That’s got to be a satire site… Yes???
Not a Catholic, but it was a well enough known phrase that I got a lot of giggles when I marked the potluck table with “Feed the Pagan Babies” for our (Pagan) Circle once…
Eek. My mistake. I mean the title to read “Catholic Dopers >age 50…” I just made a request to the mods to have the title edited.
I have this problem with left-right and it manifests in unexpected (to me) ways. BTW, if we’re ever in a car chase with me driving and our lives depend on turning one way or the other, just POINT, ok?
I called it “buying a Pagan Baby,” but in 1964 Virginia nobody caught the snark. I remember something like that adoption certificate, but I think the other nun was probably Italian. Which was still pushing it in a lot of parishes.
Catholic School Survivor here. Grades K through 8, 1956-64. San Diego.
Full Disclosure: I “lost my faith” at 17 and have profoundly hated the Catholic Church ever since.
Yes, we were constantly being shaken down for money and prayers for “The Pagan Babies.” I’ve used the phrase all my life for comic/sarcastic/ironic effect.
What I want to know is: When the Catholic Church shut down Limbo (remember Limbo?), what happened to all the souls we were always supposed to have been “offering up” prayers for?
Correct, but incomplete
http://www.unicef.org/about/who/index_faq.html
Well, we have the rock band Pagan Babies
and the hardcore punk Pagan Babies
both from the '80s. Didn’t see a Seth listed in either group though.
Either of these ring a bell?
I remember the little white classroom collection boxes in the 70s. We never heard the term “pagan babies,” though. It was called raising money for “the Missions,” I guess meaning missionaries in Africa. Every year we had a presentation by a missionary (on leave? returned home?) who would show us slides or a film strip of poor villagers in Africa getting medicine or schooling provided by the Missions. Those presentations created an image of Africa in my mind that has no cities, only poor people living in small villages.
We had “mission races”; the teacher’s wrote a running tab of each homeroom’s collections for the month in the corner of the blackboard that was never erased except when the teacher updated the total. I can’t remember what the reward was for winning, if anything. Probably getting to have an extra outdoor recess instead of a regular class one time.
I once found a five dollar bill on the way to the bus stop when I was in third grade. As soon as I got to school, I put it in the missions box. I probably wanted to be a hero, because that would have gotten us a huge boost in that month’s mission race, but instead I got mocked by my classmates for being an idiot for not keeping it.
You don’t need left & right to get this one correct – the greedy alligator always chomps the bigger number. (the < or > is his open, slavering jaws, and is always open towards the larger side)
<50 – the alligator chooses 50 because it is bigger than the lefthand number, in other words, everything on the left is smaller than 50; <50 = “less than 50”
>50 - the alligator chooses the other side, so the lefthand number must be larger than 50; >50 = “greater than 50”)
I also have weird L/R confusion at times, and I used to find it almost impossible to remember which meant which until I actually grokked the rule, now it seems almost obvious.
I knew that, but at the time, it didn’t help. :smack:
I keep thinking about all those poor bastards who are frying in hell because they ate meat on Friday back when it was a sin. I guess the joke’s on them, eh?
Actually we offered up prayers for the souls in Purgatory who were in the waiting room of heaven because they died with venial sins on their milk-bottle souls, but were still eligible to get in there.
Limbo was the no-man’s-land where you hung out forever not punished but not having any fun either because you were unbaptized through no fault of your own (even little babies). No point in praying for them as they were doomed to be in that nowhere place forever. 
Absurd? Yes.
You’re right. We “offered up” the prayers for the Purgatorians, to help reduce their sentences. I was confused. Mea maxima culpa, if you will.
As I now (thanks to you) remember it, the Limbo crowd didn’t need our prayers because they were to be dealt with fairly on some future Judgement Day. Of course, my particular nuns could have been jivin’ - it wouldn’t have been the first time. So if you remember Church doctrine being that Limbo was forever, I defer.
Fixed the title as you asked.
Fiftyone and Catholic educated 1968-76 in the midwest. We had the little white mission boxes in our classrooms. They weren’t designated for Pagan babies, but for missions in general.
No; they played in Honolulu. Also, I never went to one of their shows. I had the impression that they were punk (on account of the flyers I saw advertising their dates), but Seth was and is a great jazz aficionado, so it could plausibly have been fusion-type jazz.
