Actually, this is the Allocution Singulari Quadem.
Singulari Quidem was an Encyclical of Bl. Pius IX issued several years later. It reads in part:
Teach that just as there is only one God, one Christ, one Holy Spirit, so there is also only one truth which is divinely revealed. There is only one divine faith which is the beginning of salvation for mankind and the basis of all justification, the faith by which the just person lives and without which it is impossible to please God and come to the community of His children (Romans 1; Hebrews 11; Council of Trent, Session 6, Chapter 8). There is only one true, holy, Catholic Church, which is the Apostolic Roman Church. There is only one See founded on Peter by the word of the Lord (St. Cyprian, Epistle 43), outside of which we cannot find either true faith or eternal salvation. He who does not have the Church for a mother cannot have God for a father, and whoever abandons the See of Peter on which the Church is established trusts falsely that he is in the Church (ibid, On the Unity of the Catholic Church).
Bl. Pius IX, Encyclical Singulari Quidem, March 17, 1856
For very obvious reasons, the partisans of the laxist position never cite this Encyclical. Sounds quite like a recapitulation of Boniface VIII's "Unam Sanctum", doesn't it?
Quanto conficiamur is more explicit and basically affirms what the Letter of the Holy Office to Archbishop Cushing did.
Why not take the simple one line summary of this Encyclical that Bl. Pius IX himself caused to be written and use it as the guide to properly divining its meaning?
17. One ought to at least have good hope for the eternal salvation of all those who in no way dwell in the true Church of Christ. - Encyclical Quanto conficiamur moerore, August 10, 1863, etc.
Syllabus of Errors, December 8, 1864
That was easy, wasn't it? Catholics are bound by faith to reject the idea that there is at least good hope for the salvation of those apart from the Church.
The laxist interpretations of Bl. Pius IX also ignore the clear teaching of the First Vatican Council concerning the nature of the Catholic faith compared to false religions:
And since "without faith it is impossible to please God" (Hebrews 11:6) and to attain the fellowship of His children, therefore without faith no one has ever attained justification: nor will anyone obtain eternal life, unless he shall have persevered in faith unto the end (cf. Matthew 10:22, 24:13). And that we may be able to satisfy the obligation of embracing the true faith and of persevering in it, God has instituted the Church through His only-begotten Son, and has bestowed upon it manifest marks of that institution, that it may be recognized by all men as the guardian and teacher of the revealed word; for to the Catholic Church alone belong all those many and admirable tokens which have been divinely established for the evident credibility of the Catholic Faith ...
... And its (the Catholic Church's) testimony is efficaciously supported by a power form on high. For our most merciful Lord gives His grace to stir up and to aid those who are astray, that they may come to a knowledge of the truth (cf. 1 Timothy 2:4); and to those whom He has brought out of darkness into His own admirable light, He gives His grace to strengthen them to persevere in that light, deserting none who desert not Him. Therefore there is no parity between the condition of those who have adhered to the Catholic truth by the heavenly gift of faith, and of those who, led by human opinions, follow a false religion; for those who have received the faith under the magisterium of the Church can never have any just cause for changing or doubting that faith (canon 6).
Vatican Council I, Session 3, Dei Fillius (Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith), Chapter 3, April 24, 1870
Laxists also studiously ignore other Papal pronouncements of the same period, as if Popes such as Leo XII who proceeded Bl. Pius IX by but a few decades, had nothing relevant to say on the matter. Quite contrary though:
It is impossible for the most true God, who is Truth Itself, the best, the wisest Provider, and rewarder of good men, to approve all sects who profess false teachings which are often inconsistent with one another and contradictory, and to confer eternal rewards on their members. For we have a surer word of the prophet, and in writing to you We speak wisdom among the perfect; not the wisdom of this world but the wisdom of God in a mystery. By it we are taught, and by divine faith we hold, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and that no other name under heaven is given to men except the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth in which we must be saved. This is why we profess that there is no salvation outside the Church.
Pope Leo XII, Encyclical Ubi primum, 14, May 5, 1824
Its really so simple and elementary. The mental contortions and gymnastics needed to prove that the pithy summary of St. Cyprian really means the opposite of its literal reading are quite painful.
