Unbaptized Children, Hell, and "Let the children come to me..."

Amici, FWIW, and to save some the trouble of deep digging for answers to the question of what happens to unbaptized chidren, some ponderings...

• Preamble 
  Our Lord is clear in the Gospels: those who don't believe in Him are lost. However, as for children, He said let no one prevent them from coming to Him (Matt 19:14). This passage clearly means first, at that exact point in time, and also (we can clearly deduce) for the rest of his Earthly ministry: "Apostles, let the kids come to me; don't hinder them."
  Second: Traditionally, and no doubt truly, the Church interprets this passage as meaning anyone who wants Salvation must have the clear, innocent, beautiful Faith and love (charity) children have. (Cold calculations, measuring everything to a finely balanced metric, don't cut it.)
  Third: "Such is the kingdom of Heaven" – considering that these were as of that moment unbaptized Jewish kids, it is highly probable indeed that He truly meant ALL children were His, for He made 'em, knows their destiny (whether they become adults or not) and so on. Remember, when God says X, X happens. All Creation was created by the Father through the Son (the Logos) so I think it reasonable to understand Our Lord Jesus, Joshua, "Yahweh Saves", is proclaiming here that children will be saved.
  Don't know it for sure, of course, but it makes sense.
  So an answer: Trust God. If one is going to believe in the Christian God, He went to literally infinite trouble to become a human being, amazing the good angels (and of course confounding the bad ones) and redoing Creation on the off-chance (as it were) that some (small or large, probably small) portion of His human creation wouldn't deny Him. He was Incarnated in us so we could be incarnated in Him, through His grace ("grace" meaning "gift".) If He enabled the Immaculate Conception, as a pure gift (grace) through his not-yet-at-that-time Incarnation, He can save unbaptized infants. He's Lord of the Sabbath, in short; the Sabbath (here standing for Fallen Humanity, and Creation, and the curses of the Fall, etc.) is not His master.
  The BVM: The Blessed Mother. She is our great Advocate. And she's a mother. Does anyone think she wouldn't advocate for children who no fault of their own were not baptized? Does anyone think He would deny Her?
  Protestants and Orthodox: I suppose Prots are all over the map with answers to this. Most of the ones I've ever known think all kids go to Heaven, as a matter of course. The Orthodox Churches (14 independent "Ghetto" Churches), deny the Catholic teaching that unbaptized infants go to Limbo. But then, they've made an absolute mush of Purgatory, and trashed out a number of other things, like divorce and remarriage, so "whaddatheyknow"?
  Robert Bellarmine, much in the news because of his teachings about bad popes, was the last major Catholic thinker to teach that unbaptized infants went to the Hell of the Damned. Aquinas, Vulcan Academy-trained in logic, taught unbaptized infants didn't go to Fiery Hell, but a mild and happy Limbo, and his position eventually carried the day, but the Church has never actually dogmatically defined this.
  An Préachán

G. K. Chesterton's Cause for Sainthood dropped by the "fog of mediocrity"

I've been a fan of G.K.C's since high school, when I discovered his book Orthodoxy in a "Catholic Corner" of a Christian bookstore. It was a revelation. I had never read anything like it, and I had grown up (I mean through grade school) reading 19th century authors and then in high school, my two "go-to" authors were (kinda extreme) poles apart: H.P. Lovecraft on one hand and Plato on the other. (Lovecraft, I know realize, was channeling in Infernal, but I met Tolkien at some point in high school and J.R.R. drove out H.P., though one is never quite the same after one reads Howard Philips.)

To a very large extent, certainly on an intellectual level, I owe my Catholicism to Chesterton and Tolkien. The American Catholic Church taught me nothing, less than nothing, in fact. To these two Englishmen (and Chesterton was very English indeed, as Tolkien was -- one might say -- Old English) I owe my intellectual participation in the Catholic Church. Life is full of irony; I'm sure there's an Irish phrase for that. (BTW: there's a movement beginning for J.R.R.T.'s eventual canonization.) 

