Is Feeneyism Catholic? - Society of St. Pius X

58 IS F EENEYISM C ATHOLIC?
quod traditum est–let nothing be innovated, except that which is
transmitted [by Tradition].” 82 St. Cyprian stood by a local practice
recently introduced in northern Africa which did rebaptize:
his reasoning was that outside the Church there can be no salvation
and no remission of sin; hence converts who were baptized in
heresy never had received the remission of their sins, and therefore
never had the new life of baptism. Hence the need of this first
washing. This is the context of his letter No. 73 to Jubaianus.
This is the oldest testimony by a saint on the dogma Outside
the Church there is no salvation. Immediately, St. Cyprian gives the
doctrine on Baptism of Blood and Baptism of Desire as required
for the proper understanding of the dogma. Here is the whole
passage, so as to grasp the context:
§21. Can the power of baptism be greater or of more avail
than confession, than suffering, when one confesses Christ before
men and is baptized in his own blood? And yet even this
baptism does not benefit a heretic, although he has confessed
Christ, and been put to death outside the Church, unless the patrons
and advocates of heretics declare that the heretics who are
slain in a false confession of Christ are martyrs, and assign to
them the glory and the crown of martyrdom contrary to the testimony
of the apostle, who says that it will profit them nothing
although they were burnt and slain (I Cor. 13:3). But if not even
the baptism of a public confession and blood can profit a heretic
unto salvation, because there is no salvation out of the Church,
how much less shall it be of advantage to him, if in a hiding-place
and a cave of robbers, stained with the contagion of
adulterous water, 83 he has not only not put off his old sins, but
rather heaped up still newer and greater ones! Wherefore baptism
cannot be common 84 to us and to heretics, to whom neither
God the Father, nor Christ the Son, nor the Holy Ghost, nor the
faith, nor the Church itself, is common. And therefore it behooves
those to be baptized who come from heresy to the
Church, that so they who are prepared, in the lawful, and true,
82 Quoted by St. Cyprian in his Epistle No. 74, 1 (BAC, p.693).
83 Baptism of water by the heretics: because of the obex of the wrong faith, it
does not give sanctifying grace, but on the contrary, it adds a sacrilege, being
the thievery of a sacrament.
84 Later, the Church stated this teaching with more precision: baptism of water
can be valid inside and outside the Church, but it cannot be fruitful outside
the Church.