Ever since Christianity's inception, Christians have reflected on, discussed, proclaimed, taught and debated the meaning of the mysteries that comprise its core beliefs, such as the Incarnation, the Cross, the Resurrection, sacraments, and the word of God. Of course, those mysteries are rooted in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. It seems likely enough that even his contemporaries were trying to make sense of his words and deeds. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the New Testament understands that interpretation is discernible throughout the New Testament itself, as Paul’s letters and the so-called Letter to the Hebrews attest. The Gospel texts themselves are not straight reportage; they contain interpretive passages, such as Matthew’s citations of Old Testament prophecies being fulfilled, Mark’s interpretation of the parable of the seeds and the sower in 4:13-20, and the commentary that John intersperses at various points in his gospel, such as the famous verse at 3:17 (“God loved the world so much that he sent his only Son …”). And beyond those specific passages, it’s recognized that each of the four canonical Gospels were written as theological interpretations.
Within Roman Catholicism, theological reflection and interpretation
over the course of two millennia has resulted in the construction of a
capacious edifice of systematic theological thought. That edifice, as a source and an elaboration of
truth, is a reason to rejoice.
Yet paradoxes, ambiguities and contradictions persist.
Unbaptized children who die
Among the difficulties yet to be resolved in the church’s thought is the problem of children who die before baptism. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, at paragraph 1257, states with concision the core of the problem: “The Church does not know of any means other than Baptism that assures entry into eternal beatitude”.
Among the difficulties yet to be resolved in the church’s thought is the problem of children who die before baptism. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, at paragraph 1257, states with concision the core of the problem: “The Church does not know of any means other than Baptism that assures entry into eternal beatitude”.
We might think of the problem of unbaptized children who die
as a special subset of the larger problem of humans who die without being
baptized. This problem has many
branches: what of those who never have had the Good News proclaimed to
them? What of Jews, who are not baptized
but to whom God has made covenant promises which he has not revoked? What of those whose reception of the Good
News has been tainted because it has been proclaimed by preachers whose personal
lives have been in grave conflict with Christianity's moral code? Underlying all these problematic use cases is
a conviction that God is merciful, and a merciful God who desires that we be
with him wouldn’t permit insurmountable barriers to be erected to prevent our being with him. Yet the New
Testament and our tradition force us to recognize that ending up outside the
doors, wailing and gnashing our teeth, is not impossible; and our contemporary
readiness to simply set aside this unhappy possibility without serious
engagement and personal examination probably says a good deal more about us than it does about the authentic Christian tradition.
Unbaptized children are a special category of the larger
problem because we recognize that children lack the agency of adults; children lack
the maturity to be responsible for their decisions. Indeed, infants are so early in their
development that there is no possibility for them to make any moral decisions whatsoever;
certainly, they are not able to sin.
Thus the conundrum: baptism is necessary for their salvation; yet infants
and children are unable to choose it for themselves; and they also are too
young to commit any sins that would wound or sever their relationship with God.
In 2007, the Holy See’s International Theological Commission
(ITC) published a document entitled “The
Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die without Being Baptized”. It’s not a short document, but for people
with an interest in the topic, it’s worth blocking off an hour or so to read it. In its very first paragraph,
it states the pastoral practicality of the topic:
In
the contemporary context of cultural relativism and religious pluralism the
number of non-baptized infants has grown considerably, and therefore the
reflection on the possibility of salvation for these infants has become urgent.
On a personal note, I can state that at least one
among my nieces and nephews never has been baptized. Also, my wife has experienced more than one
miscarriage, and several of our friends also have experienced miscarriages and
stillbirths. And then there are the unborn children who die via abortion, a problem to which the ITC pays almost
no attention in its document, but which, for a faithful Catholic, must stand as one of the
chief objections to accepting the practice of abortion. So the interest in this topic certainly is
more than theoretical.
Limbo?
