Touchy, touchy, D! I assure you I wasn't preparing to lead a demonstration outside the bishop's office over this! :) I will freely admit, by the way, that the older I get the more invincibly ignorant I get. I never understood the term "invincibly ignorant" as used in this context to include people who were quite aware of the position of the Latin Church but nevertheless rejected it. It is apparent that I was wrong.
You know that Catholics claim jurisdiction for the bishop of Rome that you belief to be erroneous, correct?
You do not "know" that the bishop of Rome has the sort of jurisdiction that Latin Catholics claim he has. You know that they claim he has this jurisdiction. But you do not know that he has this jurisdiction in the way that they know. You know their claims and you reject them, which means you do not accept/know/believe that their claims are true. So you "know" their claims as an object, not as a subjective, active reality that compels your belief. If your not-knowing these claims in the second sense results from rejecting knowledge you at some point had, you are culpable for the deliberate rejection because you made a knowing choice. But if your not-knowing results from rejecting what others say but what you yourself never "believed" or authentically even entertained as possibly true, then you never truly chose not-to-know, rather, you simply have been in a constant not-knowing/not-believing state vis-a-vis these claims.
The difference can be slight and hard to pin down. No outsider can say for sure just what motivates you or any other non-Catholic in his "not-knowing" or "not-believing" of Catholic claims.
But only those who know (believe, accept, agree, hold as dogma) that the bishop of Rome has the primacy of jurisdiction that Latin Catholics and Eastern Rite Catholics believe (i.e., know) he has and yet, despite believing/knowing that he has this jurisdiction, reject these claims, only those are condemned in the Letter of the Holy Office of 1949. Presumably people who were raised Catholic, confirmed, participated in Catholic sacraments at some point "knew" (believed, truly held) the Catholic claims about the pope. Having then been reprimanded for error about nulla salus by the pope whose claims to authority they said they adhered to and in defiance of that disobeying him, they are condemned.
This is stated clearly in the Holy Office letter: "that one may obtain eternal salvation, it is not always required that he be incorporated into the Church actually as a member [leaves room for schismatics], but it is necessary that at least he be united to her by desire and longing."
And the next paragraph says that "this desire need not always be explicit, . . . but when a person is involved in invincible ignorance God accepts also an implicit desire, . . ." Pius XII, Mystici Corporis is then cited.
One qualifier is given a few paragraphs later: one must be animated by perfect charity in one's invincible ignorance. But charity is required for anyone to get to heaven. A Catholic who is explicitly and formally a member of the visible Catholic Church in communion with the bishop of Rome and who holds doggedly to the Catholic claims for the successor of Peter's jurisdiction but lacks charity/selfless love for God will end up in hell.
Only you can judge whether the reason you do not hold the same beliefs as Catholics in communion with the bishop of Rome, whether your adherence to Orthodoxy and the concomitant deliberate refusal to accept Latin claims about the pope's jurisdiction is motivated by genuine charity, just as only an individual Catholic who assents to all those Latin claims for papal jurisdiction and formally adheres to Roman rite or Eastern Rite Catholicism is animated by genuine charity rather than pride, fear, anger etc.
But Unam Sanctam is compatible with the 1949 Letter and with Mystici Corporis and a series of 19thc statements with regard to third and fourth and eighth generation Protestants whose adherence to groups out of communion with the bishop of Rome was not the result of knowing rejection but the result of holding sincerely contrary beliefs and, through no fault of their own, never actually entertaining, really epistemologically entertaining, the possibility that the Catholic claims might be true.
Deliberate, knowing adherence to schism damns to hell. The issue is just when a schismatic is a schismatic because of deliberate choice and when he is out of fellowship having never truly entertained alternative ways of seeing things and never really realizing that he has not truly entertained them.
You believe, apparently, that you have truly entertained the Latin claims and have knowingly rejected them and that that, in our eyes, condemns you to hell but obviously does not condemn you to hell in your eyes because you are convinced the Latin claims are erroneous.
We do not assume anything one way or the other about you. We believe the key is whether you have actually openly entertained these claims that you reject or whether you have rejected them out of unrecognized pre-judgment. If you were aware that you remain Orthodox out of deliberate prejudgment, that would be a sin against truth on your part. But I can't know exactly what combination of knowledge, will, choice, prejudice, misinformation etc. has gone into your very intentional and clear adherence to Orthodoxy.
You were misinformed about Unam Sanctam by a nun who did you a disservice, sinned against truth (unless she was in fact a silly old woman who didn't know what she was doing, in which case the people who fed her misinformation may be responsible for her injury to you) and fueled a prejudice against Unam Sanctam and against Latin Catholics--that alone could count as a significant source of "invincible ignorance" on your part.
But now the Unam Sanctam claim has been cleared up. You, in my view, are still misinformed about and are prejudiced toward what you see as a blatant contradiction between the Feeneyite letter and Unam Sanctam and you yourself insist that you simply do not understand the "invincible ignorance" concept. That to me would point toward the fact that you are indeed not entirely "knowing" in your rejection of the bishop of Rome's claims as we Catholics hold them.
I have no doubt that you believe you know what we claim and believe about the bishop of Rome. And certainly you know a lot of what we claim. But this interchange over Unam Sanctam and the 1949 Holy Office letter suggests that you view these matters from a perspective influenced by your upbringing, your father's strong Orthodoxy, and a host of other experiences and sources of knowledge that together might mean you never yet, through no fault of your own, have truly encountered the claims of Catholics with authenticity.
I and others have sought to present these claims accurately. But then other Latin Catholics offer counter-interpretations of Unam Sanctam and the 1949 letter--as do the Lefebvrites and the heirs of Fr. Feeney and others.
What exactly you would have to do to have succeeded in honestly and authentically sorting through this welter of information such that you truly have encountered these claims and then knowingly rejected them, I cannot say. Only you and God can say. The Catholic church refuses to play God on this. Objectively Orthodox and Catholics are in schism. They are not sharing sacraments. Exactly why each of us in schism are in schism from each other, only God and the individual can say. Many Catholic adherents could end up in hell, many Orthodox adherents could end up in heaven. Beyond that, we Catholics do not presume to say which ones are which but we exhort all, Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants alike--and I exhort myself--always to ask myself, have I honestly and humbly and with integrity been listening to the various claims for the truth about the Church and have I been truly open to following whatever path honest knowledge of that Truth requires?