Father Kelly said turning away from the idea of limbo was part of "the development of the theological virtue of hope" and reflected "a different sense of God, focusing on his infinite love."The Redemptorist said people should not think the changed focus is a lightweight embrace of warm, fuzzy feelings.
"The suffering, death and resurrection of Christ must call the shots," he said. "If Christ had not risen from the dead, we never would have thought of original sin," because no one would have needed to explain why absolutely every human needed Christ's salvation.
The fact that God loves his creatures so much that he sent his Son to die in order to save them means that there exists an "original grace" just as there exists "original sin," Father Kelly said.
The existence of original grace "does not justify resignation," or thinking that everyone will be saved automatically, he said, "but it does justify hope beyond hope" that those who die without having had the opportunity to be baptized will be saved.
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0506867.htm
This is pure and outright heretical modernism, a return to Pelgianism, where dogma is turned on its head, and words come to mean the opposite of what they were intended to mean.
Certainly there is Original Grace. But Our Lady alone was gifted with that after Adam and Eve's fall. To say everyone or even many coming into the world have Original Grace, so that the unbaptized might have eternal life if they die without Baptism, is to deny Original Sin, and empty Baptism of its meaning and necessity.
Did Fr. Kelly equate the condition of all new human individuals with the Virgin Mary? Unless he did, your equating of his "original grace" (whatever it means) with the Immaculate Conception is your doing, not his. You jumped to a conclusion that so far as I can see is unwarranted.
I am not endorsing his terminology or his explanation. It doesn't sound theologically very helpful. But you have made no case, yet, for heresy. And this illustrates the way you overinterpret your evidence from the tradition. Indeed, consistently on this thread what you have been denouncing as heretical Pelagianism comes perilously close to the central teachings of the entire Eastern/Greek tradition. You will not be satisfied until you are guaranteed that those afflicted with original sin/mortality but not guilty of actual sin are all safely nestled in hell. The Greek tradition has never endorsed that line. Among other things, your polemic has ecumenical implications. But perhaps you are one of those Integralists who thinks that anyone seeking resolution of the Great Schism is a modernist-Pelagian??
All that JPII did (presumably with the Prefect of the CDF's support, not merely the private speculations of an obscure German bishop) was to say that we entrust the unbaptized not yet guilty of actual sin to the mercy of God and do not insist that they go to limbo-hell.
What "entrust to the mercy of God" means has not been explained with any degree of precision or with any degree of authority. That is what JPII and B16 have asked the ITC to take up. Whatever the ITC concludes will not be authoritative unless incorporated into conciliar or papal magisterial teaching. We are a long way from that.
Fr. Kelly may have done a poor job of formulating things. If you have real evidence he is a Pelagian modernist, please reveal it. But what you quoted from him is far short of the smoking gun needed to call him a heretic.
And gbcdoj, you who protested that your guys hadn't been calling anyone heretics--Hermann here did not expressis verbis call Fr. Kelly a heretic but he did expressis verbis call Fr. Kelly's words heretical. I will now stipulate your sophistic distinction and ask once more, please call off the heresy-hunting (note, not heretic-hunting) dogs.