right of any church or religious grouping to “preach the good news”, even if the news doesn’t always sound particularly good and often doesn’t appear to make any sense. But when religion causes deep psychological hurt to people who are innocent of any wrongdoing, it should be seen for the negative influence it is.
One small way that the Catholic Church could make amends to the families who suffered during the “Limbo Era” would be to hold special services at all “unconsecrated” burial grounds.
Such a gesture would have healing potential. It might also help us to come to terms with the downside of what passed for religion in Holy Ireland.