Oh, get lost with the "Catechism" nonsense. Behind the old Baltimore was none other than Cardinal Gibbons, who was condemned almost by name for promoting "Americanism" and kept denying that he did. Catholic Church in the US was already long down the path of promoting religious indifferentism due to their attempting to uphold the glorious US Constitution. That's actually why a Father Feeney rose up in the US rather than in other parts of the world. If you actually look at the stuff Father Feeney's "superiors" were spouting, there was no subtlety about it, no distinctions being made ... just an open, outright, verbatim denial of the dogma that there's no salvation outside the Church. Irish Catechisms before Vatican I denied papal infallibility, and had to be revised later. Such Catechisms mean absolutely nothing. Msgr. Fenton repeatedly called out the Baltimore Catechism for unfortunate errors, including on the articulation of "BoD" (and Fenton did accept BoD).
I'm OK with someone making some rational argument in favor of BoD. I'd love to see one, actually, since it's all nonsense rooted always implicitly in "oh, well, it wouldn't be nithe of God, meciful for Him not to allow any jackass flying a plane to be saved at the last second on his way down after he lived his entire life until then separated from the Church and living in sin." That's one of the most repugnant parts about the entire BoD movement, it's the implicitly finger wagging and fist shaking at God, telling HIM what the BoDer thinks would be merciful or not to do. Sadly, even St. Robert Bellarmine's main reason for BoD (for catechumens only) was that it "would seem too harsh" to deny it. Surprising from an otherwise highly intellectual man. St. Augustine admitted that the impetus for the idea was emotion, where people questioned why God would allow a seemingly-devout catechumen to die without Baptism why some scuмbuckets who lived a life of sin snuck in under the wire and received Baptism on their deathbeds. At the end, his answer was ... stop trying to judge God based on your standards of what may or may not be fair, since God cannot be prevented by some kind of impossibility from bringing the Sacrament to His elect.
As I said, I'm OK with someone attempting to make a rational argument ...
BUT IT'S LITERALLY NOTHIGN BUT LIES AND GASLIGHTING ...
lies about the "constant universal Tradtion of the Church", a total pack of lies that another one of these troll posters started lying about, and even when the evidence was presented quite clearly that it was untrue, she kept persisting and repeating the lie, a clear sign of bad will and mendacity. I used to criticize the Dimond Brothers for the "bad will" allegation, but they're spot on in 99% of cases, and you can ferret it out by behavior like this.
When you see this pattern ...
BoDer: Church Fathers unanimously taught BoD.
Anti-BoDer: No, here's a list fo the Fathers who denied it, complete with quotes, and the only two that did were St. Augustine, who was by his own admission speculating and not transmitting received teaching and St. Ambrose, except that he did not mean what people claim.
BoDer: Universal! Constant! [like whent he government programmed words like "baseless" during COVID]
Anti-BoDer: Show me the evidence.
BoDer: Baltimore Catechism, Council of Trent, St. Thomas, St. Alphonsus, and St. Thomas.
Anti-BoDer: refutes the catechisms, and says, "yes, we already know for the 100th time what St. Thomas thought" and here's why we disagree
BoDer: Church Fathers unanimously taught BoD. [hoping enough time has passed so that the inital refutation of this had been forgotten]
This patent dishonesty and outright lying makes me sick to my stomach. Bring on the rational arguments. I'd actually like to see one, since no one has produced a single one to date, not St. Robert, not St. Alphonsus, not St. Thomas Aquinas. Nobody even really tried. St. Thomas came the closest, except for it wasn't a proof that it exists, merely an explanation of how it works, i.e. that since the Sacraments are visible signs of invisible grace, BoD is the invisible grace without the visible sign. OK, but demonstrate that it actually exists. We can't receive "Holy Orders of Desire" or "Confirmation of Desire" ... and notably those are the other two Sacraments that confer a character. That's really the closest you'll ever see.
ACTUAL HISTORY:
7-8 Church Fathers rejected BoD explicitly
St. Augustine speculated in his youth, saying "having gone back and forth on the matter, I find that ..." (admittedly speculating, and not passing on received Tradition), but then later he rejected the notion and issued some of the strongest anti-Bod Statements in history
St. Ambrose .... on Valentinian, said he hoped that Valentinian could have received a similar grace to martyrs who die without Baptism, noting that "even the martyrs are washed but not crowned". Since he elsewhere states explicitly that even good catechumens who die without Baptism cannot be saved. So what he clearly means by "washed but not crowned" is a certain remission of punishment due to sin, but without entering the Kingdom (with the crown, the Baptismal character)
After St. Fulgentius, disciple of St. Augustine, not a single mention of BoD until the 1100s with the proto-scholastics.
Peter Lombard was writing his famous Sentences, which became the textbook for the first scholastics. There was a debate between Hugh of St. Victory (for BoD) and Abelard (against BoD). So he wrote to St. Bernard to "break the tie". St. Bernard said, rather authoritatively, that "I'd rather be wrong with Augustine than right on my own." -- which while it expressed his own personal humility did nothing to bolster any argument in its favor, and he was evidently unaware of St. Augustine's later rejection of BoD (access to texts was still rather limited).
Lombard then went with pro-BoD in the Sentences. St. Thomas picked it up from there, also incorrectly basing it on St. Augustine's alleged position, and of course after him it went viral.
We had a Pope Innocent II (in a suspicious docuмent, the authenticity of which is disputed) and then Pope Innocent III (who contradicts St. Alphonsus) both opining in favor, and also again basing it "on the authority of Augustine and Ambrose" (not their own papal authority, not on a constant Tradition), but, as we have seen, incorrectly, on Augustine and Ambrose. Devotion to St. Augustine was so exaggerated at one point that the Church had to step in and condemn the proposition that one may prefer the opinion of Augustine over the Church's teaching. Church does not condemn propositions unless there's someone out there who actually holds that, at least implicitly.
Then you had the Council of Trent, from which most people try to draw BoD, but incorrectly, as Trent was teaching about justifiction (not salvation), Father Feeney's distinction, and also there are a couple ways to understand the teaching, where it says justification "cannot [happen] without" the desire, meaning it's a necessary cause, but not necessarily sufficient, and the passage can also be read as leaving the BoD opinion uncondemned, so that you're not a heretic if you hold that Baptism is necessary "at least in desire". Nowhere does Trent actively teach that one must believe this. But, again, the respected and approved post-Tridentine theologian Melchior Cano made the same distinction between justification and salvation [Father Feeney did not make it up], where he held that infidels, for example, could be justified but not saved.
Here's your "constant and universal Tradition". You'll see that the entire thing is actually a theological house of cards resting on the [alleged] "Augutine and Ambrose", "Augustine and Ambrose", "Augustine and Ambrose" -- imagine these being repeated over and over again by a parrot.
But we'll get crickets on this, no refutation (since it can't be refuted), and then after some time has passed ... "muh St. Thomas", "muh Baltimore Catechism", muh "Universal and Constant teaching" ... like robotic programmed brains who just regurgitate the talking points because they don't like EENS dogma and want to believe in a BoD.
Recall during COVID how someone put together a montage of a dozens of news channels verbatim repeating the identical talking point about how it's a "danger to our democracy" (to refuse the jab). Now imagine that same type of thing with 100 BoDers spewing, in unison, "Augustine and Ambrose", "Unviersal Constant Tradition", "Augustine and Ambrose" [bawk bawk bawk]
Topic: Miraculous Baptisms (Read 111945 times)