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Author Topic: LF Sources of Invincible Ignorance  (Read 5014 times)

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Re: LF Sources of Invincible Ignorance
« Reply #5 on: October 17, 2022, 12:02:54 PM »
Instead of finding saints supporting salvation without faith in Christ I found the opposite:

Quote
“Since your Highness [King John III of Portugal] well understands that God will require of you an account of the salvation of so many nations, who are ready to follow the better path if any one will show them it, but meanwhile, for want of a teacher, lie in blind darkness, and the filth of the most grievous sins, offending their Creator, and casting their own souls headlong into the misery of eternal death.”[8]
Here again we see St. Francis Xavier eliminating any idea of salvation for “the invincibly ignorant,” excluding from salvation even those ignorant souls whom he thought would embrace the Faith if they were taught it!


The full article has many more quotes that annihilate the ignorant teaching.




Re: LF Sources of Invincible Ignorance
« Reply #6 on: October 17, 2022, 12:17:13 PM »
Question for believers in salvation without belief in Christ:

I assume you acknowledge unbaptized infants go to Hell (limbo). At what point does an infant mature enough to have an "implicit baptism of desire".

If someone is a "vegetable", intellectually akin to an infant, is he capable of an "implicit baptism of desire"?
If yes, why not an infant?

If no, how is a mental barrier to receiving baptism any more just than a physical barrier?

It seems that salvation in ignorance doesn't even ameliorate the supposed problem it is trying to solve.


Offline Ladislaus

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Re: LF Sources of Invincible Ignorance
« Reply #7 on: October 17, 2022, 12:28:58 PM »
Instead of finding saints supporting salvation without faith in Christ I found the opposite:
Here again we see St. Francis Xavier eliminating any idea of salvation for “the invincibly ignorant,” excluding from salvation even those ignorant souls whom he thought would embrace the Faith if they were taught it!


The full article has many more quotes that annihilate the ignorant teaching.

To me, St. Francix Xavier or St. Isaac Jogues carry a lot more weight than some theologian (as great as he might be) sitting behind a desk thinking.

Offline Ladislaus

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Re: LF Sources of Invincible Ignorance
« Reply #8 on: October 17, 2022, 12:42:54 PM »
Everyone has to admit that ignorance cannot be salvific, but merely exculpatory.  To hold that exculpation can be salvific in and of itself is actually the very definition of the Pelagian heresy.

So the only thing invincible ignorance means is that there's no obstacle placed in the way of God's grace by way of a culpable ignorance.

This is all that Pius IX was teaching in those much-abused passages.  To say otherwise would be to make him a Pelagian heretic.

So, once we rule out Pelagianism, the conversation turns to what is the minimum amount of explicit faith required for supernatural faith and therefore for salvation.  In those without the use of reason (infants and others like them), the Sacrament of Baptism can infuse the supernatural virtue of faith without any explicit act of the intellect.

For all others, some explicit act of the intellect is required to make a supernatural act of faith.  Dispute is whether one must believe explicitly at least in the Holy Trinity and Incarnation (with the rest being able to be implicit) or else it suffices to believe in a God Who rewards the good and punishes the wicked.

Former has all of Catholic authority behind it.  It was believed unanimously by the Church Fathers, expressed in the Athanasian Creed, and taught / believed by all for the first 1500 years of Church history.  Around that time a Franciscan and some Jesuits came up with "Rewarder God" theory ... reacting (emotionally) to the discovery of the New World, with people wondering how God would allow all those to be lost.  St. Francis Xavier and St. Isaac Jogues answer that for them (as per above).

At some point, the Holy Office rejected a request to baptize those who believed only in a Rewader God, and insisted that they must believe at least those "mysteries of faith that are necessary by necessity of means for salvation".  Vatican I taught that supernatural faith requires knowledge of mysteries that can ONLY be known through Revelation (that rules out belief in a Rewarder God sufficing, since as Vatican I also taught, those can be known with certainty by reason).  St. Pius X also taught about how certain types of ignorance (ignorance of the explicit mysteries) are required for salvation ... so that explicitly guts the Pelagian interpretation of Pius IX.

There's no support anywhere in the Magisterium for Rewarder God theory, and it's been explicitly rejected by the Holy Office and implicitly by Vatican I.

Offline Ladislaus

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Re: LF Sources of Invincible Ignorance
« Reply #9 on: October 17, 2022, 01:01:57 PM »
St. Alphonsus was making his statements before the OUM was defined at Vatican I.  Otherwise, he would have rejected Rewarder God theory as a heretical novelty.  If something that was taught unanimously and explicitly by all Catholics for 1500 years does not constitute an infallible dogmatic teaching from the OUM, then there's no such thing.  Unfortunately, St. Alphonsus seemed to have this excessive admiration of de Lugo (one of those Jesuit innovators), and ended up incorrectly saying that this is a tenable (albeit less probable) opinion.  It is in no wise tenable, and St. Alphonsus just got that wrong.  And evidently St. Alphonsus was not aware of the Holy Office decision that ruled this out, or alternatively didn't believe that the teaching embedded in the Holy Office decree was 100% binding.