CathInfo.com

It is just as easy to speculate that God provided Baptism to St. Emerantiana through an unseen miracle to supply His requisites for salvation, as it is to use our want of knowledge as proof of its dispensability.

What we do not know is not a proof of anything.

If the Church honors anyone as a saint, according to her own teaching, the presumption must be that the saint was baptized.

St. Aiphonsus de Liquori tells us that there were approximately eleven million martyrs in the first three centuries of the Church's history. Out of these eleven million martyrs, and the thousands of others which have been recorded since by various Church historians, there are about ten cases in which the martyrs are reported to have died without baptism. In not one of these cases can we assert or conclude positively that these persons were not baptized.

The seventeenth in the series of Oecuмenical Councils was that of Florence. It was a gathering called to end some longstanding separations of Oriental dissident groups from the true Church. One of its acts was the famed decree for the Jacobites, included in the dogmatic Bull Cantate Domino, issued by Pope Eugenius IV on February 4, 1442. The following paragraph is found in this decree.

It [the sacrosanct Roman Church, established by the voice of Our Lord and Savior] firmly believes, professes, and teaches that none of those who do not exist within the Catholic Church, not only pagans, but Jews, heretics, and schismatics, can become partakers of eternal life; but that they are going into the everlasting fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels, unless they become associated with it (nisi . . . eidem fuerint agregati) before they die. And [it firmly believes, professes, and teaches] that the unity of the ecclesiastical body is of such value that the Church's sacraments are profitable unto salvation, and that fastings, almsgivings, and the other duties of piety and exercises of the Christian militancy, bring forth eternal rewards only for those who remain within it [the unity of the ecclesiastical body]: and that, however great his almsgiving may be, and even though he might shed his blood for the name of Christ, no one can be saved unless he remains within the embrace and the unity of the Catholic Church. [Denz., 714.]


Actually this declaration of the Cantate Domino simply makes more explicit the lessons brought out in the Fourth Lateran Council and in the Bull Unam Sanctam. First of all, it mentions and classifies those who are outside of the true Church. These include the pagans, who do not accept any part of divine public revelation; the Jews, who accept the Old Testament as God's message; the heretics, who accept certain parts of the teaching contained in the New Testament; and finally the schismatics, who have not rejected any portion of the divinely revealed message, but who simply have cut themselves off from communion with the true Church. It insists that none of these people can attain to eternal life unless they enter the true Church before they pass from this world. In issuing this teaching, the Cantate Dominosimply repeated, with a little more explicitness about the individuals who are "outside" the Church, what previous docuмents had already taught about the necessity of the Catholic Church for the attainment of eternal salvation. Fenton

To whatever extent I implied or otherwise contended that it is contrary to doctrine to contend that a person could be resurrected after Christ's Resurrection and before the General Judgment, I retract.  This is still a lousy proof against BoD, but I have been considering and studying the matter of resurrection in greater detail since it came up, and I am no longer as convinced as I was that it is radically impossible as such.