There are plenty of 'neutral' priests out there, (I know of some in the sspx).  I'd also propose that there are more laity feeneyites than clergy for the following reasons:

1.  The clergy can remain neutral and/or silently feeneyite and there's no danger to them getting kicked out of a chapel. 
2.  The clergy have 1,000 more important things to do than debate this topic.
3.  The laity have been forced to pick sides many times, both by family/friends who call them 'heretics' and by priests who threaten to withhold sacraments.
4.  Due to threats and actual banishment from chapels, the laity has been forced to educate themselves and fight back.
5.  I've only ever once been asked my stance on the topic by a priest, but i've been asked hundreds of times by laity.
6.  Due to family splits and chapel turmoil over the topic (I've heard of multiple families who didn't attend a wedding due to their son/daughter married a feeneyite), the laity has to study and know why they believe what they believe.

Fabricated controversy? Hardly. Bod remains not just a big deal, but a huge deal.  The division in Tradition over it is just one of the consequences.  Beyond this particular remark, responses may need to move.

The original Baltimore catechism of the 1800s has no mention of BOD or salvation for “sincere” non-Catholics.  Subsequent editions had “modernized” language inserted.  This is all novelty.  No one, from Trent til the French Revolution, 200 yrs, believed in ANY salvation outside the Church.  It wasn’t until Fɾҽҽmαsσɳɾყ started gaining ground, and Protestants started multiplying in the mid 1800s that you had a shift in thinking.  

And then there's pope St Pius V, of course, condemned the errors of Michael Du Bay, including the error that catechumens in perfect charity still need to have their sins remitted. For goodness' sakes the ink on Trent had barely dried when he condemned that error.

This isn't to get into an argument about the doctrine of the thing, only about the historiological issue at play. If you want to argue that BoD is wrong, you can't argue it's novelty. If it's an error, it's an error older than protestantism.

I still find it difficult to believe that with all the lay Feeneyites on the forum, there are, at most, six Feeneyite clergy in the world.

Referring to Catholics who believe EENS in the sense that it has been divinely revealed as “Feeneyites” involves a terribly deceitful abuse of language. The implication is that we believe what we do on the authority of a mere human (Fr. Feeney), when in truth there is no group of Catholics alive today who put more emphasis on the importance and necessity of believing dogma on the authority of God, who can neither deceive nor be deceived, revealing. The hypocritical irony here is that all of those who reject the Church's infallible definitions on the necessity of the Sacrament of Baptism and of Church membership for salvation do so by appealing to merely human authorities! “St. Thomas said this, St. Robert Bellarmine said that, etc.” It would be one thing if the “three baptisms” were taught universally (both in time and location) and were consequently part of the universal and ordinary magisterium. We know that they haven't been taught universally, however, by the testimony of SS. Gregory nαzιanzen, John Chrysostom, Ambrose, Augustine, Isaac Jogues, etc. and by the definitions of the solemn magisterium which plainly exclude the possibility of souls being saved who die outside of the Church of the faithful.


St. Paul wrote that “the sensual man perceiveth not these things that are of the Spirit of God...” (1Cor. 2:14) and the Douay footnote says that this statement applies not only to those who indulge their sense appetites as do gluttons, but also to those who “measureth divine mysteries by natural reason, sense, and human wisdom only. Now such a man has little or no notion of the things of God. Whereas the spiritual man is he who, in the mysteries of religion, takes not human sense for his guide: but submits his judgment to the decisions of the church, which he is commanded to hear and obey.” The saintly Isabella, Queen of Spain, once brought a moral question to her confessor and he began to quote certain of the Doctors and esteemed moralists of that day. "St. Augustine said...; St. Gregory said...; St. Thomas said..." The saintly queen interrupted him and said: "Father, I do not want to know what the Fathers said, good as they were; I want to know what the Church says.” Dogmatic definitions are “what the Church says” and that is why they must be believed with “divine and Catholic faith.” Faith rests on authority and if the authority a man rests his faith on is only human then his faith is necessarily merely human. Such a person's faith is neither divine nor Catholic.


The Church has been infiltrated by Fɾҽҽmαsσɳɾყ over the last two centuries and as Br. Francis Maluf wisely remarked in one of his meditations on the secret society, “We are the Church militant. That means that a war is on. How can a man be a soldier of Jesus Christ if he knows neither the enemy nor the issue.” The 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man contains the following article: “No one may be disturbed for his opinions, even religious ones, provided that their manifestation does not trouble the public order established by the law.” Anyone who has spent even a minimal amount of time studying the French philosophes would know that when it came to religion, dogma is what they expressed a hatred for more than anything else. They hated the “bigotry” and “intolerance” that follows from Catholics believing with absolute certainty that the dogmas which the Church proposes as divinely revealed are infallibly true. One of their principal aims has been to attempt to reduce religion in the minds of men to a matter of mere opinion and all who reject dogma as the rule of faith necessarily aid them in their conspiracy. The Freemasons hate dogma in general but there is of course a particular dogma of the faith that bothers them more than all others: the dogma that Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote the following about in The Social Contract, “But whoever dares to say: Outside the Church there is no salvation, ought to be driven from the State.”

Baptism of desire refers to salvific charity prior to having received baptism. That this is possible is taught universally. I'm not aware of a universal consensus regarding the "class of person" this applies to, since theologians don't talk in those terms. The class of person "eligible" is whomever fits the description. Catechumens are obvious.

Why are you OK with BoD for catechumens?

I never said I was.  I just said that I can see the argument and I understand St Thomas' logic (which he never said was certain, just speculation).  A person who is formally taking classes and planning on getting baptized, 1) desires EXPLICITY the faith, 2) is TAKING ACTION to get the faith, and 3) has made a COMMITMENT to the Church.  All other scenarios of BOD fail all 3 of those tests.  It makes no sense, logically or theologically, that they could be saved.  

It's not a 'class of person' but the 'actions' of a person, that count.  And, yes, EXPLICIT desire is necessary, and is agreed upon by all those who speculate on BOD.

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Well, that's not true at all. Saint Alphonsus (just to take the most noteworthy example) said that it could be implicit. And then when he died, his canonization bull declared that his work could be read without fear of discovering even the smallest error.