I should add that in the early church, even catechumens who were not martyred but died before baptism were considered to have received the grace of baptism. But of course, the baptism of desire of a catechumen is explicit.
There is a child. All her life, this child has been told she is beautiful by those in her family. Indeed they believe she IS beautiful.
As the child grows and goes out into the world, she tells everyone she sees just how beautiful she is. Yet she hears whispers about her appearance, she overhears others saying she is deluded, that her looks are nothing special, in fact in their opinion the girl is downright plain.
How can that be? When she looks in the mirror she sees beauty. She looks at the beauty of her mother, her sisters and grandmother - they grow luscious long hairs out of the beauty marks on their noses, their mounds of voluptuous chins perfectly framing the delicacy of their perfectly down-turned mouths. She looks like them, and so she MUST be a beauty.
Aren’t her brothers and father magnificent in their display of bones. Such fine bones that protrude proudly at their knees and shoulders. What a wonderful sight to behold. Their pale skin and sunken eyes are awesome.
The child now grown into quite a plain girl in the eyes of the world, goes on her way - demanding that others see her as beautiful. She closes her eyes to their opinion. When she is shown evidence in encyclopedias or dictionaries of the meaning of the word “beauty,” she is convinced she fits the bill. She has a right to her opinion.
What she does NOT have a right to demand, is that others think of her as beautiful. She does NOT have the right to be free of the judgment of others, because what she sees as beauty, the rest of us see as a distortion of reality.