The Limbo

The Descent of Christ into Limbo by Albrecht Dürer, 1510, National Gallery of Art, Washington

The existence of limbo was, it seems, a fairly widespread belief in Judaism in the 1st and 2nd centuries before Jesus Christ. It is a place where the righteous, the innocents, and the patriarchs awaited the deliverance of the Messiah. The New Testament echoes this through several periphrases: "Abraham’s bosom," "the prisoners of death," etc.

The Apostles' Creed attests to this in its fifth article: "He descended into hell," which the catechism of Pius X translated as "The Limbo" All elements confirmed by the writings of Maria Valtorta:

• Those who have died in the Lord already rejoice for their neighbor’s deliverance from Limbo.
• In The Limbo, the holy innocents bring joy to the patriarchs and the righteous.

In "The Gospel as It Was Revealed to Me"

• I know that I will not go to God if the Messiah does not come. Mother tells us that for now, we, the people of Israel, are like many Moseses and die in view of the Promised Land. She says we must wait to enter it and that only the Messiah will allow us to enter.
• What is life? It is a time of waiting, I would say The Limbo.
• Those who have died in the Lord already rejoice for their neighbor’s deliverance from Limbo.
• In The Limbo, the holy innocents bring joy to the patriarchs and the righteous.
• Truly I tell you that death will be the supreme goodness for many who thus will come to know how demonically evil man has become, to a point where Peace will console them for this knowledge and change it into hosanna because it will be united with the unspeakable joy of liberation from Limbo.
• Jesus to gentiles: "Oh! Lord! Our Soul is wrapped in formulas and errors. How will we open the doors of Heaven for it?" - "I will loosen the gates of Hell. I will open the gates of your Hades and of my Limbo. And I will not be able to open yours? Say: 'I want' and like a lock made of butterfly wings, they will crumble to dust at the passage of my Ray."
• But what a wait before a virtuous pagan reaches this reward (the Paradise)!... Don’t you realize it? And this wait, especially from the moment when Redemption with all its consequent wonders will have taken place and the Gospel will be announced to the world, will be the Purification of Souls who will have lived righteously in other Religions but could not enter the true Faith even though they knew of its existence and proof of its reality. For them, The Limbo for centuries and centuries until the end of the world. For those who believed in the true God and could not be heroically holy, the long Purgatory; and for some, it might end at the end of the world.
• In Hell, hatred and punishment cause fierce Blindness. In Purgatory, the Thirst for expiation annihilates all other thought. In The Limbo, the blessed joyous waiting of the righteous is not profaned by any sensuality.
• Sintica writes to Jesus of Antioch announcing the death of John of Endor: "I know the Book as a true Israelite. But I also know what the Book does not specify: that now your passion will soon be fulfilled since John (of Endor) has died and you promised him a brief stay in The Limbo."
• You do not understand that if I accepted the crown, the royalty as you understand it, I would admit I am a false Christ, I would lie to God, I would deny Myself, and I would deny the Father, and I would be worse than Lucifer, because I would deprive God of the joy of having you, I would be worse than Cain for you, because I would condemn you to be perpetually exiled from God in The Limbo without hope of Paradise?
• "But if you die, you will no longer see (the Son of God). You will be in The Limbo..." - "For a short time. You must also realize that the time has come. And the hour will come when the Lamb will take upon Himself all the sins of the world and bear all our evils and all our pains, and for this reason will be pierced and immolated so that we may be healed and at Peace with the Eternal. And then for the spirits too, there will be Peace... I hope so, trusting in the mercy of God."
• Jesus comments on "he descended into hell": "You said that some will become immediately glorious in Heaven. Is Heaven not closed? Are the righteous not in The Limbo waiting to enter it?" - "It is so: Heaven is closed, and it will only be opened by the Redeemer.
• Jesus renounces His Mother, just after His Resurrection: I felt your prayers come to Me. They came with Me on the Cross and into The Limbo.
• Consider, John, what happiness spread through all the kingdoms of God." I asked: "Which kingdoms?" I thought she knew some wonderful revelation about the kingdom of her Son who had conquered even death. She replied: "In Paradise, in Purgatory, in The Limbo. Forgiveness for those in Purgatory, the ascent to Heaven of all the righteous and forgiven. Paradise populated by the blessed.

