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A Short Catechism on EENS
20080309
The Catholic and the Church
There would seem to be grave need today in our country for accurate and clear instruction about the necessity and the quality of that love which Catholics owe to the true Church of Jesus Christ. The affection of a Catholic for his Church is far too valuable a reality to be neglected or merely taken for granted. The Catholic who fails to give an ungrudging devotion and loyalty to the Church ruins his own spiritual life and detracts from the corporate work of Christ in the society of His disciples. In order that our people may be preserved from the calamitous effects which follow upon the minimizing or withholding of love for the Church, some explicit teaching on this point is most expedient.
There is some danger that certain of our people may be lulled or beguiled into a state of remissness in their relations to the Church. From every side today highly skilled propagandists are bombarding us with pleas and demands that we attach ourselves enthusiastically to movements or societies working towards a better social, economic, or cultural order. Most of these ladies and gentlemen insist that the Church, together with other religious societies, can be of service in procuring the particular good towards which they are aiming. All too frequently we gain the impression that these publicists believe that working for their own objective is the best and essential function of the Church in modern society. It would not be too difficult for an ill-instructed Catholic to find his attitude towards the Church colored by such an erroneous concept of the Church’s position, and thus to consider the Church as in some manner possessing a claim on his loyalty inferior to that set forth by the movements for the brave new world.
Furthermore there are three tendencies in contemporary Catholic writing which work to palliate a kind of minimized loyalty to the true Church on the part of Catholics. The men who contribute towards these tendencies seem to be acting for the best motives, but their teaching is inexact and the final effects of their doctrines can hardly be other than the encouragement of a less perfect affection for the Church of God. All of these three objectionable tendencies introduce some new entity which is supposed to receive a share, and sometimes the lion’s share, of that love and loyalty which our Lord wills that Catholics should reserve for His Society. All of them betray a faulty understanding of the nature or the function of our Lord’s Church. Consequently a consideration of the erroneous theories from which these tendencies originate can show us a great deal about the nature of that affection which, as Catholics, we owe to the true Church.
(1) In all the field of Catholic letters, the most subtle influence against a whole-hearted devotion to the Church springs from the now discredited distinction between a visible and an invisible Church. It is perfectly true that Pope Pius XII, in his masterly encyclical Mystici Corporis, stigmatized this dichotomy as a funestus error.1 Nevertheless we must not forget that books, written before the appearance of the Mystici Corporis and containing, sometimes stressing, this distinction are still in circulation and still regarded, in some quarters at least, as prize examples of Catholic intellectualism. The “invisible Church” and the attitude towards the true Church which is motivated by the recognition of this ‘‘invisible Church” are still, and will be for some time, occasions of confusion for Catholic readers.
The “invisible Church” is conceived as an assemblage or community of good men and women in a state of grace, an assemblage which is supposed to extend beyond the confines of the visible Catholic Church.2 The invisible company is represented as in some way fused with or attached to the visible society, in such a way that the activity of the Church (and of other religious groups) is advantageous to the corporate life of the invisible assembly, while, at the same time, the life of the invisible society is expressed in and leads towards the visible Church, Most stressed by the men who taught the doctrine of the twofold Church, however, were two contentions. They insisted that the “invisible Church” was not coextensive with the visible Church and that it was more important than the latter. Thus Baron von Hugel stigmatized as ‘‘fanatics” those who ‘‘would declare the invisible to be coterminous and identical with the Visible,” and asserted that “the Invisible is the central – is the heart of religion.” He believed that “the Visible can so be taken as to choke the Invisible.”3 A prominent student of Von Hugel, Mr. Edward Ingram Watkin, speaking of the “ecclesiastical materialism” to which he is opposed, says that “Among Catholics it results in the body of the Church, the visible church, being preferred to the soul of the Church, the invisible communion of Saints.”4
As the theory of the “invisible Church” has been Popularized in English literature, then, it teaches definitely that the visible Church militant of the New Testament must take a decidedly inferior position with reference to another religious society. The Catholic is warned not to press his devotion to the visible Church to the point where that devotion can detract from a loyalty to a superior association. The more favored assemblage is conveniently invisible. Nevertheless it is presented as the community within which union with God and fellowship with our Lord are to be found. Compared with the affection which he is supposed to give this “invisible Church,” the love of the Catholic for the visible Church would be guarded and restrained.
