Catholic Candle note: Below is a corrected article. 

Correction

 

This correction regards our April 2025 article — Warning about Lifesitenews.com: It Promotes Heresy!: https://catholiccandle.org/2025/04/23/warning-about-lifesitenews-com-it-promotes-heresy/

 

Catholic Candle is embarrassed to have written an article in our April 2025 edition where we wrongly identified the name of the website at fault.  We thought it was Lifesitenews.com and it was really Lifenews.com.

 

We are sorry and apologize to Lifesitenews.com and to Catholic Candle readers.  It was our mistake completely.

 

 

Warning about Lifenews.com:

It Promotes Heresy

Lifenews.com publishes a mix of articles, good and bad.

Among other examples is its recent article which concludes falsely, that all unbaptized babies go to heaven.  For example, here are two ways that this heresy is stated in the article:

Do Aborted and Miscarried Babies Go to Heaven? …  I conclude that babies are among the “loved by God, that he [sic] has chosen” (1 Thessalonians 1: 4) and are with him now.  … 

Trust that your babies are with the Lord and with perfect understanding, enjoying him [sic], as you will come to see.[1]

The article in Lifenews.com promotes the protestants’ denial of the importance (or existence) of Original Sin.  They do not consider prompt infant Baptism to be necessary or important. 

The protestant author purports to be “biblical”.  But he is not.  He quickly segues into his squishy protestant heresy, namely, that Baptism is not crucial for salvation because the Father is so loving.

This protestant author’s supposed “biblical” analysis is so shallow that he neither mentioned nor showed how his protestant heresy fits with Our Lord’s words:

Unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.   

St. John’s Gospel, 3:5.

Let us close this present article with a quick summary of the truths that Lifenews.com denies, at least implicitly, by publishing that heretical article.[2]

❖  Original Sin makes us enemies of God.  As the psalmist teaches: “I was conceived in iniquities; and in sins did my mother conceive me.”  Psalm 50:7.  St. Paul teaches that, because of Original Sin, we are all “by nature children of wrath”.  Ephesians, 2:3.

 

❖  No One Can Go to Heaven Without Grace.

Here is one way that St. Thomas shows the connection between sanctifying grace and salvation:

[M]an is not justified from sin[3] [including Original Sin] except by grace … [and] the very least grace is sufficient to … merit eternal life.[4]

St. Thomas teaches the same truth in these words:

The holy Fathers [of the Old Testament] were delivered from hell by being admitted to the glory of the vision of God, to which no one can come except through grace; according to Rom. 6:23: ‘The grace of God is life everlasting.’ ”[5]

❖  But babies (and retarded persons who have never had the use of reason) can only receive grace through Baptism (because they cannot use their reason and so cannot have Baptism of Desire[6]).  As the Summa explains:

[S]ometimes Baptism cannot be omitted without loss of eternal salvation, as in the case of children who have not come to the use of reason.[7]

In other words, because there is no way for a baby to receive grace except through Baptism, if a baby is not baptized, he cannot go to heaven.

Here is another way to state this same explanation that an unbaptized baby does not go to heaven:

1.    No one goes to heaven unless he is a friend of God.

 

2.    No one is a friend of God without the (supernatural) Theological Virtue of Charity.

 

3.    There is no way for a baby to obtain this (supernatural) Theological Virtue of Charity except through Baptism.

 

4.    Therefore, a baby does not go to heaven unless he is baptized.

 

❖  Because a baby cannot go to heaven without grace and cannot obtain grace without Baptism, the Church insists on prompt Baptism.  As St. Thomas explains:

We must make a distinction and see whether those who are to be baptized are children or adults.  For if they be children, Baptism should not be deferred.  First, because in them we do not look for better instruction or fuller conversion.  Secondly, because of the danger of death, for no other remedy is available for them besides the sacrament of Baptism.[8]

This phrase “no other remedy is available for them” refers to a baby’s inability to be purged of Original Sin and to receive Grace, in any way besides Baptism.  By contrast, a person who has the use of reason could possibly receive Baptism of Desire, if he were unable to be Baptized.

❖  In the book, The Teaching Of The Catholic Church, Canon Smith explains the reality for parents of a baby who died without baptism:

[U]nbaptised children, not having received the sacrament of faith [i.e., Baptism], have not the supernatural knowledge, without which they cannot know what they have lost.  Hence their loss causes them no anguish of soul.  Although these considerations may bring some little consolation to the Catholic mother grieving over the fate of her child who has died unbaptised, they will not relieve the weight upon her conscience, should hers have been the fault, or free parents from the obligation to have their children baptised as soon as possible, since there is no measure or proportion between the natural  happiness that will be their lot [i.e., the lot of the babies] in limbo, and the inconceivable felicity of heaven, of which man’s carelessness [viz., by delaying Baptism] may so easily deprive them.[9]

❖  In his Constitution, Auctorem Fidei, on August 28, 1794, Pope Pius VI condemned the claim that the existence of the Limbo of the Children is a fable.  Here is his condemnation:

Condemned:

The doctrine which rejects as a Pelagian fable, that place of the lower regions (which the faithful generally designate by the name of the limbo of children) in which the souls of those departing with the sole guilt of original sin are punished with the punishment of the condemned, exclusive of the punishment of fire, just as if, by this very fact, that these who remove the punishment of fire introduced that middle place and state free of guilt and of punishment between the kingdom of God and eternal damnation, such as that about which the Pelagians idly talk,–false, rash, injurious to Catholic schools.[10]

Thus, the article[11] published by Lifenews.com promotes one or more heretical doctrines:

➢  That all unbaptized babies have grace;

➢  That grace is not necessary to get to heaven; and 

➢  That the Limbo of the Children is a fable, incurring the condemnation of Pope Pius VI.

Abortion is the murder of innocent babies.  It is very human for us to sympathize with the innocent and the weak.  We would be inclined to “wish ourselves into” the error that unbaptized babies (including all those murdered in abortion), somehow go to heaven. 

But we should love the truth more than the comfort of an appealing heresy!  It is heresy to say those unbaptized babies can go to heaven.  So that heresy is a false comfort. 

Also, this demonic heresy deemphasizes the urgent need to baptize babies.  When heretics deemphasize the necessity of infant Baptism, they promote the devil’s strategy of seeking to delay the Baptism of babies, even though it is the only way they can get to heaven.

Conclusion

Beware of the recklessness of Lifenews.com.  Watch out for the heresies that it publishes under the guise of “pro-life”!