When St. Paul says: "God will have all men to be saved and come to the knowledge of the Truth." (1 St. Timothy 2.4), it should immediately spring to mind that the Lord said "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, no one comes to the Father but through Me." (St. John 14.6) "And this is life everlasting that they know Thee, the only true God, and JESUS CHRIST Whom Thou hast sent." (St. John 17.3)
That this is the authentic interpretation of 1 St. Timothy 2.4 is made clear in the Catechism:
Indeed, God "desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth" (1 Timothy 2:4); that is, God wills the salvation of everyone through the knowledge of the truth. Salvation is found in the truth. Those who obey the prompting of the Spirit of truth are already on the way of salvation. But the Church, to whom this truth has been entrusted, must go out to meet their desire, so as to bring them the truth.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, 851
The universal salvific will of God is accomplished in and by the Church through her missionary work of rescuing souls from ignorance and sin. This is why the Catechism can simply explain this dogma in one sentence that cuts through all the obfuscation.
"Outside the Church there is no salvation"
846. How are we to understand this affirmation, often repeated by the Church Fathers? (cf. St. Cyprian, Epitle 73.21; De unitate catholicae Ecclesia.) Reformulated positively, it means that all salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is His Body.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, 846
In other words, the dogma is joyful news. "Salvation can be had in the Catholic Church. Here Almighty God communes with man and divinizes him."
The contrary sad reality is painfully aparent to anyone with eyes and a mind to think. Original sin closed heaven off to mankind, and all the superstitions of Hinduism, of heresies, of Shamanism, of Astrology, of Fertility Cults, and so on can do nothing to change this reality.
Man can beg for forgiveness of sins apart from the Catholic Church - if he is even awake enough spiritually to realize his crimes - but in the Catholic Church he can actually have that forgiveness. Man can ask to be reborn from his filth apart from Christ and His Church - within it he is assured of being and actually is reborn and washed clean. Man can seek grace and blessings without - inside he can have them and rejoice in them.
"No salvation outside the Church" is a proclimation that no longer is religion the spiritual equivalent of the mathematical empty set when it comes to securing man eternal rewards. Now there is a solution for THE problem of mankind. We were apart from God out there. But God is with us here.
How can we contaminate such good news then with placid assurances that salvation is easily available to everyone outside the Church, even if they never join themselves to her? Isn't this really a total rejection of everything we believe?
I'm sorry but I cannot just let this pass.
Your prooftexts in this post fail to distinguish between formal membership in the visible Catholic Church and the Catholic Church as The Church of Christ in toto. The "new" theology that you oppose (Lumen Gentium and the other documents of Vatican II, Mystici Corporis, the 19thc documents I cited earlier, JPII in Crossing the Threshold of Hope) is "new" insofar as it makes precisely that distinction.
The "laxist" position does not deny that salvation is impossible apart from the See of Peter and the Catholic Church. On the contrary, we fully affirm that no one will enter heaven apart from membership in the Catholic Church that Christ founded upon Peter.
Our "laxist" position simply disagrees with your "rigorist" position over the nature of "membership" or "adherence" to the Church founded upon Peter--over how absolutely essential formal membership in the visible manifestation of that Church founded upon Peter is. In other words, over the possiblity that the Church Christ founded upon Peter is not exactly coterminous with the visible, historic structure we call the Catholic Church here and now. Please note that I am not thereby claiming a true "invisible Church" different from the visible Church. They are one and the same church but not absolutely identical in their boundaries. That's all the Vatican II documents claim. It is a necessary and important nuancing of "extra ecclesiam nulla salus" to avoid the risk that one totally identifies the visible church on earth with the Church of Christ founded upon Peter, lest one turn the mystery of the universal Church into an idolatry of the Church's visible structures.
PLEASE NOTE the underlying theological issue: the mystery of the Church--a theological mystery that cannot be utterly identical with any historical, visible structure. It would be easy to float away into saying that visible, historical church structures don't matter, that all denominations are equally paths to heaven. I WANT TO BE CLEAR THAT I AM NOT ADVOCATING THAT KIND OF INDIFFERENTISM. But I am insisting that Catholic theology itself requires that we treat the mystery of the Church with rigorous care and not totally reduce the Church to her visible structures.
Christianity is based on the scandal of particularity, the scandal that God saves us through incarnation in time and space. The Gnostics and others wanted to deny that particularity in favor of merely spiritual, universal, invisible salvation. I am not at all interested in that and I denounce that as error. I became a Catholic in large part because Catholic teaching insists that the historical, visible Church founded by Christ on Peter cannot be dissolved into a merely spiritual, invisible aggregate of all believers over time. Against my raving feminist colleagues I insist that Christ's action in time and space, his particularity in choosing only men for apostles carries significance for all time and governs us to this day. They cannot fathom why I would give so much authority to such particularity.