The men who popularized this position either failed to see or failed to appreciate the true Catholic doctrine about association with our Lord. The basic ecclesiological question at issue between the Church and the heretical groups at the time of the Reformation was this: “Are men in the company of Christ by reason of the possession of spiritual gifts alone, or are they associated with Him through membership in a visible society within which He dwells?” The unequivocal Catholic answer was the assertion that we are with our Lord when we are in the visible company of the disciples, which He fashioned into a society around Him, and within which He continues to dwell. The Protestants thought that a man became a disciple or a follower of Christ through certain invisible graces. They considered the various religious societies formed among them as associations tending to further the common interests of those who were joined to our Lord through membership in the “invisible Church,” that is, through being connected with Him apart from any society in the strict sense of the term.
The Catholic answer was founded on a realization of our Lord’s own teaching and procedure. The group within which He lived and worked was not an amorphous gathering of well disposed people. It was the company of the disciples, men and women whom He had invited into His presence, and whom He formed, during the course of His public life, into a visible society. It was within the ranks of this community that He recognized His brothers, His sisters, and His mother. He promised this visible community, the society over which Peter was commissioned to preside as His vicar, that the gates of hell would not prevail against it. When, before the ascension, He declared that He would be with His followers all days, even to the consummation of the world, he addressed His words to the members of the visible society within which He dwells.
To the members of this society, He gave the special and unequivocal order to love one another. He had fashioned this group into the house or the family of God, and He commanded that the members of this family should so distinguish themselves by their affection, one for another, as to he readily recognizable as His followers. The mutual love and loyalty of Catholics was not in any way meant to prevent or to impede an affection of Catholics for those who are not of the true fold. On the other hand, this love was made obligatory. Catholics, the members of the house or family of God, are expected to love their non-Catholic brethren in such a way as to do everything possible to give these persons the blessings of association with our Lord which Catholics enjoy, as He wills that they should, within His Church.
As a result, according to our Lord’s own teaching, the visible Catholic Church does not appear as a kind of auxiliary to a more valuable invisible gathering. On the contrary, it is precisely the mystery of the Church that our Lord should deign to dwell within this visible organization. It is His will that men should live as His followers, joined to Him and partaking His life, when they dwell as loyal and upright members of the visible society within which He has presided since the day of its inception. The affection and loyalty which Christians owe to the house of God are due to this one visible society and to no other gathering.
(2) Another sort of teaching which tends to minimize the loyalty which Catholics are bound to give their Church is based, like the first, on a failure to appreciate the fundamental doctrine that the true Church of Christ is a visible society. The proponents of this teaching utilize a distinction between the Church as an “ideal” or as a “principle” as against the Church as an “historical reality” or as an “institution.” This doctrine would claim association with our Lord only for those acts of the Church which are immediately sacramental. They would separate the sort of activity which the Church performs in the offering of the Mass from the type of work done, for example, by the Pontifical Secretariate of State. They regard this second type of activity as “sectarian” and as in some way not demanding the loyal cooperation of Catholics since, according to them, it is a process by which the Church selfishly seeks her own material interests in the world.
We can only see the ineptitude of this doctrine when we realize that our Lord formed the company of the disciples, within which He dwells, and within which He wills that all men should be associated with Him, into a perfect society, independent of the state and of any other natural social body. The Church which He loves, the society whose members are expected to show one another a special, manifest, and supernatural affection, is an organization empowered to hold and administer property and to deal with the various mundane powers. Hence the love which our Lord commands for and within His Church demands a loyal and ungrudging co-operation with the work of the Church leaders in the actual government and direction of God’s kingdom on earth. Whatever steps the Church takes for its own wellbeing, for a better set of arrangements with temporal powers for instance, are made for the advancement of our Lord’s work in this world. The effectiveness of the corporate work of our Lord’s disciples on earth depends upon the affectionate loyalty with which the members of the Church co-operate in the activity directed by the leaders whom God has placed over His Church. Thus, any attempt to rationalize an antagonism on the part of Catholics towards the efforts of their spiritual leaders on the grounds that these efforts are being directed towards “institutional” or “sectarian,” as opposed to spiritual ends, constitutes an opposition to our Lord’s work in this world.
(3) The third tendency which tends to minimize a Catholic’s obligation of loyalty and affection towards the true Church comes from a radical misconception of the Church’s essential function. Actually, as the Vatican Council has taught us, the Church is in the world in order to carry on the salutary work of the redemption, the work of our Lord Himself.5 It seeks to bring men the forgiveness of sin and the life of grace which our Lord procured for them by His death. But, according to the commission it has received from God, it strives to bring these favors to men by bringing them into its own company. It recognizes the world outside of itself as corporately opposed to the will of Christ, and, since the first Christian Pentecost it has labored to save men by withdrawing them from “this perverse generation”6 which constitutes the city of man. This has been, and until the end of time will be, the procedure of Christ’s Church on earth. This is the work of Christ in the world.
