A Vatican committee that spent years examining the medieval concept published a much-anticipated report Friday, concluding that unbaptized babies who die may go to heaven.

That could reverse centuries of Roman Catholic traditional belief that the souls of unbaptized babies are condemned to eternity in limbo, a place that is neither heaven nor hell. Limbo is not unpleasant, but it is not a seat alongside God.

It ain’t politically correct anymore – even among the stalwarts of Rome.

In the 5th century, St. Augustine declared that all unbaptized babies went to hell upon death. By the Middle Ages, the idea was softened to suggest a less severe fate, limbo.

In his Divine Comedy, Dante characterized limbo as the first circle of hell and populated it with the great thinkers of ancient Greece and Rome, as well as leading Islamic philosophers.

Plus – it’s a good chance to take a shot at a competing wing of fundamentalist True Believers.

Father Thomas Rausch, a theologian at Loyola Marymount University, said the document “puts the Catholic Church in a different position than Protestant evangelicals, who teach if you do not have a conscious explicit relationship with Christ — born again — you cannot be saved.”

It would all be laughable except for the numbers whose brains haven’t made it past the 5th Century.