Massa damnata is the idea that most people go to hell. My friend thinks it’s probably right. So do many others. It was allegedly the most popular position among the major early Church fathers. Here, I’m going to argue that there’s a conflict between:
Thinking those who die before the age of accountability are saved.
Thinking most people go to hell.
Believing that early stage fetuses are people.
Most fertilized embryos don’t reach full development. Most get “spontaneously aborted,” meaning that they die at some point prior to birth. On the Catholic view, these are already people. There’s already *someone *there, presumably capable of entering the afterlife.
So if the majority of people die before birth, and those who die before the age of accountability go to heaven, then most people must go to heaven. If spontaneously aborted fetuses go to heaven, then most people must go to heaven.
How might a defender of massa damnata get out of the dilemma?
Presumably they won’t reject 3. I don’t know of any people who affirm massa damnata but are pro choice. Many who affirm massa damnata are Catholic, so they won’t be able to deny that abortion is impermissible. Probably Catholics are committed to the idea that abortion is impermissible * because it kills someone*, though I’m not positive about this.
They could also think fetuses are people but deny that they have any afterlife. Perhaps people killed at a sufficiently early stage are not resurrected. But this seems pretty weird. If they already are people, why wouldn’t they be raised in the general resurrection? If infants get raised during this period, why not fetuses?
So then probably the way to deny this is simply to deny that those who die before the age of accountability are saved. There are more and less crazy ways of doing this. You could think that in the afterlife, fetuses are super happy but they don’t get the beatific vision. This is standardly called limbo. But then you’ll have to think that this pleasant afterlife is the fate of most people. The early Church fathers who thought most people would suffer forever were wrong. Jesus’s passage in Matthew 7 doesn’t equal eternal postmortem punishment.
The other option is to hold that infants go to a place of eternal postmortem suffering. I assume the kinds of people capable of stomaching massa damnata are also unusually capable of stomaching this dreadful conclusion. Still, if we can be sure of anything, it’s that God won’t send murdered babies to hell for all of eternity.
Here’s maybe the most promising option: you could think that if people die before the age of accountability, they undergo some other set of trials that determine their postmortem fate. Maybe in the afterlife they’re given some set of challenges, where, in order to be saved, they have to make the same kinds of choices that we have to make to be saved. If most of us fail these moral challenges, perhaps most of them do as well.
You can also think this kind of option occurs briefly in life. So maybe right before death, the mental faculties of a fetus are enhanced greatly, and they make a free choice to either choose God or not. I think this one is a bit more promising for Catholics theologically, though I haven’t investigated carefully. Perhaps most don’t choose union with God.
But just know what this option commits you to: if you have a miscarriage, on this view, the soul of the miscarried baby is plausibly in hell—and will forever remain there. Perhaps there is some conceivable being of great power who might arrange such a thing, but it surely cannot be the God of love who theists believe made the universe.
There’s another reason massa damnata pairs poorly with believing that infants and fetuses are saved. These views in combination mean that it’s massively in a person’s interest to be killed as a baby. If someone dies as a baby, they’re heaven-bound, while if they reach adulthood, odds are high that they get sent to the land down under (not Australia) where the worm dieth not and there is weeping and gnashing of teeth (want to emphasize—I am NOT talking about Australia).
At the end of the day, there are only two options for the person who thinks fetuses make it to the afterlife. They either must think that most people have a pleasant postmortem fate or that aborted fetuses have an unpleasant postmortem fate. Either case seriously cuts against the plausibility of massa damnata. Of course, massa damnata was never a plausible doctrine to begin with—and was always evil—but for its defender, one further challenge awaits them.