In recent years there has been a growing tendency on the part of some Catholic publicists to teach that the attitude of the Church towards the world, and so, by inference, the work of the Church has been modified in our generation. These men have come to believe that today the work of Christ in the world consists preeminently in combating such errors as secularism and totalitarianism. These anti-religious doctrines are of course assailable on purely natural grounds, and they are objectionable, not only to Catholics, but also to many outside the fold. Consequently, according to this group of Catholic theorists, they can most effectively be attacked and destroyed, not by the Catholic Church acting as a unit, but rather by some quasi-religious confederation of men of good will, including both Catholics and non-Catholics. Thus they come to hold that the great work for Christ in the modern world is, for all practical purposes at least, done by an organization quite distinct from the society into which our Lord formed His disciples. In this way the Catholic Church would be compelled to be content with a share of the loyalty and affection which its children owe to the company which fights in this world for the cause of Christ.
The tendency to parcel out the work of Christ between the Catholic Church and other organizations is far more dangerous than the other two. It offers a perverted interpretation of actual fact, while the other two appeal to non-existent entities. The “invisible” Church of Christ in this world is a chimera. The
Church as an “institution” does not differ from the Church of the sacraments. There is, however, such a thing as a real association of Catholics with those not of the household of the faith for the accomplishment of social and economic good, and for the effective combatting of moral evil. Such associations are quite laudable and quite familiar, but it would be calamitously erroneous to believe that a society thus formed was competent to do our Lord’s work in the world.
The fundamental error on the part of those who contribute towards this third tendency to minimize a Catholic’s loyalty to his Church lies in their belief that the doctrine of the Church, or at least its policy, with reference to association with non-Catholics has changed during the past few years. It is a part of the mystery of the Church that the members of Christ’s Mystical Body live in the world, dwelling and associating with those not numbered among our Lord’s disciples, yet distinguished from their fellows by their membership in the house of God. Our Lord made it perfectly clear that He neither prayed nor wished that His followers should be taken out of the world.7 From the very beginning, the numbers [sic – should perhaps be “members”] of our Lord’s Church have been associated with non-Catholics in various states and in different lesser moral bodies. Catholics co-operated with non-Catholics for the wellbeing of the Roman Empire, while other Catholics worked with other non-Catholics for the benefit of Persia.
Sometimes these states and these lesser societies in which our Lord’s disciples were associated with those not of the fold were mutually antagonistic. Usually they professed devotion for justice and hostility to evil. The Catholics who have entered or who have lived in these various societies since the beginning of the Church have doubtless frequently considered them beneficent. They did not, however, make the mistake of believing that any other society shared with the Church its particular function of doing the work of Christ in the world.
It is important for us to remember that the position of the Church has not changed, and will not change. Its children still live and associate with those not of the fold. They are permitted to join, as indeed they must join, with those not of the true faith for the procurement of the benefits requisite to society. They live as citizens of diverse and sometimes mutually hostile states.
They are counted, along with non-Catholics, in various societies which are pledged to procure not only material, but also cultural and social benefits, and to combat the ills that threaten civilization itself. Yet, in the midst of all these shifting associations, the Church within which they dwell and which they love as Christ loved it stands firm. Our Lord lives and rules within it as He has since the day of its inception. Within that Church He commands, as He always has commanded, that its members love one another with a special and manifest affection. He works, and His members work with Him, to draw other men towards that Church in order that through it they may enjoy with us the benefits of association with Him. The world, in the midst of which His members dwell, is still arrayed against him. Yet, among His members, He is in the world.
The company of His followers, the one society that must fight to stay together against the hostile efforts of the city of man in order to continue the work of the redemption is, and always will be, the Catholic Church. To that Church, now as ever, the Catholic must give the affectionate allegiance due to the house of God. No other group in this world stands above it. No other society shares, or can share, its function as the company within which Christ lives and works.
Catholics, whom our Lord commands to love their Church, can fail in their loyalty towards it, not only through imagining some other group which is supposed to share in the Church’s prerogatives, but also by making one portion of the Church more important than the whole. Those who exalt the Church within their country, or their diocese, or their religious order, as in some way deserving of affection at the expense of the entire Catholic society tend only to divide the kingdom of God. So, in a much more blatant fashion, do those who indulge in the vagaries of anticlericalism, and those who, on the pretext of seeking greater perfection, look with disdain upon their fellow Catholics and upon the spiritual instructions utilized by their fellow Catholics. Men will not he harmed by movements such as these if they reflect upon the fact that Christ dwells, and wishes to be loved, in the Church Catholic which He formed and which He guides in the world.
