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Great find, Ladislaus.  This agrees with Christ, in Scripture, where He tells us:


1.  He who believes, and is baptized, will be saved.  (Belief + Baptism = members in the Church)
2.  He who does not believe, will be condemned.  (No belief = no membership = damnation).

The "unspoken middle ground" are those who BELIEVE but are not baptized (i.e. BOD).  These are neither saved, nor condemned.  They aren't members in the Church but they die justified.  Which leaves them to Limbo.

Yes, that passage confused me since I was a young man ... that in between.

It's also consistent with St. Ambrose declaring that those who have some kind of benefit from a repentance of sorts (like Valentinian) are, like the actual martyrs, possibly "washed but not crowned", where washing refers to a type of justification or at least non-condemnation, and crowning to entry into the Beatific Vision.  St. Gregory nαzιanzen teaches, in rejecting BoD explicitly, that there are some who are not good enough to be glorified (enter the Kingdom) but not bad enough to be punished.  It all fits.

I watched some of his Twitter talk on the issue and he maintained that "There was not a single theologian at the Vatican Council I who supported Fr. Feeney's position"...blah, blah, blah.

Right, so what?  Despite the big deal they raise about this, Father Cekada could only find 2 dozen theologians who even dealt with the subject, and the vast majority simply mentioned it in passing, "Yep, BoD".  There was almost no in-depth theological discussion of it since Sts. Bellarmine and Alphonsus, just a mere mention and regurgitation.

On the contrary, every single theologian (with one possible exception, Guerard des Laurier) concluded that Vatican II and the Novus Ordo Mass are Catholic.

BoD is nonsense.  Majority of Church Fathers rejected it, several quite explicitly.  St. Ambrose said something about Valentinian, but he linked his status to those of martyrs who are also "washed but not crowned" and elsewhere states, in "De Sacramentis" that even noble catechumens cannot be saved without receiving the Sacrament.  St. Augustine in a very youthful speculation (admits it's speculation) throws BoD theory out there, but then retracts it so forceful after his more mature anti-Pelagian days that his are some of the most powerful ANTI-BoD statements in existence.  St. Fulgentius his disciple rejects BoD and the EENS language of Florence comes largely from him.  After St. Fulgentius, there's not another mention of "BoD" until there's a debate among the pre-scholastics, Hugh of St. Victor (for) and Abelard (against).  Peter Lombard then writes to St. Bernard asking his opinion and St. Bernard very tentatively sides with "Augustine" (or so he mistakenly thinks), stating that he'd rather be wrong with Augustine than right on his own.  While he was a saintly man, obviously, theology was not his strength and clearly truth comes before being a respecter of persons, and St. Bernard very unjustly persecuted Abelard for "heresy" later because Abelard actually pioneered the scholastic method that St. Thomas later adopted, in his seminal work "Sic et Non", in which he did exactly what St. Thomas later did, examine a position and then with a view toward the CONTRARY positions, i.e. the objections, etc.  St. Bernard considered it impious to subject faith to this type of reason.  He was dead wrong, and Abelard right.  Abelard is really the father of the scholastic method.

In any case, after Peter Lombard went with St. Bernard, in his "Sentences", the manual used by nearly all the scholastics, and St. Thomas went with it ... it went viral.

But there's zero evidence of BoD having been revealed or being anything other than sheer speculation.  Nor has it ever been demonstrated to flow logically and necessarily from other revealed dogma.

Finally, the fruits of BoD are completely pernicious.  No good comes of it.  If God chooses to save some by BoD, that He hasn't revealed, then glory to Him.  But my not believing in it doesn't change what God actually does.  Meanwhile, believing in BoD ironically erodes belief in the necessity of Baptism, making salvation by BoD even less likely, for, as Father Feeney put it, people start to desire the desire for Baptism rather than Baptism itself.  It leads inexorably to religious indifferentism and EENS-denial.

At the very least, all discussion of it must be banned.  If I were Pope, before studying it for formal condemnation, I would immediately forbid any mention of BoD among Catholics and would order mention of it expunged from the works of St. Thomas, St. Robert, St. Alphonsus, and all of them.