We of a certain age are familiar with one possible way to untangle this knot of contradictions and anxiety: limbo. (My children, now young adults, who attended Catholic school, never were exposed to the speculation about limbo.) In its second paragraph, the ITC document recaps the church’s official view of limbo:
We of a certain age are familiar with one possible way to untangle this knot of contradictions and anxiety: limbo. (My children, now young adults, who attended Catholic school, never were exposed to the speculation about limbo.) In its second paragraph, the ITC document recaps the church’s official view of limbo:
It is clear that the
traditional teaching on this topic has concentrated on the theory of limbo, understood as a state which includes the souls of infants
who die subject to original sin and without baptism, and who, therefore,
neither merit the beatific vision, nor yet are subjected to any punishment,
because they are not guilty of any personal sin. This theory, elaborated by
theologians beginning in the Middle Ages, never entered into the dogmatic
definitions of the Magisterium, even if that same Magisterium did at times
mention the theory in its ordinary teaching up until the Second Vatican
Council. It remains therefore a possible theological hypothesis. However, in
the Catechism of the
Catholic Church (1992), the theory of limbo is not mentioned. Rather,
the Catechism teaches that infants who die without baptism are entrusted by the
Church to the mercy of God, as is shown in the specific funeral rite for such
children.
In 2006, before the ITC issued its report, Robert T Miller,
at that time a law professor at Villanova (I believe he now teaches at the University
of Iowa), published at First Things’
Web Exclusives blog a defense of the notion of limbo. It’s a
short read and worth considering, in my opinion (although marred at the First
Things website by its not being broken up into paragraphs for some reason). Here is what is probably the key passage:
God wills the good of all his creatures,
especially the rational ones. The key is to distinguish the creature’s natural
good, the fulfillment of its nature, from its supernatural good, a fulfillment
that exceeds its natural capacities and is possible only with the help of
divine grace. God does indeed love the unbaptized infants, and so he wills their good, both
their supernatural and their natural good - but he acts to ensure only
their natural good. Hence, according to Thomas Aquinas, in limbo the souls of
the unbaptized infants enjoy the complete fulfillment of human nature,
including a natural knowledge of God, the greatest possible for unaided human
reason. The only thing such souls lack is the supernatural vision of God that
is possible only through grace, and, according to Aquinas, they do not even
regret not having that supernatural vision because they understand that it is a
gift over and above anything human nature could merit and so not something they
could ever have reasonably hoped to attain. They no more regret not having the
beatific vision, Aquinas says, than a peasant regrets not inheriting a kingdom.
The fate of such souls is therefore not a bad fate, not a fate to be pitied. On
the contrary, it is the greatest thing of which human nature is capable, and to
look down on it is to hold very cheap the divine grace that makes possible for
some persons something even better. On a deep level, most people who despise
the fate of the unbaptized infants in limbo are assuming that human beings have
some right to the divine grace needed for the beatific vision. Such people are
implicitly assuming that those who, even through no fault of their own, do not
attain that grace are somehow being treated unfairly or, at least, are
deserving of pity, having suffered some misfortune. This is to forget that
grace is a gift.
FWIW, I find this speculation, as Miller describes it here, to be at once interesting, logical and comforting. No doubt these factors are what account for the persistence of the idea of limbo over many centuries.
The Holy Innocents: a Liturgical Source of Hope
What occasions these reflections on the destiny of unbaptized infants and limbo is today’s feast day, the Feast of the Holy Innocents. Our secular culture spends so much time building up to Christmas Day (albeit skipping over Advent in the process) that we fail to remember – despite the Christmas carol extolling the 12 days of Christmas – that Christmas is a season, not a single day. What’s more, liturgically, both the Christmas and Easter solemnities are celebrated over the course of an octave – essentially a full week, from the date of the solemnity until its one-week anniversary. And the Christmas octave, in particular, also is characterized by a cluster of sanctoral feasts and solemnities without parallel on the liturgical calendar:
The Holy Innocents: a Liturgical Source of Hope
What occasions these reflections on the destiny of unbaptized infants and limbo is today’s feast day, the Feast of the Holy Innocents. Our secular culture spends so much time building up to Christmas Day (albeit skipping over Advent in the process) that we fail to remember – despite the Christmas carol extolling the 12 days of Christmas – that Christmas is a season, not a single day. What’s more, liturgically, both the Christmas and Easter solemnities are celebrated over the course of an octave – essentially a full week, from the date of the solemnity until its one-week anniversary. And the Christmas octave, in particular, also is characterized by a cluster of sanctoral feasts and solemnities without parallel on the liturgical calendar:
·
December 25th is the solemnity of
Christmas
·
December 26th is the Feast of St.
Stephen, deacon and martyr
·
December 27th is the Feast of St.
