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Criminy.  44 replies to this?  

I am sorry not to respond, I'm not running away from my own statement.  I am researching a massive series of articles I plan to write on NFP, one of these days.  I'm now wondering if NFP is not the great "secret heresy" of our time, because it snuck in under the radar before the shock of Vatican II.  

BoD and BoB I believe will eventually be defined as Jehanne says.  You must have an explicit vow to belong to the Catholic Church.  It is not just enough to have faith in Jesus Christ, for instance, to vow to become Protestant.  One Pope often quoted by Feeneyites says that even the shedding of blood will not suffice for salvation unless you are within the Catholic Church -- this rules out baptism of blood for those who are trying to be Christian but not Catholic.

Unlike anyone else here, most likely, I was baptized as an adult and have traced all of this in my own soul.  I know that I was reborn as soon as I decided to become Catholic.  Since then Jesus has "known" me.  For two years before that I was just "Christian" and if I had died then, I believe I would have gone to hell.
But if I had died as a catechumen, I think I would have had a good chance at salvation.

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I read an interesting quote from Pope St. Leo the Great.  I can't find it now, I'll try to dig it up again, but he said that if you were baptized by a heretic -- referring to an Arian -- it does not count as a real baptism, but that you don't need to get baptized again even conditionally.  Instead you only need the "laying on of hands" of a real Catholic bishop, in other words, confirmation.

This implictly confirms baptism of desire, because he is saying that someone with an invalid baptism does not need to have it redone.  

Here's a question to make everyone's head spin:  What about someone baptized by a Freemason with evil intent, such as whom lurked in the Church long before Vatican II?  What if someone was baptized by a "jureur" heretic, a French priest who went along with the Revolution?  This would be like being baptized by an Arian, Nestorian, Monophysite, etc.

The wrong intent destroys baptism, you know.   Does God abandon all those who had this type of baptism, or has He seen that they DESIRED the waters of baptism and supplied the justification invisibly for them HIMSELF?  

If there were no baptism of desire, heretics could sneak into the Church, as they have done now, and take everyone to hell with them through invalid baptisms, not even needing to bother with tricking them through various false doctrines.  

The irony of all this is that Catholic Martyr, baptized in the Novus Ordo, may not even be validly baptized. Maybe none of us are, since the clergy is essentially kaput.  

I leave you with another quote from Trent I just discovered, the third snippet I've found where it clearly teaches baptism of desire.  This is from Session 7:

"CANON IV.-If any one saith, that the sacraments of the New Law are not necessary unto salvation, but superfluous; and that, without them, or without the desire thereof, men obtain of God, through faith alone, the grace of justification;-though all (the sacraments) are not indeed necessary for every individual; let him be anathema.

Here's a question to make everyone's head spin:  What about someone baptized by a Freemason with evil intent, such as whom lurked in the Church long before Vatican II?

Sorry to disappoint (sort of :wink:), but such does not make my head spin at all.