This is another example vindicating Fr. Feeney (RIP):
"There is no one about to die in the state of justification whom God cannot secure Baptism for, and indeed, Baptism of Water. The schemes concerning salvation, I leave to the sceptics. The clear truths of salvation, I am preaching to you."
Precisely this. I actually backed a BoDer into a corner one time, the old "Lover of Truth [sic]" (I called him "Lover of Heresy"), and I refused to move on until he answered my question. I kept pushing him on the fact that God can do anything that He wants, that it's childsplay for Him, etc. ... and he finally had to concede the point. I mean, it would be openly heretical to deny it. I love it how BoDers claim that we "constrain" or "limit" God by His Sacraments, whereas in point of fact it is the who constrain God by "impossibility". If God decreed that His Sacraments are necessary for salvation, then they are necessary for salvation, and He WILL follow through on it and get the Sacrament to His elect. There are many stories of saints raising people back to life in order to baptize them.
Perhaps the most moving and dramatic happened in the life of St. Peter Claver, an incident witnessed by many. He had arrived at a home where a devout slave girl, Agustina, had died. But St. Peter was inspired to kneel at the foot of her bed for an hour, and after the hour she came back to life and coughed up a large quantity of blood. St. Peter began to hear her Confession (he must have received inspiration that she had not been saved). But after a short time he received another light, stopped the confession, and baptized Angusta, after which died. She had related that she was in a beautiful place travelling down a road when a man in white stopped her and told her that she could go no further, since she didn't have on her wedding garment. Agustina had been a devout practicing "Catholic", as far as anyone had known, going to daily Mass and receiving Holy Communion nearly every day.
In any case, St. Augustine, who's often cited as the great authority behind BoD, he actually retracted it after having battled it out with the Pelagians, and issued some of the most anti-BoD statements in existence.
If you wish to be a catholic, do not venture to believe, to say, or to teach that they whom the Lord has predestinated for [the sacrament of] baptism can be snatched away from his predestination, or die before that has been accomplished in them which the Almighty has predestined.
There is in such a dogma more power than I can tell assigned to chances in opposition to the power of God, by the occurrence of which casualties that which He has predestinated is not permitted to come to pass. It is hardly necessary to spend time or earnest words in cautioning the man who takes up with this error against the absolute vortex of confusion into which it will absorb him [. . .]
St. Augustine realized that to somehow endow "misfortune" or "chance" to overcome the power of God wasn't even remotely Catholic.
In any case, back to "Lover of Heresy". He admitted that God cannot be undermined by accidents or impossibility. So then I asked him then why God would will for some to be saved by BoD and others by the Sacrament.
Only thing He could come up with was that God willed for some people to spend some time in Purgatory ... but of course we know how that undermines the teacing of Trent regarding how initial justification is a regeneration, and then the Council defines regeneration as a complete rebirth so that nothing remains which could hinder or delay one's entry into the Kingdom.
Topic: God provides: Stories of God providing deathbed Baptism of water (Read 3544 times)