It may be that God would not let him die before, any more than he would holy Simeon before he had seen his salvation, and that he would not is presumable from the fact that he did not. You say there are large numbers of schismatical and heretical communions who are not guilty of the sin of schism or heresy. As Catholics, we know nothing of the fiction of an invisible church, for which heretics in our day contend, and which is composed of the elect of all communions, the subterfuge to which they were driven, when pressed to tell where their church was before Luther and Calvin. The Church which Catholics believe is a visible kingdom, as much so as the kingdom of France or Great Britain, and when faith assures us that out of the Church there is no salvation, the plain, obvious, natural sense of the dogma is, that those living and dying out of that visible kingdom cannot be saved. But although we are not of the same religion, I hope we shall both one day be in Heaven.
Death makes no change in that.
As the tree falls so shall it lie. And He said again, 'There shall be one fold and one shepherd,' and He made St. Peter the chief shepherd of His flock. Saying this, the priest left him. But these words sank deeply into the good man's heart, and led him to renounce the errors in which he had been brought up, and he became a fervent Catholic. We declare, say, define, and pronounce that it is absolutely necessary for the salvation of every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff.