CathInfo.com

Sean, you keep going back to the notion that a sin has to be committed against faith to lose supernatural faith.  Normally yes, for an adult, but I hold infants to be a special case.

Even the "Rewarder God" folks held that explicit faith in a God who rewards the good and punishes the wicked is a sine qua non for supernatural faith ... for adults.  I hold, with St. Thomas and others, that explicit knowledge of Christ and the Holy Trinity are also essential.  In fact, this was held unanimously until the discovery of the New World, when a Franciscan and some Jesuits floated Rewarder God theory in response to finding all those unevangelized masses.  In any case, until Bergoglio said it some years ago, no Catholic ever entertained the notion that an atheist, someone who had explicit faith in nothing, could be saved.  So, if the infant grows up to acquire the use of reason but does not have any explicit belief in anything, that supernatural virtue of faith fades away, like the seed sown on the rocky ground where it has nothing to take root in.  As to why God may have allowed this, we can only speculate, but St. Thomas holds that this ignorance, if invincible, is itself not a sin, but God would allow this to happen on account of other sins.  It can also be God's Mercy, as perhaps He knows that the person would end up rejecting the faith and therefore meriting a worse eternal fate.  We don't know.

Based on how you're asking the question, in your scenario, let's imagine an infant who's secretly baptized by some overzealous individual and ends up being raised by atheists.  He reaches the age of reason, and then dies at the age of 15 without having actively rejected the faith or committed any other grave sin.  Would that person be saved?  To say yes would be to say that atheists can be saved without explicit faith in anything ... which no Catholic thinker or theologian has ever held prior to Bergoglio's utterance.  You're saying that individuals can have some infused supernatural virtue of faith without any knowledge or awareness of it.  You'd basically be promoting a variation of Rahner's Anonymous Christian theory and agreeing with Bergoglio that atheists can be saved.

Lad-

please explain how grace is lost without sin (or conversely, how those in the state of grace are damned).

Lad,

In your opinion, can the state of grace be lost without mortal sin?