John the Evangelist
·
December 28th is the Feast of the Holy
Innocents
·
The Sunday within the Octave of Christmas is the
Solemnity of the Holy Family
·
The eighth day of the Octave, i.e. a week after
Christmas Day, is the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God
Because of where Holy Innocents falls on the calendar, it
never is celebrated on a Sunday (if December 28th happens to fall on
a Sunday, the feast is superseded by the solemnity of the Holy Family), so for
those whose main exposure to
scripture is from Sunday worship, the story of the Holy Innocents may not be
well-known. It’s from Matthew’s Gospel
(Matt 2:16-18), and is told immediately after the account of the flight to
Egypt:
The Massacre of the Infants. When Herod realized that he had been deceived by the magi, he
became furious. He ordered the massacre of all the boys in Bethlehem and its
vicinity two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had
ascertained from the magi. Then was fulfilled what had been said through Jeremiah the
prophet:
“A voice was heard
in Ramah,
sobbing and
loud lamentation;
Rachel weeping
for her children,
and she would
not be consoled,
since they were
no more.”
The theologians who authored the ITC’s document take due
notice of this passage:
86. b) Some of the
infants who suffer and die do so as victims of violence. In their case, we may
readily refer to the example of the Holy Innocents and discern an analogy in the
case of these infants to the baptism of blood which brings salvation. Albeit
unknowingly, the Holy Innocents suffered and died on account of Christ; their
murderers were seeking to kill the infant Jesus. Just as those who took the
lives of the Holy Innocents were motivated by fear and selfishness, so the
lives particularly of unborn babies today are often endangered by the fear or
selfishness of others. In that sense, they are in solidarity with the Holy
Innocents. Moreover, they are in solidarity with the Christ who said: “Truly, I
say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it
to me” (Mt 25:40). How vital it is for the Church to proclaim the hope and
generosity that are intrinsic to the Gospel and essential for the protection of
life.
Still, the ITC authors don’t explicitly affirm a happy
outcome for infants who die before baptism:
It must be clearly
acknowledged that the Church does not have sure knowledge about the salvation
of unbaptised infants who die. She knows and celebrates the glory of the Holy
Innocents, but the destiny of the generality of infants who die without Baptism
has not been revealed to us, and the Church teaches and judges only with regard
to what has been revealed. What we do positively know of God, Christ and the
Church gives us grounds to hope for their salvation.
Yet if the church isn’t able to make an affirmation
theologically, it seems to me that, in its celebration of the Feast of the Holy
Innocents, she points liturgically to reasons to hope. Here are the antiphons for Morning Prayer for today's feast:
Clothed
in white robes, they will walk with me, says the Lord, for they are worthy.
These
children cry out their praises to the Lord; by their death they have proclaimed
what they could not preach with their infant voices.
From
the mouths of children and babies at the breast you have found praise to foil
your enemies.
At
the king’s command these innocent babies and little children were put to death;
they died for Christ, and now in the glory of heaven as they follow him, the
sinless lamb, they sing for ever: Glory to you, O Lord.
If, with the ITC, we affirm the principle lex orandi, lex credendi (the rule of
prayer is the rule of belief), then we should be confident that the Holy
Innocents truly are in heaven with God; and if them, why not my own children, and other children, who died before being baptized?
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThe whole dilemma, it seems to me, is a result of the doctrine (dogma, I suppose) of the Fall and Original Sin, which in my (heretical) opinion can't stand as currently defined. From the Catechism:
ReplyDelete_____________________________
390 The account of the fall in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at thebeginning of the history of man. Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents.
_____________________________
In strictly scientific terms, there could not have been any "first parents" of the human race—that's just not how evolution works—so apologists have come up with the notion that at some point two physical humans were ensouled by God and became "metaphysical" humans, from which we all descended. (This, of course, required either incest among the children of Adam and Eve, or unions between the children of Adam and Eve and their highly evolved (but nonhuman) contemporaries. So it's incest or bestiality—take your pick.
There is no historical evidence for the slaughter of the Holy Infants. It is not recounted in any Gospel but Matthew's, and the most plausible theory is that it is an invention to make the point that Jesus is the "New Adam."
Some years ago, there was a movement among Catholics to try to have victims of abortion declared martyrs. It was shot down by Rome for the same reason (it seems to me) that it is impossible to consider the Holy Innocents as martyrs.
