reductio: Hence, it would be the self praise that stinks for reductio to adopt the honored name of Savanarola just as the Society of St. Pius X dishonors St. Pius X by misappropriating his name for their nefarious purposes of impersonating Catholics.
It also seems unlikely that reductio had Jesuit teachers. The Jesuits who taught me so long ago that Jesuits were still Catholic would have made short work of him. Later Jesuits were possessed of the more leftist types of error such as were condemned as "modernism" (read secular humanism) than reductio who flirts with SSPXism and Feeneyism (most particularly).
Unfortunately, there are those who regard themselves as Catholic who are all too familiar with partial readings of ancient texts and not at all familiar with more contemporary materials and ignore the context of both. Hurling anathemas from on high (or wherever) at the specks in others' eyes helps them to ignore the motes and beams in their own eyes.
Lutheran Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer struggled against Hitler on behalf of the persecuted Jews, came to America, was welcomed as a hero by many sympathetic Americans who raised funds to fuel his efforts but he went back to Germany to personally confront the evils of nazism and was hanged by Hitler as a last minute effort before Hitler blew his own brains out in the bunker with Eva Braun. BUT, despite such noble works (apologies to reformation views of works) and the burning faith in and love for God which was exhibited by his works, he just must be in hell because he was not Catholic at death. Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Moral hero and good and faithful servant or denizen of hell simply for not being Catholic??? Apparently the latter or so we are expected to believe by reductio. I don't believe that.
Ditto the Protestant ten Booms. Ditto Dismas, the good thief, crucified with Jesus Christ and who was never baptized Catholic or otherwise. Just because Jesus Christ said that Dismas would join Him in paradise that day doesn't mean that Jesus Christ had any business contradicting the Council of Florence not to be held for 1400+ years in the future, right, reductio????
When I attended a Jesuit prep school of the illustrious actually Catholic sort (in olden days), we never wondered about the eternal destination of the Bonhoeffers or of the ten Booms or of Dismas (Christ's own words were good enough for us before Marcel Lefebvre and Leonard Feeney's acolytes discovered their supposedly superior wisdom). We went immediately to the outer shores, the worst we could imagine and asked our Jesuits whether Hitler or Stalin could possibly have been admitted to heaven. Now, no one regarded those outcomes as likely but the Jesuits admonished us that no one can possibly know whether either had enjoyed a grace of final perfect repentance in those last moments of consciousness and therefore, we could not be certain that either was in hell.
Reductio is not an authority on Catholicism (based on his posted opinions) nor is he authorized by the Church to be one. He is far closer to the Feeneyite heresy condemned by actual Church authority in the 1950s (Fr. Feeney repented and returned to the Catholic Church before he died) or the SSPX schism condemned as such by John Paul the Great in his Ecclesia Dei in 1988 in which he excommunicated SSPX leaders and adherents. Marcel Lefebvre, the founding schismatic of the SSPX, never repented publicly before he died, but, like Hitler and Stalin, we can never be sure that he did not respond to a grace of final perfect repentance.
It ill behooves Catholics in the United States to harangue against Protestants or Masons since we have generally enjoyed the hospitality of both and have flourished here. We are not required to deny objective truth nor should we. There have been brief periods of anti-Catholic activity in various places here. If we want to complain, we will have to confess anti-Protestant and anti-Masonic behavior of our own.
When Connecticut was a formally Congregationalist state (until 1818), the Roman Catholic Mass was not allowed to be said there. Is it not reasonable to suggest that the Congregationalists were acting on a far older Catholic model of Christendom which merged church and state to a substantial degree??? The Baptist congregation at Danbury, Connecticut, complained to retired President Thomas Jefferson of Congregationalist hegemony in Connecticut in 1911. IIRC, the Baptist faith originated with Roger Williams' expulsion from Massachusetts by Congregationalists there across the border to Connecticut's next door neighbor Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.
Ironically, free will as a gift from God is a central tenet of Catholicism. How you exercise it will determine whether or not you are in a state of grace at death. If you are not in a state of grace you are not going to heaven, no matter what religion you profess. At least that is what we Catholics believe.
