http://www.traditionalmass.org/images/articles/BaptDes-Proofed.pdfBaptism of Desire and
Theological Principles
(2000)
by Rev. Anthony Cekada
What principles must Catholics follow to arrive at the truth?
OVER THE YEARS I have occasionally encountered traditionalists, both lay and clerical, who followed the teachings of the late Rev. Leonard Feeney and the St. Benedict Center concerning the axiom “Outside the Church there is no salvation.” Those who fully embrace the Feeneyite position reject the common Catholic teaching about baptism of desire and baptism of blood.
Catholics, however, are not free to reject this teaching, because it comes from the Church’s universal ordinary magisterium. Pius IX stated that Catholics are required to believe those teachings that theologians hold “belong to the faith,” and to subject themselves to those forms of doctrine commonly held as “theological truths and conclusions.”
In 1998, I photocopied material on baptism of desire and baptism of blood from the works of twenty - five pre-Vatican II theologians (including two Doctors of the Church), and assembled it into a dossier. All, of course, teach the same doctrine.
Behind the Feeneyite rejection of this doctrine lies a rejection of the principles that Pius IX laid down, principles that form the basis for the whole science of theology. He who rejects these criteria rejects the foundations of Catholic theology and constructs a peculiar theology of his own —
one where his own interpretation of papal pronouncements is every bit as arbitrary and idiosyncratic as a free-thinking Baptist’s interpretation of the Bible. It is utterly pointless to argue with such a person over baptism of blood and baptism of desire, because he does not accept the only criteria on which a theological issue must be judged.