Just as no one can be saved except by receiving baptism--by which anyone who does not pose some obstacle to incorporation3 becomes a member of the Church--or at least by desire for baptism,4 so also no one can attain salvation unless he is a member of the Church or at least is ordered towards the Church by desire. But for anyone to attain to salvation, it is not enough that he be really a member of the Church or be by desire ordered towards it; it is also required that he die in the state of grace, joined to God by faith, hope, and charity. 5

As for those ordered by desire towards the Church, these include not only catechumens,12 who, moved by the Spirit, consciously and explicitly desire to enter the Church, but also those who, even if not knowing that the Catholic Church is the true and sole Church of Christ, still, by God's grace, implicitly and unknowingly desire the equivalent,13 either because they sincerely will what Christ himself wills or because, though ignorant of Christ, they sincerely desire to fulfil the will of God their Creator. The gifts of heavenly grace will never be wanting to those who sincerely desire and ask to be renewed by the divine light.14

I posted an excerpt of one of the schema here before, the one on the Dogmatic Constitution of the Church:

https://www.cathinfo.com/crisis-in-the-church/the-vatican-ii-schema-excerpt-from-the-dogmatic-constitution-of-the-church/msg871881/#msg871881

It's interesting to read these "orthodox" schema, which show that the pre-V2 mindset of the "conservatives" who prepared them shared tendencies that flowered into the more  liberal  docuмents that ultimately resulted from V2. One can understand, I think, why there were so many less "no" votes to the ultimate docuмents, which are so criticized in Trad circles today.

For example, on EEENS,  we have this:


Footnote 5 is to the Holy Office Letter of 1949, with its censure of "Feeneyism."

Here's more:


Of course, almost all Feeneyites recognize that the problems pre-date V2, and you can see that in the schema. Unlike most if not all Sedes - certainly about all the Sede bishops and priests - they don't have an almost mythic regard of "golden days" for the pre-V2 Church.

Indeed, the contagion of full-blown EENS-denial was absolutely rampant.  Regardless of what one thinks of Father Feeney, if you read the one treatment the Dimonds have of Father Feeney, the statements made by Father Feeney's fellow Jesuits make your hair stand on end.  Not only is Cardinal Cushing on record as having stated,  "No salvation outside the Church?  Nonsense!  Nobody's gonna tell me that Christ came to die for any select group." but Father's fellow Jesuits were even worse.  When Father Feeney was excommunicated, the newspaper headlines (and I'm sure they consulted with the Church first) read, "Vatican says that there is salvation outside the Church."

This is why Archbishop Lefebvre believed in "Anonymous Catholics," where people could be in the Church without even knowing it, but are saved BY the Church (that's precisely Rahner's "Anonymous Christian" position as well).

Why did he believe this?  It was because he was taught this by teachers whom he considered otherwise orthodox and conservative and reliable at seminary.  This stuff was everywhere.

So, when Father Feeney sensed that there was something very wrong in the Church, and went in search of what that was, he was entirely alone.  Everyone else thought that the Church was flourishing.  Buildings were going up left and right, and people were converting in droves, so that the estimates were that by 2020 the US would be a majority Catholic country.  Seminaries and convents were full, to the point that the US had to send priests on missions and turn away religious vocations ... because they didn't have room for them all.

So Father alone sensed that there was something rotten in Denmark, so to speak.  And he rightly realized that it had to do with EENS.  And it wasn't just EENS, but the ecclesiology that comes from EENS-deninal.

MAJOR:  There's no salvation outside the Church (dogma).
MINOR:  Non-Catholics, including infidels, can be saved. (widespread belief).
CONCLUSION:  Non-Catholics, including infidels, can somehow be IN the Church.

This is V2 ecclesiology in a nutshell, where the Catholic Church has a subsistent "core" composed of actual Catholics, but also includes all manner of heretics, and even infidels.  Indeed, these are our separated brethren, separated because they're not actual Catholics, but brethren because they're really in the Church.  There are then different degrees of material separation from the Church, even if these types are all formall united to (the soul of) the Church.

Karl Rahner rightly held that the biggest revolution at V2 was with regard to EENS and Catholic ecclesiology, but was stunned that the "conservative Fathers" didn't make a peep about it.  Here was the most revolutionary thing about V2 and it went by unnoticed even by the conservative group, individuals like Archbishop Lefebvre, who was one of the group's leaders.

This is the foundation of the "subjectivism" that Bishop Williamson rightly holds to be the fundamental error of Vatican II.

So you start with doctrinal subjectivism (with Wojtyla's religious indifferentism) and the next step is moral subjectivism (which is where we are with Bergoglio today) ... and all of Vatican II is clearly explained.

But people for some reason fail to see that EENS-denial is the "Rosetta Stone" to interpreting and unlocking all of Vatican II.