The Catholic University of America, Washington, D. C.
JOSEPH CLIFFORD FENTON
---
1. AAS, XXXV (1943), 224.
2. Cf. Otto Karrer, Religions of Mankind (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1938), p. 262.
3. Cf. Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd.; New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., Inc. 1931), I, 231.
4. The Catholic Centre (London: Sheed and Ward, 1943), p. 139.
5. Cf. DB, 1821.
6. Cf. Acts, 2:40.
7. Cf. John, 17:15.
There is some danger that certain of our people may be lulled or beguiled into a state of remissness in their relations to the Church. From every side today highly skilled propagandists are bombarding us with pleas and demands that we attach ourselves enthusiastically to movements or societies working towards a better social, economic, or cultural order. Most of these ladies and gentlemen insist that the Church, together with other religious societies, can be of service in procuring the particular good towards which they are aiming. All too frequently we gain the impression that these publicists believe that working for their own objective is the best and essential function of the Church in modern society. It would not be too difficult for an ill-instructed Catholic to find his attitude towards the Church colored by such an erroneous concept of the Church’s position, and thus to consider the Church as in some manner possessing a claim on his loyalty inferior to that set forth by the movements for the brave new world.
Furthermore there are three tendencies in contemporary Catholic writing which work to palliate a kind of minimized loyalty to the true Church on the part of Catholics. The men who contribute towards these tendencies seem to be acting for the best motives, but their teaching is inexact and the final effects of their doctrines can hardly be other than the encouragement of a less perfect affection for the Church of God. All of these three objectionable tendencies introduce some new entity which is supposed to receive a share, and sometimes the lion’s share, of that love and loyalty which our Lord wills that Catholics should reserve for His Society. All of them betray a faulty understanding of the nature or the function of our Lord’s Church. Consequently a consideration of the erroneous theories from which these tendencies originate can show us a great deal about the nature of that affection which, as Catholics, we owe to the true Church.
(1) In all the field of Catholic letters, the most subtle influence against a whole-hearted devotion to the Church springs from the now discredited distinction between a visible and an invisible Church. It is perfectly true that Pope Pius XII, in his masterly encyclical Mystici Corporis, stigmatized this dichotomy as a funestus error.1 Nevertheless we must not forget that books, written before the appearance of the Mystici Corporis and containing, sometimes stressing, this distinction are still in circulation and still regarded, in some quarters at least, as prize examples of Catholic intellectualism. The “invisible Church” and the attitude towards the true Church which is motivated by the recognition of this ‘‘invisible Church” are still, and will be for some time, occasions of confusion for Catholic readers.
The “invisible Church” is conceived as an assemblage or community of good men and women in a state of grace, an assemblage which is supposed to extend beyond the confines of the visible Catholic Church.2 The invisible company is represented as in some way fused with or attached to the visible society, in such a way that the activity of the Church (and of other religious groups) is advantageous to the corporate life of the invisible assembly, while, at the same time, the life of the invisible society is expressed in and leads towards the visible Church, Most stressed by the men who taught the doctrine of the twofold Church, however, were two contentions. They insisted that the “invisible Church” was not coextensive with the visible Church and that it was more important than the latter. Thus Baron von Hugel stigmatized as ‘‘fanatics” those who ‘‘would declare the invisible to be coterminous and identical with the Visible,” and asserted that “the Invisible is the central – is the heart of religion.” He believed that “the Visible can so be taken as to choke the Invisible.”3 A prominent student of Von Hugel, Mr. Edward Ingram Watkin, speaking of the “ecclesiastical materialism” to which he is opposed, says that “Among Catholics it results in the body of the Church, the visible church, being preferred to the soul of the Church, the invisible communion of Saints.”4
As the theory of the “invisible Church” has been Popularized in English literature, then, it teaches definitely that the visible Church militant of the New Testament must take a decidedly inferior position with reference to another religious society. The Catholic is warned not to press his devotion to the visible Church to the point where that devotion can detract from a loyalty to a superior association. The more favored assemblage is conveniently invisible. Nevertheless it is presented as the community within which union with God and fellowship with our Lord are to be found. Compared with the affection which he is supposed to give this “invisible Church,” the love of the Catholic for the visible Church would be guarded and restrained.
