Many religious people don't dare point out how dubious the beliefs of other religions may be, for fear that their own beliefs will be subjected to the same scrutiny.  Far from fearing such scrutiny, however, "Liberals Like Christ" invite it.  Thanks to criticism and arguments with our readers we have corrected and improved our views in the past and look forward to doing so again and again in the future.
        But where the Catholic Church is concerned, despite the fact that neither science, history, personal experience nor "revelation" provide any reliable information about the world beyond the one we are all in now, "Holy Mother the Church" has claimed for ages to know all kinds of things about what happens to people after they die.  In this page, we will explore what the church claims to know about Purgatory, Indulgences, Limbo, and the "assumption" of Mary's body into heaven.

        "Pope Benedict (XVI) is about to do a remarkable thing: kick Limbo into Limbo. [ See Oct. 6, 2006 BBC article].

        Remember the old catechism? Limbo is that part of hell where unbaptised babies go when they die. Hell for babies? That always sounded harsh. Yet what choice did the Church have?
        Traditionally, baptism is the essential gateway to heaven. Without it, St Augustine said, hell loomed. Though parents in the congregation shifted their feet and voiced their protests, he insisted that little babies had to suffer for ever because scripture said, "Unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Spirit, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of heaven." King Herod would have licked his lips.
        Augustine did make one concession. Babies suffered only the mildest punishment. Mind you, it was still absolutely awful because humans are made to see God and if they don't, their whole being suffers.
        Eight centuries passed before St Thomas Aquinas came up with Limbo, a place of natural happiness for unbaptised babies who, by definition, had not committed any personal sin. For the next 700 years, Rome taught that Limbo is a kind of play centre for babies without any adult supervision. It was far more densely populated than heaven or hell.
        I once entertained an elderly couple to dinner. Soon after their marriage, they'd had a stillborn child. In those days, unbaptised babies were not buried in the church graveyard but in scrubland with derelicts, heretics and murderers. When their priest tried to console them by saying at least their baby was happy in Limbo, they never went inside a church again.
        One silver-haired lady told me that in her twenties her son had been stillborn. She was desolate. Even in winter she used to creep out of the house at night with a coat over her nightdress to kneel by her baby's grave to keep him warm.
        When Pope Benedict was head of the Holy Office, he said of Limbo, "Personally, speaking as a theologian and not as head of the Congregation, I would drop something that has always been only a theological hypothesis."
        In the New Catholic Catechism, he omitted all references to Limbo. God's mercy and Jesus' tenderness towards children "allow us to hope that there is a way of salvation for children who have died without Baptism". Now he is awaiting a report from a group of theologians who are said to be recommending that Limbo be officially dispensed with.
        This has its problems. Rome teaches that a human being exists at the moment of conception. That human is tainted with original sin that can only be cleansed by baptism. What other mechanism is there for cleansing them of this sin?
        John Paul spoke of abortion as murder. He intimated it was worse than murder because a human is killed without a chance of baptism and, therefore, with no hope of eternal life. Still, in 1995, he told women who had murdered their babies to beg their forgiveness. How could they forgive if they were not in the presence of the Lord?
        Nearly 40 years ago, in a book called "Christ and Original Sin", I proposed a solution that some bishops called heretical. I suspect Rome will very soon adopt something like it.
        We should think of original sin not as a personal but as a communal taint. All of us from birth are caught up in two universal realities. The first is the combined sin of the world, the second is the shared goodness of humankind. Babies are born into both. In baptism, they are officially enrolled in the zone of grace that Jesus called the Kingdom of God.
        A baby who dies before baptism doesn't need it. He or she goes straight to God, for baptism is a sacrament of the living, not the dying. A baby dying without baptism doesn't die in original sin but out of original sin."

        "The trouble with the Vatican, a priest said to me, is it's always changing its mind.
        Take Limbo. Till recently it was very important. Now it has disappeared off the radar screen.
        Small children were once warned of what to do if they came across a dying baby and no priest was present. They had to pour water over the little one's head while saying the baptismal words. If words and pouring were not simultaneous, the poor wee thing would go not to heaven, only to Limbo.
        Doctors and nurses attending women in childbirth were told to baptise a baby in the womb if it was likely to die before birth, using a syringe.
        A devout Catholic couple told me of their terror at the thought of their baby being run down by a car on the way to church for baptism. They'd never see him again in this life or the next.
        Limbo was always a problem in the developing world when most babies died unbaptised. Rome simply said they could not be saved.
        The situation worsened when geneticists found that perhaps three quarters of embryos are aborted without the woman knowing it. This meant, according to the Vatican, that most humans have to be snatched out of the drain by their guardian angels and transported to Limbo.
        Now we're being told, without a word of apology to bereaved parents, that the popes got it all wrong for well over 1500 years. Why should we trust them any more?"