So I am not abandoning or downplaying the importance of formal membership in the visible, historic Church with its center in the See of Peter. But I am saying that the theological mystery of the Church founded by Christ on Peter cannot be reduced to that visible earthly structure. It subsists in it. And, if the Church of Christ is not absolutely coterminous with that visible, earthly structure, then there is room for salvation outside that visible earthly structure but within the Church of Christ founded upon Peter. The wonder of the mystery of the Church is that it is at the same time intensely focused on the visible, particular, historic structure of the Catholic Church with Peter at its visible head and also not identical with that but incredibly and profoundly more than that.
And so, our position (Lumen Gentium etc.) claims that visible formal membership in the concrete structures of the Catholic Church is not always coterminous with membership in the Catholic Church of which the successor of Peter is the earthly head.
Your documents in the post to which I am now responding do not directly address the issue we have been debating. You make them address the issue by your interpretation of them, but they do not explicitly address the exact nature of the "baptism of desire," the characteristics or possibliity of any non-formal membership in the Catholic Church.
In effect, the entire debate is over the nature of adherence by desire--just what that is, how it functions. You accept it in principle, even as you accept invincible ignorance in principle. You interpret both of these narrowly; Lumen Gentium, Mystici Corporis and the documents from the 19thc I cited yesterday explicitly enlarge your narrow definition. Your documents are silent; the ones I cited explicitly address the issue and do so in an "enlarged" way.
In response to my citations from the 19thc you cite other contemporary documents that simply are silent on the question of how the visible, concrete bishop-of-Rome headed historical Catholic Church relates to/overlaps with, is or is not utterly coterminous with the Church of Christ that subsists in the Catholic Church.
Your documents may have a sterner tone (certainly you think they do) and you read sterner tone as prooftexting for your minimalist interpretation of baptism of desire/invincible ignorance. I gave you documents that explicitly offer an enlarged reading of invincible ignorance and you refute them with documents that do not address that point.
Finally, anyone observing this conversation from outside either camp could scarcely fail to see that a lot of invincible ignorance is floating around on this thread. That was my point in my last post, which I thought would be my last. But it didn't seem to register with you: our conversations, with spouses, with adolescent children, with political opponents involve invincible and vincible ignorance. It is very true that often we should be able to understand the other's point--often our inability to disagree with a spouse or a colleague stems from willful pride, greed, animosity (lack of charity) etc. I am not saying that everytime a conversation ends up as "agreeing to disagree" we have invincible ignorance. I am, however, saying that sometimes honest, good faith irresolvable disagreements take place. That is invincible ignorance. Unless you, Hermann, wish to claim that everyone who disagrees with you is always at fault because he is willfully choosing not to entertain your ideas and willing to be persuaded, that his disagreements with you never stem from factors in his or your background for which he and you are not culpable, then you ought to be more generous with allowing for invincible ignorance than you are.
I am not interested in letting everyone off the hook. I am, however, convinced that all of us encounter aspects of invincible ignorance alongside tons of vincible ignorance in our day-to-day lives. Invincible ignorance is very frustrating. To me it's just so obvious that I'm right about X, Y, or Z. I can't see why someone else, someone like you, Hermann, can't see that the interpretation I'm giving (and Lumen Gentium, Pius XII etc. give) to Extra Ecclesiam is the right one. But I am not going to declare that Hermann's inability to see my point stems from Hermann's sinful, willful disobedience to the voice of conscience within him that is telling him, "Oh Hermann, listen up now, Dionysiusdecordealcis is right about this and if you want to escape hell you better listen to him."
No, I ascribe to Hermann good faith, honesty, integrity, when he sets forth a minimalist interpretation of Extra Ecclesiam. I believe that Christian charity requires me to think of Hermann this way and that, if I did not, I, not Hermann, would be guilty of sin.
Why I should not apply the same principles to at least some of those who, despite my best efforts and the best efforts of many Catholics far better skilled at explaining the reasons for accepting Catholic teaching in general, I must confess, I am powerless to understand. I am invincibly ignorant of the reasons why I should not be more generous toward those who are not yet Catholic but who are honest, good faith believers in Jesus Christ or (more rare but not impossible) honest desirers of Truth.