Trent teaches there is no spiritual regeneration without water.  Desire alone is faith alone, a notion that belongs in hell with Luther. 

Ladislaus, Reply #11

I initially believed in Baptism of Desire simply because I thought that Trent taught it.  So one day I happened to be reading Trent's entire treatise on justification in Latin.  What I found was that this particular quotation had been lifted out of its entire context.  If you read the entire thing, a picture emerges.  What Trent is teaching, against the prevalent Protestant errors, is in fact the necessity of cooperation between grace and free will.  Grace is given freely, but then the WILL must must cooperate.  So the ENTIRE POINT of the Treatise is that BOTH grace ex opere operato AND the cooperation of the WILL are necessary.  So it would seem strange then for Trent to be teaching the whole time that both grace and will are necessary, and then suddenly to switch gears and say ... but grace OR free will are necessary for justification.  There's even a Canon in Trent which condemns the proposition that one is justified by Baptism even without the intention/desire to receive the Sacrament.

Now, the word commonly translated as "desire" is actually the Latin votum, which is a noun form of the Latin verb that means "to will".  Desire is a watered down translation made, IMO deliberately, to weaken its force.  It's more like a "vow" (our word "vow" also comes from the same Latin root).  Let me give an example.  I can DESIRE all I want to get married, but that does not mean I am married.  I can get engaged, set a date, rent out the reception hall, hire a photographer, have every intention and desire to get married, but then bail out five minutes before pronouncing my "vows" ... and I am not and never was married.  There must be some FORMALIZATION of this intention.  Now, one could argue that a catechumen could be close to having this kind of will/intention/vow to get baptized.  So in order to make BoD apply to all manner of infidels, the force of it had to be weakened.  Even St. Robert Bellarmine explicitly limited BoD to the catechumen.

In any case, on its face, the expression, "I cannot play baseball without a bat or a ball," is ambiguous.  You COULD take it that I cannot play baseball without having EITHER a bat OR a ball.  Or you could take it as meaning that I cannot play if EITHER is MISSING.  So on the surface, you could take it the BoD way, or else you could take it the way I read it.  But if you take the VERY NEXT SENTENCE of Trent, this sentence is immediately disambiguated ... in favor of MY reading of it.

To paraphrase, justification cannot happen without the laver or the desire, for Jesus taught that, in order to be born again, one must be born of water AND the Holy Spirit.  This is clearly making the following analogy (if you recall analogy format from the SAT) --

laver:desire::water:Holy Spirit (laver is to desire what water is to the Holy Spirit). 

Trent deliberately uses the descriptive term "laver" instead of, say, the Sacrament, precisely to drive home the analogy with this teaching and Our Lord's "water AND the Holy Spirit".  See, again, if you read the entire context, Trent had just spent several paragraphs explaining how it is the Holy Spirt who INSPIRES this cooperation of the will.

So to take this passage the BoD way would be to say:  I can play baseball with either a bat or a ball, since the coach said that I must have a bat AND a ball to play baseball.  It's ridiculous on the face of it.

Water AND the Holy Spirit immediately disambiguates the "not without the laver or the will for it" into my reading of it, and not the BoD meaning.

I stand by this reading of Trent as absolutely the only one that makes sense.  As for why other theologians didn't read it this way.  Well, St. Alphonsus actually cites teaching on the intention to receive CONFESSION (combined with perfect contrition) as sufficing to RESTORE someone to justification after it has been lost through sin.  But if you look at the passage on confession, Trent explicitly states, "EITHER ... OR".  If Trent were teaching the same thing here, you would have expected the exact same unambiguous phraseology, "EITHER the laver OR ELSE the desire".  But it's not there in the passage regarding Baptism.  In theology manuals AFTER the Council of Trent that were used in seminaries, BoD was still presented as a disputed question, with BoD referred to as the "Augustinian" position (by contrast with other Fathers who rejected it).  So in the immediate aftermath of Trent, this passage was NOT in fact read as closing the debate on BoD.  One or another theologian first read this as promoting/endorsing Baptism of Desire ... and then everyone else simply followed along and made that assumption without re-examining that interpretation.

So, if someone could persuade me that the sentence, "I cannot play baseball without a bat or a ball, since the coach said that I have to have a bat and a ball to play baseball," actually means that I can play baseball with EITHER a bat OR a ball, then you could convince me that Trent teaches BoD in this passage.

This thread is very helpful on this subject: https://www.cathinfo.com/baptism-of-desire-and-feeneyism/trent-and-justification/


Pay special attention here to Ladislaus' posts. What is commonly translated as "desire" in that quote from Trent is better understood as being like a vow (votum). Desire is a more ambiguous word in English, as he explains. Quote from him in that thread: