The visibility of the Church requires a visible membership.

That is not what the 1949 letter said, though!  Have you read it?

These are simply not in conflict. You think they conflict...but they do not.

For starters, here is St. Thomas:

Quote

"Next, he [Pope Innocent III] comes to the article about the effect of grace. First, he speaks of the effect of grace with regard to the unity of the Church, saying: "There is one universal Church of the faithful, outside of which no one at all is saved." Now, the unity of the Church is nothing other than the congregation of the faithful. Since it is impossible to please God without faith, there can be no place of salvation other than in the Church. Furthermore, the salvation of the faithful is consummated through the sacraments of the Church, in which the power of Christ's Passion is operative."

Nowhere does St. Thomas or anyone else say the following:

"However, this desire need not always be explicit, as it is in catechumens; but when a person is involved in invincible ignorance God accepts also an implicit desire, so called because it is included in that good disposition of soul whereby a person wishes his will to be conformed to the will of God."

This is heresy, plain and simple.

Don I'm impressed.  Now look at the infallible decrees treating on baptism, and see that there is indeed a conflict with baptism of desire and baptism of blood.

you have to account for the fact that both of these Popes lived centuries before the Reformation. At the time there werent any non Catholic Christians. i think the Church's position is perfectly consistent. even now the Church claims that all salvation comes through the Catholic Church but modern Popes have also acknowledged the work of the Holy Spirit in some non Catholic churches.

this is no contradiction, its called the Development of Doctrine. makes perfect sense to me.

So you buy the implicit faith heresy too, huh?

First of all, their were sects claiming to be Christian though they were not, even before the Protestant revolt (schismatics).

Second, perhaps you would do better to listen to popes rather than some Novus Ordo 'catholic' at 'catholic'answers.

Now We consider another abundant source of the evils with which the Church is afflicted at present: indifferentism. This perverse opinion is spread on all sides by the fraud of the wicked who claim that it is possible to obtain the eternal salvation of the soul by the PROFESSION of any kind of religion, as long as morality is maintained. Surely, in so clear a matter, you will drive this deadly error far from the people committed to your care.

With the admonition of the apostle that "there is one God, one faith, one baptism" may those fear who contrive the notion that the safe harbor of salvation is open to persons of any religion whatever. They should consider the testimony of Christ Himself that "those who are not with Christ are against Him," and that they disperse unhappily who do not gather with Him.  Therefore "without a doubt, they will perish forever, unless they hold the Catholic faith whole and inviolate."

Let them hear Jerome who, while the Church was torn into three parts by schism, tells us that whenever someone tried to persuade him to join his group he always exclaimed: "He who is for the See of Peter is for me." A schismatic flatters himself falsely if he asserts that he, too, has been washed in the waters of regeneration. Indeed Augustine would reply to such a man: "The branch has the same form when it has been cut off from the vine; but of what profit for it is the form, if it does not live from the root?"

Don I'm impressed.  Now look at the infallible decrees treating on baptism, and see that there is indeed a conflict with baptism of desire and baptism of blood.

I sympathize with Father Feeney, really, I do.  In my opinion, the Traditional Catholic Movement started with him, and I think that he was the greatest priest and defender of the Faith during the entire 20th-century.  The Fathers at Lateran, Constance, Florence, and Trent, when they specified vowtum with respect to Baptism had nothing in common with the modernist heretics that began swarming the Vatican in the 19th and 20th centuries.  Those churchmen are agnostics, who want Catholic spirituality to complement their agnosticism.  They are descendants of the deists, who evolved (no pun intended) into the modern atheistic movement.  Their faith is not based upon Revelation but upon Darwin, Kant, Hume, and the rest of the French philosophes who gave us the deistic, Masonic American and French revolutions.

I am with Feeneyism 100%.  The BoD and BoB doctrines are, IMHO, a very minor difference between us.

For the record, I posted the CA response for humor's sake.

I'm against Feeneyism but not for the reasons in that post.

The Holy Office of Pius XII settled the Feeney issue in the 50's. Open and shut. It is amazing to me that his adherents still slam the door to Heaven to souls the Church does not.

Bottom line is that they indulge in private interpretation of a dogma that contradicts the Church's own interpretation.

They settled nothing; if anything, they excommunicated themselves.  What you are asking us to believe is that the Holy Spirit speaks with a forked tongue.  You are no different than the modernists at EWTN and CA.