Non-Catholic Communities As “Means Of Salvation”

• 9 years ago

By FR. BRIAN W. HARRISON, OS

Many dissident traditionalists claim that Vatican Council II’s Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio (UR) is irreconcilable with traditional Catholic doctrine. The passage most commonly singled out in support of this claim is the affirmation in article 3 of the Decree that “the Spirit of Christ has not refrained from using [non-Catholic communities] as means of salvation.”

Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and his followers in the Society of St. Pius X, for instance, have for decades denounced this conciliar teaching as heterodox. While SSPX writers acknowledge that non-Catholics can sometimes be saved in their separated communities, they insist that, according to Catholic orthodoxy, no one can ever be saved through, by or because of those communities, as is entailed in the idea of their being means of salvation.

It seems to me that in making this argument, such critics of the Vatican II teaching fail to distinguish between two distinct theses: (a) that these communities can formally be means of salvation; and (b) that they can be means of salvation merely materially. Only thesis (a) is heretical, and Vatican II does not teach that (a) is true.

Being formally a means of salvation would mean that non-Catholic communities as such — that is, in their own distinctive and proper character as non-Catholic, i.e., as separated from the See of Peter, the center of true unity — could somehow help people along the road to salvation. Indeed, that thesis would be unorthodox. It would be impossible for that kind of salvific help to occur, because the distinctively non-Catholic aspects of every non-Catholic community are, as such, always false and reprehensible, and so could never help anyone along the road to salvation.

Being merely materially a means of salvation, however, is a very different matter. For instance, many non-Catholic communities happen to have valid Baptisms, and (to take the most obvious and indisputable example) the valid Baptism of an infant that happens to take place materially and physically within a Protestant, Orthodox, or Anglican community and place of worship certainly helps that child along the road to salvation.

All Catholics (at least, ever since St. Cyprian in the third century received a papal correction on this point) have agreed that if such a child dies in infancy, he/she will go straight to Heaven. So it’s obvious that the heretical community wherein that child received a valid (i.e., Catholic) Baptism was materially “used by the Holy Spirit” as a “means” of the child’s salvation.

Likewise, if an adult pagan or nonbeliever comes to believe in the divinity of Christ through the preachings or ministrations of a non-Catholic sect, then that person, compared to his/her previous state, is certainly moving in the direction of eternal salvation. Thus, the sect in question has materially been used by the Holy Spirit as an instrument in that person’s spiritual progress.

It is true that this formal/material distinction is not itself found spelled out in the Vatican II text under discussion (UR 3); but it is implicit in the last clause of the sentence, which specifies that the salvific efficacy of any separated community is derived from the Catholic Church, not from anything proper to (distinctive of) that separated community itself. The complete sentence reads: “For the Spirit of Christ has not refrained from using them as means of salvation which derive their efficacy from the very fullness of grace and truth entrusted to the Catholic Church” (emphasis added).

Moreover, it is an established hermeneutical principle that if a given magisterial text could be understood in two senses, one of them novel and heterodox and the other traditional and orthodox, then it is the latter sense that must be taken to express the true mind of the Church. This is the “hermeneutic of continuity” that Pope Benedict XVI famously insisted on.

In his letter on the upcoming Year of Mercy, Pope Francis has expressed the hope that the SSPX can before long be fully regularized and reconciled with the See of Peter. If the above clarifications about one longstanding bone of contention can help in some modest way toward that goal, this little article will have served its purpose.