Page 127 "The Church of Christ,"
"...We hold it for certain that those baptized by heretics are separated from the Church and deprived of all of the blessings enjoyed by her members, if they have arrived at the age pf discretion and have adhered to the errors of their Sect.
Years ago, in "The Church of Christ" by E. Sylvester Berry, Std I learned that all babies baptised are automatically members of the Catholic Church.
For the longest time I searched for the reference cited on page 127 of the book but the source could not be found because of an error in the footnote which reads Benedict XIV, "singular nos" Feb 9, 1749 and not Singulari Nobis.
Today, I found two sources.
Here are the sources;
https://exlaodicea.wordpress.com/2013/03/22/no-protestant-babies-pope-benedict-xv-to-king-henry-ix/
The second source is from the estimable Catholicism. org and the excellent Brother Andre Marie
Benedict XIV’s Brief, ‘Singulari Nobis,’ to Cardinal Henry, Duke of York, February 9, 1749
It is a Brief sent by Pope Benedict XIV (Prospero Lorenzo Lambertini) to Cardinal Henry, Duke of York(Henry Benedict Stuart, younger brother of Bonnie Prince Charlie), who, for obvious reasons, was interested in things that pertained to Catholics and Anglicans in the nations to whose thrones he was the rightful heir.
To the best of my ability, what follows below the line is, in every detail, verbatim from DH. This includes elisions, which are in the original. The emboldened numbers are the DH numbers, while the numbers appearing after the § symbol are the paragraph numbers of the Brief. Note: the convention in DH is that the numeration of footnotes resets with each individual numbered paragraph. Due to the limits of footnoting in the WordPress content management system, I have had to break that convention in my own footnote enumeration.
Among the things proven by Singulari Nobis is that there is no such thing as an Anglican (Lutheran, Presbyterian, etc.) baby. If they are validly baptized, they are Catholic.
Benedict XIV’s Brief, Singulari Nobis, to Cardinal Henry, Duke of York, February 9, 1749
Ed.: Benedict XIV, Bullarium (Mechelen), 7:24‒26 (old ed., vol. 3, no. 2).
Incorporation into the Church by Means of Baptism
2566 § 12. … When a heretic baptizes someone, provided he uses the legitimate form and matter, … the latter is marked with the baptismal character….
2567 § 13. Next, it was also found that someone who has received valid baptism from a heretic is made a member of the Catholic Church by virtue of that ⟨baptism⟩; for the personal error of the one baptizing cannot deprive him of this happiness, provided the baptizer confers the sacrament in the faith of the true Church and observes her provisions in what relates to the validity of baptism. Suárez affirms this admirably in his Fidei catholicae defensio contra errores sectae Anglicanae [Defense of the Catholic faith against the errors of the Anglican sect], book 1, chapter 24, where he proves that the person baptized becomes a member of the Catholic Church, also adding this, that if the heretic, as often happens, christens an infant unable to make an act of faith, this is no obstacle to his receiving the habit of faith at baptism. 1
2568 § 14. Lastly, We have established that, if they reach the age at which they can distinguish right from wrong for themselves and then adhere to the errors of the one who baptized them, persons who were baptized by heretics are rejected from the unity of the Church and are deprived of all those benefits that those remaining in the Church enjoy, but they are not freed from her authority and laws, as González wisely explains in the section “Sicut”, no. 12, concerning heretics. 2
2569 § 15. We see this in the case of fugitives and traitors, whom the civil laws completely exclude from the privileges of faithful subjects. Similarly, the laws of the Church do not grant clerical privileges to those clerics who disobey the commandments of the sacred canons. But nobody thinks that traitors or clerics who violate the canons are not subject to the authority of their princes or prelates.
2570 § 16. These examples, unless We are mistaken, are relevant to the question; for just like them, so too heretics are subject to the Church and are bound by ecclesiastical laws.
