http://books.google.com/books?id=B30XAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA468&dq=augustine+%22rebuke+and+grace%22&lr=&cd=2#v=onepage&q=gospel%20of%20christ&f=false

St. Augustine, On Rebuke and Grace, Chapter 11:

"For if, according to the word of truth, no one is delivered from the condemnation which was incurred through Adam except through the faith of Jesus Christ, and yet from this condemnation they shall not deliver themselves who shall be able to say they have not heard the gospel of Christ, on the ground that 'faith cometh by hearing,' how much less shall they deliver themselves who shall say 'We have not received perseverance!'  For the excuse of those who say 'We have not received hearing' seems more equitable than that of those who say 'We have not received perseverance;' since it may be said, O man, in that which thou hadst heard and kept, in that [ emphasis Augustine's ] thou mightest persevere if thou wouldest; but in no wise can it be said, That which thou hadst not heard thou mightest believe if thou wouldest."  

Here St. Augustine is not dealing expressly with this topic.  It just happens to come up.  

He is arguing against those who see some hope for someone who slips into mortal sin and dies unrepentant.  He says such a person has no hope.  He then compares such a relapsed Catholic to someone who has never heard the gospel at all.

St. Augustine's point is this -- Someone who has never heard the Gospel has an excellent excuse before God, that he didn't know, yet this will not save him.  Consequently, St. Augustine says, how much more unlikely is it for someone to be saved who did know the true faith, yet fell back into evil habits, failing to persevere?  

Though St. Augustine is not an infallible authority, what is remarkable about this passage is not just that he is condemning the idea of salvation for those with "implicit faith" before it was hatched, but that he treats it as an established, known fact that those who have never heard the Gospel and die that way cannot be saved.  He throws this out as casually as he might throw out any other rule of faith, such as that Mary is the mother of Christ or that in heaven we will be re-joined to our resurrected bodies.    He continues in the next chapter --

St. Augustine, On Rebuke and Grace, Chapter 12:

"And consequently, both those who have not heard the gospel, and those who, having heard it and been changed by it for the better, have not received perseverance, and those who, having heard the gospel, have refused to come to Christ, that is, to believe on Him, since He Himself says 'No man cometh unto me, except it were given him of my Father,' and those who by their tender age were unable to believe, but might be absolved from their original sin by the sole laver of regeneration, and yet have not received this laver, and have perished in death:  are not made different from that lump which it is plain is condemned, as all go from one into condemnation."

Four categories of people are established as being part of the "lump," those who are damned:

( i ) Those who never heard the gospel

( ii ) Those who heard the gospel, joined the Church, relapsed into mortal sin and died unrepentant AKA those who failed to persevere

( iii ) Those who heard and rejected the gospel and the Church

( iv ) Babies who die before being baptized



It will be seen that including both ( i ) and ( iii ) in the mass of the damned, both those who never heard the gospel, and those who heard it but rejected it, entirely does away with the casuistic distinction made by certain Jesuits and others -- which has now become a commonplace and I believe is the key driving force behind the apostasy of today -- between "culpable" ignorance and plain old ignorance when it comes to the question of salvation.  The question of whether someone has rejected the gospel, or never heard it at all, only makes a difference when it comes to the degree of punishment received in hell, where someone who has rejected Christ and the Church outright, explicitly and with contempt, will certainly suffer far greater tortures than a pagan who died in ignorance.  Yet this pagan will also be in hell.

All of these, those guilty of rejecting the unity of Christ explicitly, or those who never knew about it, are part of the massa damnata, the damned heap.  I do not speak of the "inculpably ignorant" at all because ignorance is a punishment for sin, and no one who is ignorant is free of guilt.  This is part of the dogma of original sin.  

Someone may reply that Pius IX speaks of those who "through no fault of their own do not know the gospel."  Such people, who have what is called invincible ignorance, are those who follow the natural law and who will be brought the gospel by a missionary or angel.   If such a missionary or angel never comes, they are at fault, they have closed their hearts against the knowledge that Christ died to bring to all men.  Such as end their lives this way lost their invincible ignorance, if they ever had it, and died in CULPABLE IGNORANCE.  They are culpable for ORIGINAL SIN, the source of all ignorance.

Every man and woman who has lived since Pentecost has had a chance to hear the gospel; somehow, if they desired it, God would have brought it to them.  Don't the Three Wise Men prove this?  Here are three pagans who came out of nowhere to pay homage to the true God.  God gets what needs to be known to the elect, and that is that.  If millions died in the Americas without hearing the gospel, it was because they had no desire for it.  The Spanish or some other missionaries would have gotten there long before if they had desired it.  