Aborted Babies Not Martyrs
DeleteArchbishop Angelo Amato, Secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, issued an official Statement on the Community of Divine Innocence. Included in the statement was a strong censuring of the idea that of abortion victims are martyrs:
“The central message that De Menezes claims to have received since 1984, namely that the Church proclaim the martyrdom of all the innocent children deliberately killed before birth and acknowledge these unborn children as companion martyrs of the first Holy Innocents, is doctrinally problematic. A martyr is someone who bears witness to Christ. If the victims of abortion were to qualify for martyrdom it would then seem that all victims of any moral evil should be likewise deemed martyrs. De Menezes’ notion of a ‘Baptism of Love’ is not, as claimed, a development of doctrine. Rather it is an innovation which is difficult to harmonize with the teaching of the Church.”
On the Holy Innocents, knowing some of the other things that Herod did, such as killing three of his own sons, I believe he was fully capable of killing children on the off chance that one of them might challenge him for his crackerjack prize of a throne someday. But as far as martyrdom goes, I always thought that it required an assent of will.
DeleteBTW I agree with you about about the Fall and original sin.
I think what the Church is saying is that we have to trust God. Which is really, really hard sometimes. My brother who was next to me in birth order died shortly after birth. The priest comforted my parents by saying that their intention had been to baptize him, even though they didn't get the opportunity, and that it was a baptism of desire, of sorts. A generation earlier, my dad's younger sister had also died shortly after birth. In that case the baby had been baptized, by a Protestant nurse who saw that she wasn't going to make it. She knew that my grandmother would want it. This was a small town hospital, before the days of NICUs. Nowadays both babies probably could have been saved, but neonatal death was pretty common in the past.
ReplyDeleteLimbo has never seemed like a believable teaching to me. I sometimes wonder about people who lived before either the Old or New Testaments. There is fossil evidence of homo sapiens, not to mention Neanderthals, as far back as 250,000 years ago. I have to believe that on a natural level they could know something of God.
Of course, the obvious question is why an infant's eternal destiny should depend on who chose to kill him or her, and why, or who by chance happened to be available or unavailable to perform a baptism. The Holy Innocents, if saved as martyrs, just happened to be in the right place at the wrong time, through absolutely no merit of their own. Why should their manner of death count for them as some kind of baptism or salvific act?
DeleteOne answer (from the apologists I frequently debate with) is that God owes no human person anything. If he wishes to grant eternal bliss to some unbaptized babies and damnation to others, it's perfectly consistent with his goodness, and the babies roasting in hell (or frolicking in limbo) have no cause to complain. It's a nifty answer, but a very difficult one to accept if you believe that God is all-good, all-merciful, and all-just in anything like the way we understand goodness, mercy, and justice.
What I'm speculating in my post is that the Holy Innocents are experiencing eternal beatitude with God. To put it in the terms that Aquinas apparently used (as summarized by Miller), he chose to give them divine grace. My basis for that hope is the liturgical prayer of the church.
DeleteWhether God has chosen to do so for any other infants (including my own children who died of miscarriage), the church doesn't say. You may be right; they may be roasting in hell or cavorting in limbo. Or they may have the same gift of grace given to them as has (I believe) been accorded the Holy Innocents. Or, for all I know, they died before they were "ensouled", and God has some other destiny for them, or even no destiny at all.
Re-reading my previous reply, I see I have an unclear antecedent for a pronoun: I wrote, "To put it in the terms that Aquinas apparently used (as summarized by Miller), he chose to give them divine grace." I'm claiming that it's God, not Aquinas or Miller, who is the dispenser of divine grace :-)
DeleteOh, dear me. Jesus told his disciples there were some things they simply were not going to be told in advance. Such as, who will sit on his left and who will sit on his right. (Also, such as, whether there even are thrones in heaven. Hmm!)
ReplyDeleteObviously, God does whatever he does about babies who die without baptism. He also does whatever he does about adult rice farmers in modern day Vietnam who lived and died in the 11th Century without hearing the good news.
We do not know what it is that he does. Jesus didn't say. And anybody's guess is as good as a Villanova law professor's. If the professor and assorted commissioners need Limbo, let them speculate. But I'd rather trust the unbaptized innocents to a merciful God than to a theological commission or a law professor.
I believe Jean said something like that before she killed the comment. Which I wish she hadn't.
P.S. Jesus didn't say anything about original sin, either. That came from a theologian.