In other works

The Notebooks of 1943

• Catechesis of August 16, 1943: "It is I who have overcome death and death (of the Soul). I who called back to life the dead from Limbo. They were sleeping. Like Lazarus, whose resurrection veils this one, truer. I called them. And they rose.

The Notebooks of 1944

• Catechesis of January 15: "I tell you, I who created this place (Hell): when I descended there to draw from limbo those who awaited my coming, I was horrified, I who am God, at this horror (Hell), and if a thing made by God were not immutable because perfect, I would have wanted to make it less atrocious, because I am Love and I have suffered this horror."
• Catechesis of May 29: "Let us see the major categories for which one must suffer, those for which I also suffered in my Passion: the clergy, the desperate, the sinners, the idolaters, the Souls awaiting return to God, in other words, for you, the Souls of purgatory; for me, at that time, it was the righteous from limbo."

• Catechesis of June 11: "Where is this spiritual spirit level? Oh, high up! Where humanity cannot reach. It is still perceptible, because the Soul is not Conflicted and its life in the Vital atmosphere does not make it stupid. No, because this actually increases its capacity to see and hear. But the reason is that it already lives in the atmosphere of Love, since the spiritual level is the antechamber of paradise of the blessed: The Limbo currently of those who are not yet born to eternal life, but whose Soul already waits to enter it, as spiritual children."

• Catechesis of August 4: "In the time of Job, heaven was populated only by Angels. The righteous awaited Christ in the abode of limbo to become citizens of heaven. But now, the processions of the saints of heaven and earth join the Angels."

The Notebooks from 1945 to 1950

• The Notebooks of December 25, 1946: "Some of my humble shepherds (of the Nativity) died before I became the Master, and could do no more than adore me that night with all their being, bowed before my manger and cradle, then with all their Soul for a few days or years, until their death, after the ferocity of Herod separated me from them: but do you think they will all go to heaven with glory and joy less than that of the three Wise Men from the East who were leaders of all the learned and mighty who would love me through science, over the centuries? No, on the contrary, I tell you: many learned persons, after loving me, were lost for wanting to know me through excessive science, or still purify their scientific and complicated worship — this worship assaulted by cold gusts of science — in the purifying Fire which teaches them to love without analyzing love, nor the Object of love; but the shepherds who served me like Disciples all passed from death to Life, and those who died before I ascended to the Father, from death to a peaceful waiting for me in The Limbo."

• "In the dictation of January 15, 1944 to my Maria, I said: 'When I descended there to draw from limbo those who awaited my coming, this horror horrified me and, if what God made were not immutable because perfect, I would have wanted to make it less atrocious, because I am Love and I suffered before such horror.' I meant the different otherworldly places where the deceased were generally held and called 'hell' in opposition to paradise, where God dwells. When, in my overabundant joy after the Sacrifice was consummated, I was able to open The Limbo to the righteous and draw from purgatory a multitude of Souls, I shuddered in horror contemplating in spirit that only the place of damnation knew neither redemption nor transformation of horror. But I did not enter it. It was neither right nor useful to do so. Are you surprised I could bring a multitude of Souls out of purgatory? Consider: if a mass can free Souls from purgatory and always serves to shorten and ease their Purification, what must the real Sacrifice of the Lamb of God have been for them? I, who am Priest and Victim, applied to them my merits and my Blood, and that whitened the stoles not yet fully purified by the white Fire of purifying charity.' (Cf. Apocalypse 7:13-14)

The Book of Azarias

• Book of Azarias, Feast of Christ the King: "It was not fitting that the Spirit of man, granted by God, emanation of God, seed of God, be lost after the death of the flesh. Nor was it fitting that a perpetual exile keep the spirits of the righteous away from the Father's dwelling, in eternal The Limbo. The first was unfitting because of the dignity of all that comes from God, the second because of God's justice. The righteous had to have a reward. Which one, if not paradise? But they could not enter paradise with souls wounded by original sin that no purgatory can erase. It follows that it was necessary to erase this sin. Therefore, a God had to restore the order and make it even better so that henceforth, Purification from sin would come not only from an inheritance as would have been that of men descended from a faithful Adam and Eve, but from the sacrifice of a God-Man, from His infinite merits and His teaching which, if Homelier by Souls of goodwill, communicates to them the capacity to imitate the Son of God in His works and in His Virtues."

