Remember limbo, that place where the Catholic Church teaches that babies go if they die before being baptized because they do not deserve either heaven or hell?
Pope John Paul showed on Thursday that he still muses about one of the more forgotten elements of Catholic theology commonly associated with medieval thinking.
He asked theologians to think about it harder and come up with "a more coherent and enlightened way" of describing the fate of such innocents.
According to Catholic teaching, baptism removes the original sin which has stained all souls since the fall from grace in the Garden of Eden.
The Pope made his comments in an address to the International Theological Commission, which is discussing, in the Pope's words "the fate of babies born without baptism." Limbo, which comes from the Latin word meaning "border" or "edge," is a state or place reserved for the unbaptized dead, including good people who lived before the first coming of Christ.
In the Divine Comedy, Dante passes limbo on his way into hell and writes:
"Great grief seized on my own heart when this I heard, Because some people of much worthiness I knew, who in Limbo were suspended."