This is a false dichotomy. This priest has the authority, as a priest to teach the faith, and he is reiterating magisterial teaching, unlike a lay person such as yourself, with no authority who is making it up as he goes along.
"Vatican II was not a dogmatic council, but describes itself as a pastoral council; as such, it did not intend to teaching anything new, definitively, nor did it. So it would be wrong to suggest that Vatican II has somehow changed that which has been dogmatically declared in the past--no council or pope could do that, even if it intended such.Popes, councils, theologians and the laity can speculate about such matters as invincible ignorance and a hidden manner in which God may work with judging individuals, but we remain bound to the teaching that there is no salvation except through Christ and no salvation outside the Church. I reject the false interpretation and misreading of the Latin text as, "without" rather than "outside of."
I invite anyone who can produce a dogmatic declaration of the Church that teaches that salvation is possible without Christ or outside of the Church to do so. You will not find it, folks!" - Father Echert
The problem for you is that this statement does not conflict with Vatican II or with the "broader" interepretation of Extra ecclesiam nulla salus that has been around for centuries and was not invented at Vatican II. "Outside the church" can be further specified. The crytpo-Jansensist Feeneyite rigorists identify membership in the visible, formal Catholic Church with "the church" and to deny that anyone not a visible, formal member of the Catholic Church can be saved. Rigorism has been an issue for at least 19 centuries now--Novatianists were rigorists too (over different issues, but with a similar psychology).
Nor does the claim that one can be saved without being a formal member of the visible Catholic Church mean that one is being saved without Christ. Christ is active outside the boundaries of his visible Catholic Church. What the good Father Echert here asserts is that no one who is saved is saved apart from Christ.
What the 1949 Holy Office letter asserts (and a series of 19thc and earlier papal teachings also asserted) is that someone who is outside the visible Catholic Church because he knowingly and deliberately rejected her claims, knowing them to be true but still choosing to remain outside her membership, such a person is damned. But not all who are not formal adherents of the visible Catholic Church formed by those bishops in communion with the bishop of Rome and their flocks are damned. And many who are formal adherents and members of the visible Catholic Church formed by adherence to bishops who are in communion with the bishop of Rome, many of those could well end up in hell for sins against charity, sins against truth, for not living up to the higher obligations placed on them by their formal membership in that visible Church and their greater knowledge of the truths about the Church. Those who know these things and do not live according to them, those who violate caritas as in the 1949 letter, they are in deep doo-doo (as the letter did not say--at least not in those terms).
You silently inserted the word "visible" into Fr. Echert's statement, then invoked his authority for your rigorist position. That's sloppy reading and interpretation of the text.