Lessons on Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans

• Lessons on Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, Lesson No. 9: "The virtue of these Gentiles, their spontaneous obedience to the law of virtue, will have baptized them without other Baptism; it will have consecrated them without other chrism than the infinite merits of the Savior. The Limbo will no longer be the dwelling of these righteous waiting. Just as on Good Friday evening the righteous left The Limbo, because the Blood shed by Jesus Redeemer purified them from their original stain (Cf. Genesis, chapter 3 - Romans 5:12-21), so at the evening of Time, when the merits of Christ have triumphed over all His Enemies, the righteous, who by firm conviction of being in the true Religion belonged to a non-Catholic group, will be absolved and justified by Him. They will receive the reward for the Virtues practiced on earth. If this were not so, God would have deceived these righteous who gave themselves a law of justice and defended justice and virtue. But God never deceives. His reward, even if sometimes it is delayed, is always certain."

• Lessons on Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, Lesson No. 24: "The day will come, at the Last Judgment, when Purgatory will be abolished and its occupants will pass to the Kingdom of God. The Limbo will also disappear because the Redeemer has redeemed all men who follow justice to honor the God of their faith, and to approach Him as they know Him, with all their strength. But how long will be their path of exile after their earthly life! How long also for those who, although Catholics, do the bare minimum to keep the flame of their love lit, content with barely doing what is necessary not to die in a state of mortal sin! What a difference between the latter, — saved more than by their merits, by the infinite merits of the Savior, by the intercession of Mary, by the treasures of the communion of Saints, the prayers and sacrifices of the righteous — and those who wanted glory not by selfishness, but by love of God!"

• Lessons on Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, Lesson No. 46: "Adam is an emblematic figure of what happens when one falls into rejection by God. For his sin he had to wait in hell for centuries and millennia, despite the long expiation he already made on Earth. Afterwards, he was at least admitted to the place where Enoch and Elijah had already been for centuries in the happy friendship of God."

In other sources

In her visions, Saint Frances of Rome (1384-1440) defined The Limbo as “a prison where all the righteous Souls of the earth waited so long for the arrival of the Liberator. This place, although contiguous to Hell, has no communication with it.” According to the visions of Saint Frances of Rome, the place still exists.

Late, this place was reserved only for children who died without Baptism (Limbus infantium: Limbo of infants). This notion ended up eclipsing the rest of Limbo. For a long time, they made part of official Catholic teaching. According to the catechism of Saint Pius X, to the question "Where do children who die without Baptism go?" the answer was:

"Children who die without Baptism go to limbo, where there is neither supernatural reward nor pain; since they have original sin and only that, they do not merit paradise, but neither do they merit hell or Purgatory."

The Catechism of the Catholic Church of 1992 virtually no longer addresses the question of Limbo. In 2007, the International Theological Commission distanced itself from the ancient belief about the abode of children who die without Baptism, while recognizing that the Limbo of infants "remains a possible theological opinion.

Concerning the limbo of the righteous, Saint Frances of Rome affirmed that it remained after being emptied of its occupants by Redemption. This is confirmed by Maria Valtorta. She affirms indeed the existence of Limbo until the end of times and does not reserve them specifically to children who died without Baptism. The Limbo hosts the righteous of other Religions: "those who follow justice to honor the God of their faith, and to approach Him, as they know Him, with all their strength."

The Limbo are distinct from Purgatory. They are a place of "Purification of Souls who have lived righteously in other Religions (non-Catholic as noted elsewhere), but could not enter the true Faith having known its existence and the proof of its reality."

The righteous in Limbo will be absolved and justified at the end of time and will then receive the reward for the Virtues practiced on earth.

"Their Baptism, says Jesus, will come through the Kiss that the Eternal will give them when, freed from the prison of the flesh, they fly toward God, their goal, their nest, the concern of their entire sojourn in exile on earth."

According to Maria Valtorta, this is the realization of the dogmatic constitution Lumen gentium, § 16: "those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of the Christ and His Church, but nevertheless seek God with a sincere Heart and strive, under the influence of His Grace, to act according to His will as their Conscience reveals and dictates it to them, can also arrive at eternal salvation."

Name given to characters of the Old Testament who had a long life and numerous descendants: Ex: Abraham. By extension: Elderly man having great authority over his people and inspiring deep respect.

Second part of the Bible, from the coming of Jesus Christ until the Apocalypse.

In-depth research on God, faith, religious Doctrine.

Solemn document of the pope or a council defining essential points of the Catholic faith.