The term "invincible ignorance" has been misused and that is a big part of the confusion.  "Invincible ignorance" is really a temporary state.  Certain people are invincibly ignorant AT A CERTAIN TIME, not permanently.  But if they live up to their consciences and the natural law God will send them what they need to know by a necessity of means, belief in the Incarnation, Trinity, Catholic Church and so on.  The error is to extrapolate from this to say they can be SAVED by their consciences or by the natural law -- that is straight from Rousseau and Voltaire.  Following the natural law is only the first step that predisposes one to receive the actual graces necessary to bring one into the Church.  After this it is still imperative to have explicit belief in certain articles of faith.

However, if they die in ignorance, then they will be blamed for their ignorance by God, as Augustine says, having a better excuse than those who fell away, but still not an excuse that will save them.  This is because all who do not receive the truth are culpable.  Those who disagree with this very simple fact, ask yourselves, if I am lying, then why would unbaptized babies be sent to limbo, which is in hell?  Who could be less culpable than they?  Those who try to save unbaptized, unbelieving pagan adults get themselves in quite a pickle trying to explain how these pagan, Jєωιѕн and Muslim adults could be saved by some vague yearning, but not babies!  Is it because babies can't vaguely yearn?  Do you see how ridiculous this all becomes?

SJB, I don't want to get into an eternal debate with you, but only want you to be saved.  Please reconsider your position.  I have been where you are, been surrounded by the influences you're influenced by -- it's wrong.

The latter, of course.  

But that is not what the theologians who teach salvation in false religions say.  If they said "If the man converts at the last moment and wishes to be joined to the Church, he may be saved by baptism of desire," that would be fine.  But they claim he has baptism of desire even though during his entire life he showed no impetus, no inclination to be Catholic.  They say he will be saved despite himself, doing the opposite of the work of Christ, sometimes not knowing Christ, because inwardly he has some sort of inchoate, unspoken yearning for the truth.  

A lot of people who see that this is heresy complain that it undercuts missionary work.  That is not my problem with it at all.  Sometimes this heresy is spoken modestly enough that it wouldn't really affect missionary work, like if it is said that a Protestant with no mortal sin might be saved.  This is so impossible that it's unlikely any Protestant would be much encouraged by it.  

My problem is simply that it denies Christ's promise that those who seek shall find.  It denies the workings of grace and makes grace out to be some kind of lame duck that only gets to SOME people that it wants to get to, while it fails others.  It denies the necessity of the name of Christ for salvation, the name by which all men are saved.  It denies the necessity of belief itself.  

All of this is bad, but it gets worse.  What is worse is when it takes someone like a Jєω who outwardly denies Christ, who HATES Christ, and grants him salvation, saying that if he had only known, he would have loved Christ.  We have entered the realm of the absurd.  Here the pain of Christ Himself, dying on the Cross, is invalidated.  What is the point of having a will, and of doing God's will to earn our salvation, if we can deny not only God's will, but our own will doesn't even matter, and we have some invisible will we don't know about, so that someone can be saved based not on what he knew or what he did, but on what he should have known and done?  Why shouldn't Satanists earn the same mercy, since they wouldn't pray to Lucifer if they only knew how good Christ was?  How can the matter of salvation be predicated on what someone should have done, instead of what he did do?  

St. Augustine completely blasts all of these fallacies in the above quote, but I doubt anyone in his time was saying such things, that a Jєω would be saved despite himself, despite hating Christ outwardly, due to some inchoate desire to be Catholic that even he never suspects during the entire duration of his life!  Augustine just knew that no one could have faith who didn't have faith -- it's not complicated.  How did we get to the point where people like Jєωs are having faith and salvation forced upon them that even they don't want?

Everything falls apart when you believe in this heresy.  It is one short step from here to universal salvation.  And it goes against Florence which said ALL Jєωs, pagans, Muslims will not be saved.  

Abp. Lefebvre says that someone who dies in a false religion is not saved BY that religion but IN it, but this already is unfortunately heresy.  If he had expressed a will to be a Catholic, he would no longer be IN whatever religion he was in, Protestantism, the Orthodox faith, what have you.  He would have stopped attending their services, have rejected their works, and would be preparing to do what it took to be Catholic.  Anyone above the age of reason who dies IN a false religion, that is, believing that religion is the true one, is damned.

As for those in ignorance, like I said, that's a punishment for sin, but God is prepared to get the word out to whoever truly wants it.  If the Native Americans had really followed the natural law, if they were really prepared for the gospel in, say, 1040, God would have sent them missionaries in 1040.