[many good posts sourcing quotes from Augustine & Others]
Thank you very much! Clearly you understand and appreciate the need to carefully docuмent one's material when arguing about such important matters. Hopefully Crawford will see this thread and, with a little luck, your work will rub off on him!
This ignorance of Father Feeney's positon discredits the book right out of the gate. Nice attempt to take this quote out of context. I'm sure that we can expect a lot of that in your book.
Not that you would know, as you have demonstrated! Since, after all, the book isn't
about Feeney.
Father was then asked whether those who persevered in a state of justification until death would be damned if they did not receive the Sacrament, and he responded in the negative.
That must have been what he meant when he said,
in context, and in his own words, "in case you would like to brush up on what I have been saying" (
Bread of Life, p. 56; which it sounds like you, Ladislaus, might
need to do!), that:
"Q. Can anyone now be saved without Baptism of Water?
A. No one can be saved without Baptism of Water.
Q. Are the souls of those
who die in the state of justification saved, if they have not received Baptism of Water? A. No. They are not saved. Q. Where do these souls go if they die in the state of justification but have not received Baptism of Water?
A. I do not know.
Q. Do they go to Hell?
A. No.
Q. Do they go to Heaven?
A. No" (
Ibid., pp. 56-7,
emphases added).
For, you see, this is begging the question on your part. Father denies the possibility (following St. Augustine) that God would allow anyone to persevere in a state of justification without providing the Sacrament to that soul before death. This is the clear teaching of St. Augustine. So the hypothetical which you posit as an argument against the anti-BoD position is not granted by our side, and you are begging the question with it. You assume that it's possible in the first place and then, based on this unproven premise, use this as an argument in favor of BoD.
Well you seem to have forgotten that the book isn't
about Feeney, nor is it about
Bread of Life, so there is no question begging. Go ahead and open the .pdf and see how many times you can find his name in it. Crawford doesn't even agree with Feeney (which you would know if you'd been forthright in your argumentation and bothered to actually
look and see what you were supposed to be arguing against). So our work leaves him pretty well alone. We've spent more time
here discussing it than we did in the whole hundred and thirty pages of our response to Crawford.
Ah, yes, this puts on display the level of intellect that one will no doubt find throughout this tome. This above was the answer to the contention, which has been amply proven over years here on CathInfo, that the BoDer ecclesiology is identical to that of the Vatican II establishment, and that all the Vatican II errors derive from this non-Catholic ecclesiology. We have presented the arguments, and these have never been refuted. In fact, no refutation has ever been attempted. Instead, you get "rebuttals" such as the one quoted above.
Great point; CathInfo was not one of the sources we consulted when writing the book. Now that we've had time to review it, we see that the whole book was a mistake and Crawford was right all along! In your hubris you cannot seem to escape the misconception that this book is about
you. No wonder you are disappointed! Collect your thoughts and arguments and compose a reply to what we have written. If it's as bad as you say, we can't imagine it would take long for you to expose our errors and set the record straight.
Again, another high-quality argument. An actual perusal of my 15,000+ posts on CathInfo will find this degree of mine mentioned perhaps 2 or 3 times, and only when it's relevant to the discussion being made. So this absurd ad hominem is also calumny. I guess that 2 or 3 posts among 15,000 backs your assertion that I can't make it far without bringing it up.
Yes, not only are you idiots, but you are of bad will, spending lots of energy attacking Catholic dogma.
What a delicate little drama queen you are! At least to the credit of the other clowns in this thread, they stay in clownish character.
You, on the other hand, come out swinging with your chest puffed out so far you can't even see your opponent, and then retreat to moral thin ice when your horse manure gets tossed back at you.
Page 3 sets forth the false theological premise:
"The ordinary magisterium is just as infallible as the extraordinary magisterium."
bzzzt. It's the Ordinary UNIVERSAL Magisterium that is just as infallible, when teaching that a matter has been "divinely revealed" (cf. Vatican I). So, as I said, this entire thing rests on the distorted sedevacantist position on infallibility. I was correct in my initial speculation. We've had sedevacantist clowns here on CI believe that any book that has ever received an imprimatur from a legitimate bishop was protected by infallibility. Now, that's an extreme, but there are sedevacantists all along that continuum because they fail to add the word "universal" (and the term "divinely revealed") into the equation when discussing the infallibility of the ordinary magisterium.
