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Debates and Discussions | Faith & Doctrine

This is a debate between Bro. Peter Dimond of Most Holy Family Monastery and Ken Bird on the issue of “baptism of desire” and what the Catholic Church teaches on this matter. Both individuals hold the sedevacantist position.

Ken, who originally liked our material, became very much opposed to us and to our material after being persuaded by arguments for baptism of desire which were made by other sedevacantist priests, bishops and groups. He became convinced that they had the truth on this issue and that we did not. The cordial tone of this conversation doesn’t really capture how very opposed Ken had become to our position. Coming into the conversation, Ken thought that we were completely wrong, heretical and theologically ignorant on the issue. He denounced us in no uncertain terms. To our pleasant surprise and to his credit, in the course of the conversation Ken couldn’t resist the arguments from dogmatic teaching which refute baptism of desire and he changed his position! Many angles to the baptism of desire controversy are discussed in this exchange, especially later on. However, we simply didn’t get to some other facets of this issue. (As an example, a passage in Sess. 7 of the Council of Trent is mentioned in passing but we simply never got to discussing it.)