"I'd rather trust the unbaptized innocents to a merciful God than to a theological commission or a law professor." Tom, bingo! I totally reject the notion that *any* infants are in hell, or for that matter, in Limbo. As for Limbo, I also reject the notion that the hereafter is redlined, with some people not quite special enough for "real" heaven. I'll leave discussion of hell for another day.
DeleteI didn't see Jean's comment, I hope she brings it back.
Pretty much what Tom said.
DeleteI cannot imagine heaven as a place where I could look down and placidly watch my miscarried children screaming in hell. If that's the deal, I would rather be in hell with them.
If the Church can manage to find loopholes for suicides, I don't know why unbaptized babies are such a challenge. I can only assume that withholding any assurances helps strengthen the case against abortion: You've not only killed your child, but possibly consigned it to eternal torture, ergo, worst possible sin. If that messes up women who miscarry, well, that's the way we roll on this here guilt trip called Catholicism.
The idea that God confines himself to the boxes the theologians and Church Ladies have constructed for him would be laughable if so many people didn't believe it.
I'm an "eye has not seen nor ear heard" guy on this. I guess some people can't live with uncertainty and want the afterlife Google mapped to square centimeter accuracy and a detailed foolproof manual on how to get there.
DeleteI haven't seen any evidence that unbaptized infants really are a challenge, as far as worrying about their destination, on the parish level for the people who actually have to comfort the mourning. I'm with Stanley on the "eye has not seen nor ear heard" thing. It's uncertainty in a good way, that our imaginations can't even begin to stretch around.
DeleteBTW, good to see you, Jean. Hope you had a nice Christmas.
DeleteStanley: hasn't Catholicism always attracted or retained those who seem to want …. nay, need …. that degree of certainty?
ReplyDeleteJim, I'm neither a psychologist or sociologist but I believe it is more complex than that. Even in the world of dancing, there are folks who turn something that should be relaxing and fun into an OCD ordeal, squeezing the joy out of it. Catholicism attracts and repels all types. It's given me my connection to Jesus. Jesus has changed my thinking on many fronts. It is more for me about the spirit and arc of the thing than a set of rules. I was an engineer. I got most of my OCD rocks off at work. But I don't live my life that way or expect others to do so. But the calcified higherarchy has taken a lot of the fun out.
ReplyDeletePeople like you are why I wanted to be Catholic. They are joyous and encouraging, they open possibilities.
DeleteThe legalistic mansplainers are why I can hardly stand actually being Catholic.
A cradle Catholic friend asked me a long time ago, "Can't you just take the good it's given you, be happy in that, and ignore the b.s.?"
It felt like cheating, but I suppose that's where I am.
Keep dancing joyously, Stanley (and everyone!). You never know how much the example helps someone else!
Two of my grandchildren are unbaptized. It doesn't worry me. God will not punish them because they aren't baptized. If God is the type that would punish them just for that, then being in that God's presence for all eternity would be hell rather than heaven.
DeleteI am with Jean and David. I have mentioned this before - the two teachings I rejected as a child were that the Pope is infallible and that nobody who is not a baptized Catholic could go to "heaven". That teaching was later softened to "baptized christian". Not only do I not believe that a God who is Love would deny "heaven" to innocent, unbaptized babies, I don't believe a God who is Love, and who is the creator of ALL, including ALL human beings who have ever lived, would have created 90% of these human beings so that they wouldn't be “eligible” for "heaven" from the starting gate - full union with the Divine. According to a quick google search, some Population Bureau estimates that approximately 107 billion people (homo sapiens) have lived on this earth during the last 10,000 or so years. Maybe many more, going even farther back. Christianity started only 2000 years ago. Nobody knows how many people have been baptized christians during that time, but maybe around 11 billion - a bit more than 10% of ALL human beings who were created by God - individuals who were deliberately created by God according to christian theology.
Why would God refuse "heaven" to all those billions who were born before Christ? Why would God refuse "heaven" to the billions today who happened to be born in parts of the world where christianity is either non-existent or a tiny part of the population? Why would God deny 'heaven" to the unbaptized ancestors of Jesus? Why would Hitler be eligible for "heaven" (assuming he repented or did enough time in the state called purgatory if it exists) but Ghandi would be forever banned from the heavenly realms?