When we met him, he was working at Tower Records in Waikiki and doing a weekly show at the UH radio station.
I remember being instructed as a child, whenever I complained about something that inconvenienced me, to “offer it up.” Mom never mentioned that it was supposed to be for the souls in Purgatory, though*. I always associated it with buying some brownie points for myself. Which sorta made sense, in a way. With my allowance of twenty-five cents per week, I was kind of priced out of the indulgences market.
*And with ten kids in the family, it probably had more to do with getting some of us to shut the hell up for five minutes. 
Thx.
Now that you mention it, I guess I don’t remember whether Limbo was forever or not. The thing that was so bizarre is that presumably if some total stranger baptized your unconscious but still living body (by pouring water on your head-- it had to be your HEAD!-- and saying the words, “I baptize thee in the Name of the Father,” etc.), and then you immediately died, you WOULD go to heaven right that second because the baptism erased Original Sin and since you were unconscious you weren’t able to commit any willful sins. BUT someone who devoutly went to Mass every Sunday or even every DAY for years, but said, "Goddamm it, fuck it all to hell!"or deliberately ate meat on Friday (back when it was a sin), or deliberately broke the communion fast (all venial sins–* not to be confused with the word VENAL, which is NOT the same thing at all*), and then was hit by a bus… that poor soul would go to Purgatory because of the momentary lapse. The best time to get hit by a bus was when you came out of confession, before you had a chance to do anything bad. No wonder we’re all screwed up.
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That’s got to be a satire site… Yes???
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IDK. I read a few more or her entries and can’t tell if she’s for real or the web site is a good example of Poe’s Law.
George Carlin, “Special Dispensation: Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, and Limbo,” amirite?
What happens to kids who haven’t yet reached an age where they can jump through the hoops to obtain salvation on their own say-so is a problem for all variants of Christianity, AFAICT. The answer these days among conservative/evangelical Protestants seems to be something called the ‘age of accountability,’ and if someone dies before reaching that age, they go straight to heaven. (A good example of this belief is in the opening pages of the first *Left Behind *book, where among the Raptured are every child under 12 years of age, worldwide.)
Sorry, no baptism, no heaven, no exceptions, no wiggle room. Unbaptized babies went to limbo. Tough titties, eh?
Limbo was never part of the official Catholic Church doctrine. It was a “possible theological hypothesis” proposed by various theologians (and argued about in theological circles) to try to reconcile the concept that baptism is necessary for salvation with the concept of a just God and the fact that an unbaptised infant while burdened with original sin had committed no personal sin.
The Church neither accepted nor condemned the concept of limbo meaning that theologians and the faithful were free to accept or deny its existence.
But most Catholics have been raised to believe in limbo. It’s one of those things the nuns tell the little kids to shut them up and move on. Since most Catholics stop learning about religion after 8th grade (or perhaps high school) and almost no Catholics get involved in the formal academic study of theology, there’s no one to tell them that “it’s complicated” and they go on believing that it is formal doctrine for the rest of their lives. And when their turn comes to teach religion to children, they just pass on what they were told.
If you are seriously interested in the topic, in 2007 Pope Benedict XVI authorized the publication of a paper written by the International Theological Commission titled THE HOPE OF SALVATION FOR INFANTS WHO DIE WITHOUT BEING BAPTISED. It goes through the history of the theological debate. They concluded basically that we don’t for sure what happens to unbaptised babies. “Our conclusion is that the many factors that we have considered above give serious theological and liturgical grounds for hope that unbaptised infants who die will be saved and enjoy the Beatific Vision. We emphasise that these are reasons for prayerful hope, rather than grounds for sure knowledge. There is much that simply has not been revealed to us (cf. Jn 16:12). We live by faith and hope in the God of mercy and love who has been revealed to us in Christ, and the Spirit moves us to pray in constant thankfulness and joy (cf. 1 Thess 5:18).”
If you are slightly less interested in the subject, the preamble that comes before the actual text of the study provides an interesting overview.
By the way, there is also another theological construct called the Limbo of the Fathers. This was where righteous folks like Moses and Abraham went when they died. Many believe that after Jesus died he swept up their souls with him to heaven when he ascended (“The Harrowing of Hell”).