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Fr. Cantalamessa is absolutely wrong to claim that CCC §1261 supports his position, which, recall, is that "The fate of children who are not baptized is no different from that of the Holy Innocents." Whereas the CCC holds out a hope for their salvation through some miracle, as perhaps an enlightening of the intellect to allow an unbaptized child to deliberate about himself and "then direct himself to the due end" (St. Thomas, Pars Ia-IIae q. 89 a. 6 corp.) and thus be saved through baptism of desire, Fr. Cantalamessa affirms that they are saved just as the Holy Innocents. The CCC hardly envisions such a certainty as being possible, and hence affirms: "All the more urgent is the Church's call not to prevent little children coming to Christ through the gift of holy Baptism," an urgency cancelled out by Fr. Cantalamessa's theory!

I must confess that the mere idea of a God eternally depriving an innocent creature of his vision simply because another person has sinned, or because of an accidental miscarriage, makes me shudder … and I am sure would make any unbeliever happy to stay away from the Christian faith.

It is puzzling how Fr. Cantalamessa makes such an assertion, in light of the the historical fact that the missionary efforts of the Church were perfectly effective in the past two millennia. "The Church does not know of any means other than Baptism that assures entry into eternal beatitude" (CCC §1257). And how can Fr. Cantalamessa call unbaptized infants innocent, when the Church affirms that they are stained with the guilty of the sin of Adam? "Following St. Paul, the Church has always taught that the overwhelming misery which oppresses men and their inclination towards evil and death cannot be understood apart from their connection with Adam's sin and the fact that he has transmitted to us a sin with which we are all born afflicted, a sin which is the 'death of the soul'. Because of this certainty of faith, the Church baptizes for the remission of sins even tiny infants who have not committed personal sin." (CCC §403)

If anyone denies that infants, newly born from their mothers' wombs, are to be baptized, even though they be born of baptized parents, or says that they are indeed baptized for the remission of sins, but that they derive nothing of original sin from Adam which must be expiated by the laver of regeneration for the attainment of eternal life, whence it follows that in them the form of baptism for the remission of sins is to be understood not as true but as false, let him be anathema, for what the Apostle has said, by one man sin entered into the world, and by sin death, and so death passed upon all men, in whom all have sinned, is not to be understood otherwise than as the Catholic Church has everywhere and always understood it.
For in virtue of this rule of faith handed down from the apostles, even infants who could not as yet commit any sin of themselves, are for this reason truly baptized for the remission of sins, in order that in them what they contracted by generation may be washed away by regeneration.
For, unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven. (Pope Paul III, Council of Trent, Decree on Original Sin)