So, a few years ago, when I read that there was a movement to investigate Chesterton's cause for sainthood, I thought that was fitting. Quite fitting. He's certainly the patron saint of Catholic English-language writers, Catholic apologists in general, journalists and of course fat guys with mustaches and curly hair, and (let's not forget) beer drinkers. Seriously, though, he's certainly not an exemplary layman "martyr" saint, or a suffering layman saint like the lovely souls St. Gemma Galgani and now the Blessed Chiara Badano (http://www.chiarabadano.org/ ), but he is kin to Aquinas (another rather overweight fellow) and G.K.C. "channeled" St. Thomas for "everyman" better than any professional academic has ever done.

Gilbert was an amazing "Everyguy" sort of saint, a husband, a writer, trying to make a living as a (sort of) journalist, and saintly he was, in temperament: just compare him to his great friend, "Old Thunder", Hilaire Belloc. (A "suffering saint" if one may make so bold; one who didn't tolerate fools, however, whereas G.K.C. was kind to everyone, even George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells.)

And of course, Belloc had every reason (times 100) to be bitter. He coined the phrase I quote in the title about the Catholic bishops of England in the 1930s being "a fog of mediocrity". They still are! We languish in a soup of never-ending foggy mediocrity in our bishops! I cannot think of how I could chew up the modern hierarchy remotely like Old Thunder would have done were he still be alive today.

But as one of the people quoted in this Catholic Herald article says, it was "political correctness" that did in G.K.C.'s cause for sainthood. He was "anti-Semitic", you see. (Eye roll) So today, England has a huge anti-Semitic problem (Muslims, and Leftists, oh my!) and thus G.K.C., who would have been disgusted with both, is shut of his Church because of them. It is a calumny. Old Thunder would have thundered on and on about it, but not the kindly G.K.C.

An Préachán

PS: 

You can read a lot of G.K.C.'s work at Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=G.+K.+Chesterton

But I didn't find his St. Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox there. However, I located it at Gutenberg Australia: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100331.txt

Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin as Dewey, Cheatum, and Howe (or Cheatum, Fleecem, and Scramm) Part I

I've been blogging some apologetics lately, and once again it is driven home to me how Luther, Zwingli and Calvin were the infamous law partners "Dewey, Cheatum, and Howe" (Do we cheat 'em, and how!) 

Once again, I've had to discuss why Catholics believe, are supposed to believe, in the Real Presence. The following is some bits of that. 

The idea, the dogma, of Our Lord being truly present in the consecrated bread and wine goes back to the beginning, as in St. Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 11: 23-32. Notice how St. Paul says, "What I have received from the Lord is what I have passed on to you...", an oath of sorts, a "I solemnly swear I'm telling the truth". He says almost the same thing in chapter 15 at verse 3, "For what I received I passed along to you as of first importance," after which he witnesses to Our Lord's Passion, Resurrection, and the the Apostles meeting with the Resurrected Christ. It is a formal testimony to the reality of Christ rising from the dead. 

He even mentions five hundred of the brethren who saw Christ at one time. A Greek speaker with something of a classical education (as well as a Pharisaic one), I think St. Paul is mentioning these 500 (no where else referenced in the NT) because he would have known that in Athens, the greatest intellectual seat of the original Greek-speaking world (surpassed in the larger Mediterranean world by Alexandria, of course), a man on trial for his life faced a jury of 500. I think he's saying he has evidence that would pass an Athenian jury in that city's heyday. So therefore back in chapter 11, when he says he is passing on what he "received from the Lord" is an upping of the witness, a supreme capping of the oath. I think there can be no question that St. Paul means Christ is truly present, and that is what St. John in his chapter 6 is on about, for he would be writing after the Synoptic Gospels and he, John, did not include a Last Supper/Institution scene – instead, we went into a extended narrative about the reality of eating Christ's Body and Drinking His Blood. The Early Church Fathers after St. John clearly taught the Real Presence, but they used Platonic philosophy to explain to the pagans how such a thing could be. "Sign" and "signify" language – but they meant by that that the image contains a real essence of the higher reality (a basic tenant of Platonism).

They did not mean it in the more modern sense of only "symbolizes" the reality. (I've had Catholics, middle-aged, salt-of-the-earth types, tell me the Eucharist is "only symbolic"!)

By Aquinas' day, the up-and-coming theologians (like St. Thomas) used Aristotle, and thus developed the Transubstantiation definition. A wonderful lecture on this, and one very respectful to Protestants, is given here by Msgr. Frank Lane. I highly recommend it.