My point is three-fold:
1. You really can't compare desire for confession with desire for baptism. In the desire for confession, a "perfect contrition" is ONLY possible because...you've already been baptized.
That's a key point which is often missed in the dogmatic declaration from the Council of Florence.
In the EENS passage is explicitly taught that "... only those remaining within this unity [of this ecclesiastical body] can profit by the sacraments of the Church unto salvation"
This is fatal to BoD. Why? Because, even in BoD it's the Sacrament of Baptism that is the instrumental cause of justification and salvation. To say otherwise, would be to profess the heresy that salvation can be had without the Sacraments, and without the Sacrament of Baptism in particular, which is the gateway to all the other Sacraments.
In other words, BoDers hold that the Sacrament of Baptism can "profit ... unto salvation" for those who receive it by "votum" ... but that contradicts the definintion from Florence, which clearly states that one must be in the unity of the body of the Church in order to profit unto salvation from the Sacraments.
Msgr. Fenton rightly denounced the notion that people could be in the SOUL of the Church, but came up with this strange notion that someone could be IN the body even if not OF the body. So, the analogy or metaphor here is that of an "undigested hamburger", and so I refer to this as "undigested hamburger ecclesiology". It's IN the body (like undigested food in the stomach) but not OF the body, not having been assimilated into the body. At not point, however is the food "in the unity of" the body, i.e united to the body, as if it were part of the body, not until it's digested and assimilated into the cells of the body.
God mirrors the supernatural world in nature, and here too we see that if something doesn't have the DNA of the body, it's not part of the body. Thus the character of the Sacrament of Baptism is in fact the DNA of Christ. Without said DNA, were are not part of Christ's Body, and are not recognized by God the Fathers as His sons.
As you have grasped, Pax, despite Decem's nonsensical gaslighting ... the KEY to this entire thing, justification and salvation ... is understand the distinction between a natural justice and the justfication that entails elevation to the supernatural life and entry into the Kingdom.
It was St. Thomas who first began to articulate this distinction adequately in describing why those who die in Original Sin only but without actual sin do not suffer but instead can have perfect happiness, since the supernatural state is not something that's a PRIVATION of our NATURE, not a privation of a DUE good, which alone causes suffering and evil.
Now, once a souls has been baptized, the supernatural virtues of faith, hope, and charity BECOME DUE GOODS for those souls, since those must needs go along with that baptismal character.
This articulation of Limbo by St. Thomas provides the key to ...
1) Our Lord saying teaching that those who believe and are bapptized will be saved, but those who do not believe will be condemned. What of those who believe but are not baptized? It would seem that they are neither saved nor condemned.
2) St. Gregory "the Theologian" nαzιanzen said that there are those who are not good enough to be glorified and yet not bad enough to be punished (glory = supernatural life, and the Kingdom)
3) St. Ambrose referring to the hope that Valentinian might be, like the unbaptized martyrs ... washed (restored to natural justice) but not crowned (elevated to the supernatural state of the Kingdom).
Once St. Thomas fashioned the key of this distinction between the natural (reward & punishment) and the supernatural (free gift) ... that key unlocks the entire set of apparent contradictions and unravels everything.
Everything becomes crystal clear. St. Augustine and others somewhat confused and conflated the natural and the supernatural where it came to reward and punishment. Selfsame Council of Florence, after saying that the Sacrament cannot profit unto salvation for those who do not remain in the unity of the body, immediately after that says tht only to them also can almsgiving, fasting, etc. etc. have ETERNAL rewards. That's distinct form temporal rewards, and the corollary of temporal punishment.
So ... let's lay it all out there, and people would do well to engage regularly in some introspection like this ... if the anti-EENS people were honest about it, they would admit that they have a hard time envisioning some naturally virtuous individual ... kind, generous, selfless, etc., being consigned to torture by flaming hot pokers for all eternity because he hadn't received the free gift of faith.
After all, if your next door neighbor were to tied someone down in his basement and torture him for months and years ... you'd think he were some kind of deragned monster, sick in the head. Yet many people imagine that this is what happens to all those who are not saved and enter into the Kingdom, even if they were good, selfless, kind-hearted, etc. There's something wrong with that, and everybody knows it. THAT is why the try to invent ever possible loophole to allow non-Catholics to be saved, to prevent having to embrace this image of God as some cruel sadistict individual Who Himself does not do as He teaches.
Well, this conflict is also thoroughly resolved by the same distinction, where those who are naturally good can offset some of the temporal (non-eternal) punishment due to sin by their natural good works and virtues, where they can be "washed" ... and therefore freed from this type of suffering, or at least where there are many degrees of this suffering (as also mentioned in one EENS definition), completely self-infilicted and proportionte to the privation of the due natural good in their souls that was engineered by all their life choices.
Topic: St Alphonsus' Baptism Contradiction (Read 42181 times)