Something funny happened this last week that reminded me of this thread, so I thought I would post it up. First of all, I'm mostly agnostic and my wife is catholic. She wants to do the whole baptism thing for our 3 month old, which I'm fine with.
So we had to go to this class for parents and godparents in order to be allowed to have the baptism. The teacher (a deacon, which I gather is below a priest in the catholic hierarchy) told us that up until 1975, the church taught that babies who died before being baptised could not enter heaven, and would stuck in limbo/purgatory after death. However, in 1975 the church decided that mankind should not be allowed to assume what god wanted for the afterlife of infants, so now they say that "the Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God."
So basically, all the un-baptised babies that died before 1975 went to limbo, and no one knows what happened to all the ones after 1975. Doesn't make sense to me, and my wife couldn't really explain it to me either.
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