Goodness, do you ever struggle to compose your thoughts and present them in an ordered way! Try replying all at once. Anyways, talk about
strawmen. Most of what you say here has nothing to do with what is argued in the book; you've been terminologically
triggered into a tangent about virtual phantoms in the cyberspace. Try again.
Then the ignorami argue that Trent teaches that the supernatural virtues begin before Baptism, speaking of the faith, hope, and charity which lead to justification. False. All theologians who treat of this subject teach that Trent here refers to incipient faith, hope, and charity, the natural analogues to the supernatural virtues of the same name, what they call fides initialis, etc. The actual SUPERNATURAL virtues arrive in the soul at the exact same time as justification, not before ... and they all arrive together at the initial justification, not first one, and then the other. This is all universally taught by theologians.
Phenomenal insight! Since
all of them teach that
this is what Trent means, we look forward to you quoting them! You know, when you simmer down and compose a proper reply instead of this:
But then the authors claim to be refuting the position of Father Feeney, and Father Feeney himself felt that these supernatural virtues (and justification itself) could arrive before Sacramental Baptism. Evidently Crawford changed his position away from that of Father Feeney to the more Dimondist view. Nevertheless, the book's authors equivocate between attempting to refute Crawford and Father Feeney ... even though their positions are not identical.
... Which, again, we never do. Do
try to make it seem like you care about responding to the actual argument, yes?
The authors of this book validly argue that if you concede the possibility of a justified catechumen somewhere, this soul is already within the Church because Justification simply does not occur outside the Catholic Church. OK. However, I strongly suspect that the authors do not limit the possibility of salvific BOD strictly to pious catechumens. Or do they?
Do they believe that a Moslem, Jєω, pagan, Hindu, etc. can be saved because somehow he became an invisible justified "catechumen" in the microseconds preceding death? I don't have a problem if you want to believe in thomistic BOD (remote possibility for a sincere catechumen who dies before the water), if it is properly taught applying solely for catechumens and no one else. Evidently, someone belonging to a false religion is most certainly not a catechumen of the Catholic Church. The authors argue correctly that the teaching of Baptism of Desire never interfered with the EENS dogma in the past centuries. If properly taught and understood, it should not be.
Amazing! Someone's actually read it. Try it out, Ladislaus. If your temper lets you.
On the Novus Ordo Watch site, they advertise/promote the Contra book - but don't give you the whole story, offer Fr. Crawford's booklet or "his side of the story," or allow comments at the bottom. This Contra book is theological junk, written by amateurs. Yes, another CMRI-related hit piece. These lay people, Contra authors make a point to not mention the hit done unto Fr. Crawford by the CMRI, in saying he did not answer their theological questionnaire to him at about the time he left them - when he actually did three times, and had the post office mailing receipts, etc., and proof they did receive his mailed answers. And his were good answers on NFP and EENS. There does seem to be a vendetta against Fr. Crawford here.
What a phenomenally strange thing to say given that
we include a hundred pages worth of appendices of Crawford's work which include his precious receipts and hurt feelings. We also provide,
on the very first page, a very brief history of Crawford which includes the fact that he has written multiple replies to Pivarunas. Nothing is hidden; on the contrary,
we're distributing his book for him now. It's at the end of ours!
I pay very little attention to this subject any more, mainly because it most certainly displeases God when anyone goes about preaching that God Himself is just as taken by surprise as the infidel, by his unforeseen death - let alone prior to receiving a baptism which he is presumed to have desired. What - was God just too preoccupied doing something else to provide the time, the water and the minister for the infidels? What is it that God was so busy doing that the infidels had to save themselves anyway?
Your above reply, by missing the point of my post, demonstrates the real reason and the main purpose you are publishing such a book as this, namely, you are out to make whatever money you can off of the evil thing.
The book is iniquitous, it is a scandal and Catholics faithful to the Church's teachings on the Sacrament of Baptism have cause to condemn and avoid reading it, the book serves no other purpose than to falsely attribute it to be a teaching of the Church that there is hope for salvation and that salvation is attainable outside of the Church, without the Sacrament of Baptism. Same o same o.
A regular ol' Robert Johnson tale, ours is. Who would have ever anticipated the diabolical fame and fortune that awaits those who give their books away for free!