The hierarchical church too often thinks it is God - and that it can decide for God what God's actions should be according to human understanding and rules. The Jews were the chosen of God. Now the Christians are the chosen people, according to christians, anyway. And Catholics are the ultimate chosen of the elect according to the RCC. Well, the JW say that only they are the elect and the rest of us will be banned. As do the Seventh Day Adventists. As do the evangelical christians. The Orthodox teach that they are the "one, true church" and that it is the Church of Rome that strayed. Etc.
I could not believe that only baptized Catholics (or christians) could be given salvation (whatever that is, but it’s definitely pure gift) when I was 9 years old and the nuns and priests insisted that we must believe it. I had a good memory and I knew that I had to spit out the Baltimore Catechism answer to get my A in religion. But I didn’t believe it. And I don't believe it now.
I think these types of dogmatic teachings, found in much of christianity today are among the reasons so many young adults have no interest in formal religion. Spiritual but not religious. The studies show that most "nones" believe in God. Significant proportions of them read the bible, at least occasionally, and pray surprisingly frequently. But they don't buy into the idea that religion is primarily an exclusive club that people join in order to learn what they must believe and must do (like be baptized) to save their personal hides from hellfire.
Stanley: It's given me my connection to Jesus. Jesus has changed my thinking …. It is more for me about the spirit and arc of the thing than a set of rules
I'm also with Stanley - formal religion should help those seeking God. But too often it is an obstacle on the path to God, and so many decide to go around it, ignore it, and find their own paths.
Thanks to all for your comments. I revised the original post a very little bit this morning, as it had one or two typos and some syntax that could be untangled a little. In doing so, I mentioned that my children, who attended Catholic school in the decade of the 2000 "Oughts", didn't learn about limbo in school. Neither did I, to the best of my recollection, but my Catholic schooling, which was in the 60s and 70s, was sort of the heady-post-Vatican-Two era when there wasn't much doctrine or quasi-doctrine taught. My kids' Catholic schooling was post-Catechism-of-the-Catholic-Church era, which supposedly was a corrective to my era. But limbo didn't make it into their curriculum, just as it didn't make it into the Catechism.
ReplyDeleteAt any rate - I mention this about my children because I polled a couple of them to make sure I was right about their not having learned about limbo. They confirmed my hunch, although one of them had a pretty accurate understanding of it, which apparently she picked up elsewhere. The conversation quickly turned to something which interests them far more: is limbo a place for cats who die? I offered my own theological speculation, which is that, while we're not certain that any humans are in hell, we can be fairly certain that some cats are; but that view was rejected by the household magisterium. But I think Ann Olivier, bless her, once noted that all living things have souls, so I don't see why there can't be a limbo for cats and other beloved household pets.
"Why would God refuse "heaven" to all those billions who were born before Christ? Why would God refuse "heaven" to the billions today who happened to be born in parts of the world where christianity is either non-existent or a tiny part of the population? Why would God deny 'heaven" to the unbaptized ancestors of Jesus?"
ReplyDeleteA few thoughts on these questions by Anne. One is that we don't know whether any of the people Anne mentions, even Hitler, truly are "denied" heaven. We know that baptism is the ordinary means for achieving union with God.
Another is that "deny" is an interesting word choice, because it seems to imply that all of us are naturally destined for heaven unless we somehow screw it up. But that's not really the traditional Christian view. The traditional Christian view is that, because of the Fall, we're all destined for something less wonderful than heaven; but also that God sent his only Son to repair that breach between God and humanity - to justify us, to somehow make us worthy for that which we're not naturally worthy. We're further told that the graces which the church stewards on God's behalf extend beyond the visible borders of the church; so there is hope that those graces somehow work to save those who aren't explicitly part of the church, like Ghandi, or the many people around the world with whom I work in my day job every day.
Jesus's ancestors, being Jewish, are a special case. When Jesus died, he descended to the realm of the dead, which is not the same as hell the place of eternal punishment, and opened the barrier that prevented those souls from being in God's presence. This is what is celebrated on Holy Saturday, although if our only experience of the Triduum is what is celebrated in the parish evening services, it's skipped over.
For our purposes as baptized Christians, it just seems to me that what we should take away from all this is the imperative to proclaim the Good News in order to bring people to the fount of baptism. I think this set of teachings about the unbaptized is harder on us, who are charged with sharing our faith with others, than it is on those who never have heard the Good News (whether infant or adult). To whom much is given, much is expected.