The pope is going to eliminate limbo. No, not the dance. Though while he's out abolishing things, he might as well eliminate that as well. No, the Pope is going to eliminate that special place between heaven and hell. Limibo is where you go if you die, and God can't make up His mind. Or as the article puts it:

The church has held that before the 13th Century, all unbaptised people, including new born babies who died, would go to hell. This was because original sin - the punishment that God inflicted on humanity because of Adam and Eve's disobedience - had not been cleansed by baptism.

This idea however was criticised by Peter Abelard, a French scholastic philosophiser, who said that babies who had no personal sin didn't even deserve punishment.

It was Abelard who introduced the idea of limbo. The word comes from the Latin "limbus", meaning the edge. This would be a state of existence where unbaptised babies, and those unfortunate enough to have been born before Jesus, would not experience pain but neither would they experience the Beatific Vision of God.

If you ask me, God just needed limbo as a place to hide unbaptized children from Catholic priests. Hmmm, maybe that's why the pope is eliminating it? 

(Thanks to reader JT for this.)

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