If I am fortunate enough to enjoy through eternity the Beatific Vision, I promise not to complain if my mother's best friend Hilda is there though Methodist, Dietrich Bonhoeffer though Lutheran, the ten Booms though reformed Christians, the good pagan centurion who (at the cost of his own execution) slew St. Peter by a sword rather than allow his sufferings in upside-down crucifixion to continue, post-Crucifixion Jews who lived good and righteous lives ("I come not to abolish the Law but to fulfill it.") or the thoroughly moral member of a Fifth Century American Indian tribe who (despite never hearing of the Bible and never being baptized much less being Catholic and never having the slightest opportunity for either) obeyed the law written in his or her heart by God (why was it written there?), worshiped the Great Spirit as a sole Supreme Being and lived an extraordinary life of what we might call genuine piety (under such circumstances) and minimal sinfulness. As to the last, did God create such people with the specific intent that they go to hell or even limbo through no fault of their own???
First let me explain my position. I'm in an indult FSSP, blessed by the Vatican, so you can't accuse me of being SSPX or a Feenyite when I say this to you.
I find it bothersome the analogy you have used here. I think it can be said with certainty that Hitler and Stalin are roasting in Hell. It's pretty obviouse they didn't repent before their death and they certainly can't be compared to the Good Thief on the Cross who did no more than steal something. Hitler and Stalin were responsible for millions of deaths. Sacred Scripture says there are no murderers in Heaven.
Another thing, I have to agree with Reductio on the infallible dogma that "Outside the Church There is No Salvation." Now you tell us, was this dogma, defined and taught by the Church for hundreds of years declared infallible teaching or not? If you answer honestly, without trying to placate Protestant sensitivity here, you would have to answer YES! To answer otherwise would be misrepresenting Catholic teaching and declaring that the previous Popes who taught this were "just out of touch with reality." If you want to claim that, then you might as well say that infallibility is a bunch of bunk.
According to Father John A. Hardon, S.J.(Jesuit) in the Catholic Pocket Dictionary:
Infallibility: The condition of infallibility is that the Pope speaks ex cathedra. For this is required: 1. he have the intention of declaring something unchangeably true; Pg. 195
Unchangeably true. Hmm... wouldn't that make Outside the Church There is No Salvation UNCHANGEABLY true?
The only thing that would save someone "outside of the Church" would be invincible ignorance.
As author Kevin Knight states from an article in Catholic News Agency:
Extra ecclesiam
Outside the Church there is no salvation.
It's a stark sentence. Some Catholics even love its shock value, waving the doctrine like a flag in the face of their enemies. Other Catholics flatly refuse to believe it, and claim that this teaching was repudiated by the Second Vatican Council. Both groups are wrong.
Despite what some may think, this dogma is infallible, and all Catholics are required to believe it. This was repeated clearly at Vatican II, which said: "Basing itself on Scripture and Tradition, the Council teaches that the Church, a pilgrim now on earth, is necessary for salvation."
Certainly we can't go into the exclusionary error of Father Feeney, but neither should we fall into the error of relativism.It ill behooves Catholics in the United States to harangue against Protestants or Masons since we have generally enjoyed the hospitality of both and have flourished here. We are not required to deny objective truth nor should we. There have been brief periods of anti-Catholic activity in various places here. If we want to complain, we will have to confess anti-Protestant and anti-Masonic behavior of our own.
I think it ill behooves a Catholic to be so accomodating to that which the Church has declared as a threat to the faith and has warned repeatedly not to enter into membership with them. If the Masons want to take that as "anti-Masonic" behavior, so be it. You also forget Catholic contributions to this country as if we are somehow not responsible for anything good within this country. You only seem to want to give credit to the Protestants and Masons.
Did you know the oldest settled city in the United States, St. Augustine, was settled by Catholics?
Hospitality? Hmph! We had to fight tooth and nail with the Protestants for what we have here. It's revisionist history to say otherwise or you don't know your Catholic American History. Ever read about the Know Nothing Movement? Ever heard of the attacks on Catholics by the Ku Klux Klan?
It's not as rosy a picture as you paint.
You stated an opinion opposite the to the dogma of the Church. No volume of fancy words will cover this up.