By RAYMOND DE SOUZA, KM
Part 39
Yes, to join the Church of Jesus Christ is necessary for salvation. But we must understand that when the Church teaches that outside her pale there is no salvation, she does not intend to pass judgment on individual cases, nor on God’s mercy and Providence. Whatever is connected as exceptions to the rule in the general economy of salvation, it is God’s business, not ours. We are guided by what He has revealed to us through the Church, not by what we think He meant in this or that Bible verse.
The Church is essentially the society of salvation, the ordinary means established by God to save men, and those who desire eternal salvation must enter her fold.
Here is how the Catechism of the Catholic Church begins to address this topic: “How are we to understand this affirmation, often repeated by the Church Fathers? Reformulated positively, it means that all salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is his Body” (CCC, n. 846).
We must not fear “upsetting” those who disagree with Church teaching. We are not imparting our personal opinions; we are passing on what the Catechism teaches. God has established the Church in the world with marks of her divine mission, with sacraments that impart grace, with the Magisterium to teach, govern, and sanctify, and even the unimaginable: the Real Presence of her Founder continually in her tabernacles in the Holy Eucharist!
In the ordinary order of Providence, no one can be saved outside of the Church. But God can and does act outside of the ordinary order if He so wishes. He is not chained by His sacraments. The parables of the talents, when He gives gifts in an unequal fashion, and the workers in the vineyard, who received the payment not according to their hours of work, but by the choice of the owner, show how He gives His gifts according to the designs of His Providence, and not equally to all.
The salvation of non-Catholics who are faithful to grace and the natural law is an action of God through extraordinary means, because the ordinary means is the Church He founded.
Jesus Christ claimed to be — and is — the only way to the Father, not Buddha, Mohammed, Zoroaster, Joseph Smith, or the Rev. Moon. Jesus established a specific Church, and everyone claiming to be His follower must obey Him and join His Church. And she has three provinces: the Church Militant here on Earth, the Church suffering in Purgatory, and the Church Triumphant in Heaven. If the righteous non-Catholic does not join the Church Militant on Earth due to non-culpable ignorance, he will join the Church suffering in Purgatory, en route to the Church triumphant in Heaven.
The pagan or heretic may be saved in spite of his paganism or heresy, not because of it. He dies doing his best to follow the natural law and/or the Gospel precepts known to him, and God supplies the extraordinary means, as long as he sincerely — and here sincerely does count — tries to do the will of God in all things.
Now let us take care of some objections to this teaching:
First objection: If the Church is infallible, why does she change her doctrine from time to time? Can the truth change? Example: Before the dogma of the Immaculate Conception was proclaimed in 1854, Catholics could disagree with it. Now, they cannot.
Wrong! The teachings of the Church never change. She never contradicts herself; all she does is develop the same teaching so that it may be made more clear, more explicit, more understandable by the faithful. That’s the job of the Magisterium, the teaching mission of the Church. The Church has always believed in the Immaculate Conception, and in 1854 all she did was to define it in clearer terms, in its meaning and extension. Based upon Genesis 3 and the faith of the early Christians, the Church defined the teaching in specific terms.
This is called development of doctrine: a growth in understanding, not in contradiction or denial of a previous teaching. Like the boy Jesus who, in His childhood, did not have the characteristics of a grown man, but grew and developed in His human nature. At the age of twelve, He never trimmed His beard, simply because He did not have one. But the facial hair follicles were there already under his skin, and would grow out of it in due course. Likewise, every Catholic teaching that became more explicit in time was already implicit in divine Revelation.
So does the Church with the divine Revelation entrusted to her. All she does over the centuries is to develop the contents of the message entrusted to her by her Founder. And, once the definition is clear and the teaching made more explicit and understandable, the Church tells the faithful under her care the truth about it. In some cases, it is a dogma of faith, which cannot be contradicted.
Second objection: The Church is not “one” in government. There was a time when to or even three Popes received allegiance from the people (The Great Western Schism of 1378-1417).
Reply: Wrong! There have never been two or three Popes at the same time. You don’t know your history if you think that. There was confusion about who the Pope was, not that there ought to be more than one. They confused the identification of the man on the Chair of Peter, not the Chair itself. Everyone knew that there is only one Pope. The question was, “Which one was he?” — that was the confusion. A confusion of persons, not of principle.
Free Will
Third objection: The Church cannot be from God, because if she were, she would have converted the whole world by now, after 2,000 years of Christianity.
Reply. Wrong again! The Church is from God, just as Jesus was from God the Father, and yet His own people refused to accept Him. The servant cannot be greater than the Master. The Church is the Mystical Body of Christ, of which He is the Head and we are the members. Where the Church is, Christ is there as well. Those who refuse the Church, do not refuse only a group of men established in Rome; they refuse Christ Himself: “Whoever listens to you listens to me; whoever rejects you rejects me; but whoever rejects me rejects him who sent me” (Luke 10:16).
Unlike Mohammed, who, by war, slavery, fire, and word forced people to convert to his pagan heresy, Jesus told the apostles to preach. Conversion by persuasion, not force.
Those who believe and are baptized, will be saved. Those who don’t, will be condemned. God created us with a free will, not an enslaved one — more like animals than humans. Even if the Church preaches to every single human being on Earth, but converts only an insignificant minority, God’s will is done. People receive the eternal reward according to their free choices.
Fourth objection: Why do some people have hostility to the Church?
That’s the next article.
+ + +
(Raymond de Souza is an EWTN program host; regional coordinator for Portuguese-speaking countries for Human Life International [HLI]; president of the Sacred Heart Institute, and a member of the Sovereign, Military, and Hospitaller Order of the Knights of Malta. His website is: www.RaymonddeSouza.com.)
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress