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Stubborn,

Just to be clear, you would say not say St. Thomas of Aquinas, St. Robert Bellarmine, St. Alphonsus - I'll stop there - were in your personal opinion heretics, right? Only people who "persist in promoting the idea"? Not sure how one parses that, but . . .

DR

It is evident, both from Bellarmine and Billuart, that no one can be saved unless he belongs to the visible communion of the Church, either actually or virtually, and also that the salvation of catechumens can be asserted only because they do so belong; that is, because they are in the vestibule, for the purpose of entering, – have already entered in their will and proximate disposition. St. Thomas teaches with regard to these, in case they have faith working by love, that all they lack is the reception of the visible sacrament in re; but if they are prevented by death from receiving it in re before the Church is ready to administer it, that God supplies the defect, accepts the will for the deed, and reputes them to be baptized. If the defect is supplied, and God reputes them to be baptized, they are so in effect, have in effect received the visible sacrament, are truly members of the external communion of the Church, and therefore are saved in it, not out of it (Summa, 3, Q.68, a.2, corp. ad 2. Et ad 3.)… …Bellarmine, Billuart, Perrone, etc., in speaking of persons as belonging to the soul and not to the body, mean, it is evident, not persons who in no sense belong to the body, but simply those who, though they in effect belong to it, do not belong to it in the full and strict sense of the word, because they have not received the visible sacrament in re. All they teach is simply that persons may be saved who have not received the visible sacrament in re; but they by no means teach that persons can be saved without having received the visible sacrament at all. There is no difference between their view and ours, for we have never contended for anything more than this; only we think, that, in these times especially, when the tendency is to depreciate the external, it is more proper to speak of them simply as belonging to the soul, for the fact the most important to be insisted on is, not that it is impossible to be saved without receiving the visible sacrament in re, but that it is impossible to be saved without receiving the visible sacrament at least in voto et proxima dispositione.


Brownson, Orestes. “The Great Question.” Brownson’s Quarterly Review. Oct. 1847. Found in: Brownson, Henry F. The Works of Orestes A. Brownson: Collected and Arranged. Vol.V. (pp.562-563). Detroit: Thorndike Nourse, Publisher, 1884.