About one thing the [Catholic] Church is quite clear: the holy patriarchs, people like Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, were not in hell [Gehenna] at the time of the Lord came—not what we mean by hell—and they were not in heaven. They had to wait for our Lord’s coming before they could get into heaven. And the place or the state in which they waited is what we call Limbo [of the Fathers or Paradise].
When or Lord Jesus Christ had died on the Cross, and left his body in the tomb to wait till Easter morning, the first thing which his spirit did was—what? To explore his Father’s lumber room.
[Note: A lumber room is a place where you keep things which you don’t need at the moment, but don’t want to throw away because you will need them later on. So it was with the patriarchs; God didn’t need them yet in his drawing-room, so to speak, that is, in heaven, but he would want them there later on, so he didn’t throw them away into Gehenna, the rubbish heap; he kept them in Limbo, which is his lumber room.]
He went to Limbo [Paradise], and visited all the borderline cases of the old patriarchs who had been waiting so many centuries for him to come. How they must have crowded round him, and what a lot he must have explained to them which they hadn’t been able to understand properly hitherto! “It’s all right, Adam (he will have said), you did a very foolish thing, and a very wicked thing, when you ate the fruit of the tree although you had been told not to; but I have been hanging, from twelve to three this afternoon, on a very different kind of tree, and now the world has been redeemed from the consequences of your sin. It’s all right, Eve; you disobeyed, but my Mother, by her obedience, has brought salvation into the world. You see now, Noe, what was the idea of building an ark to save yourself and your family from the flood? It was a prophecy of the Church which I am just going to found, the ark which stays afloat in a sinful world, and saves men’s souls from being engulfed in it. You, Abraham, when you sacrificed your son Isaac, or rather were prepared to sacrifice him, were doing what my heavenly Father did when he sent me into the world to die. Your ladder, Jacob, set up between you and heaven, was the image of my Incarnation; you, Joseph, were sold for twenty pieces of silver, I was sold for thirty. Do you remember, Moses, how you set up a brazen serpent on a pole in the wilderness, and all the people who had been bitten by the snakes, if only they could be persuaded to look up at it, got well? That is what my Cross is going to do now for sinners.” And so on, all down the list of the holy people whom we read about in the Old Testament. What a holiday that must have been for them all, when our Lord came and explained to them, at last, when their experiences in life had meant, and ended up, “Now you are going home with me; it is time you went home!”
(“When he ascended on high he led a host of captives, and he gave gifts to men.” Ephesians 4:8).
Taken from: “The Creed in Slow Motion”, Knox, Ronald, Msgr., Sheed & Ward, New York, 1951, pp. 110-112.