The men who popularized this position either failed to see or failed to appreciate the true Catholic doctrine about association with our Lord. The basic ecclesiological question at issue between the Church and the heretical groups at the time of the Reformation was this: “Are men in the company of Christ by reason of the possession of spiritual gifts alone, or are they associated with Him through membership in a visible society within which He dwells?” The unequivocal Catholic answer was the assertion that we are with our Lord when we are in the visible company of the disciples, which He fashioned into a society around Him, and within which He continues to dwell. The Protestants thought that a man became a disciple or a follower of Christ through certain invisible graces. They considered the various religious societies formed among them as associations tending to further the common interests of those who were joined to our Lord through membership in the “invisible Church,” that is, through being connected with Him apart from any society in the strict sense of the term.
The Catholic answer was founded on a realization of our Lord’s own teaching and procedure. The group within which He lived and worked was not an amorphous gathering of well disposed people. It was the company of the disciples, men and women whom He had invited into His presence, and whom He formed, during the course of His public life, into a visible society. It was within the ranks of this community that He recognized His brothers, His sisters, and His mother. He promised this visible community, the society over which Peter was commissioned to preside as His vicar, that the gates of hell would not prevail against it. When, before the ascension, He declared that He would be with His followers all days, even to the consummation of the world, he addressed His words to the members of the visible society within which He dwells.
To the members of this society, He gave the special and unequivocal order to love one another. He had fashioned this group into the house or the family of God, and He commanded that the members of this family should so distinguish themselves by their affection, one for another, as to he readily recognizable as His followers. The mutual love and loyalty of Catholics was not in any way meant to prevent or to impede an affection of Catholics for those who are not of the true fold. On the other hand, this love was made obligatory. Catholics, the members of the house or family of God, are expected to love their non-Catholic brethren in such a way as to do everything possible to give these persons the blessings of association with our Lord which Catholics enjoy, as He wills that they should, within His Church.
As a result, according to our Lord’s own teaching, the visible Catholic Church does not appear as a kind of auxiliary to a more valuable invisible gathering. On the contrary, it is precisely the mystery of the Church that our Lord should deign to dwell within this visible organization. It is His will that men should live as His followers, joined to Him and partaking His life, when they dwell as loyal and upright members of the visible society within which He has presided since the day of its inception. The affection and loyalty which Christians owe to the house of God are due to this one visible society and to no other gathering.
(2) Another sort of teaching which tends to minimize the loyalty which Catholics are bound to give their Church is based, like the first, on a failure to appreciate the fundamental doctrine that the true Church of Christ is a visible society. The proponents of this teaching utilize a distinction between the Church as an “ideal” or as a “principle” as against the Church as an “historical reality” or as an “institution.” This doctrine would claim association with our Lord only for those acts of the Church which are immediately sacramental. They would separate the sort of activity which the Church performs in the offering of the Mass from the type of work done, for example, by the Pontifical Secretariate of State. They regard this second type of activity as “sectarian” and as in some way not demanding the loyal cooperation of Catholics since, according to them, it is a process by which the Church selfishly seeks her own material interests in the world.
We can only see the ineptitude of this doctrine when we realize that our Lord formed the company of the disciples, within which He dwells, and within which He wills that all men should be associated with Him, into a perfect society, independent of the state and of any other natural social body. The Church which He loves, the society whose members are expected to show one another a special, manifest, and supernatural affection, is an organization empowered to hold and administer property and to deal with the various mundane powers. Hence the love which our Lord commands for and within His Church demands a loyal and ungrudging co-operation with the work of the Church leaders in the actual government and direction of God’s kingdom on earth. Whatever steps the Church takes for its own wellbeing, for a better set of arrangements with temporal powers for instance, are made for the advancement of our Lord’s work in this world. The effectiveness of the corporate work of our Lord’s disciples on earth depends upon the affectionate loyalty with which the members of the Church co-operate in the activity directed by the leaders whom God has placed over His Church. Thus, any attempt to rationalize an antagonism on the part of Catholics towards the efforts of their spiritual leaders on the grounds that these efforts are being directed towards “institutional” or “sectarian,” as opposed to spiritual ends, constitutes an opposition to our Lord’s work in this world.
(3) The third tendency which tends to minimize a Catholic’s obligation of loyalty and affection towards the true Church comes from a radical misconception of the Church’s essential function. Actually, as the Vatican Council has taught us, the Church is in the world in order to carry on the salutary work of the redemption, the work of our Lord Himself.5 It seeks to bring men the forgiveness of sin and the life of grace which our Lord procured for them by His death. But, according to the commission it has received from God, it strives to bring these favors to men by bringing them into its own company. It recognizes the world outside of itself as corporately opposed to the will of Christ, and, since the first Christian Pentecost it has labored to save men by withdrawing them from “this perverse generation”6 which constitutes the city of man. This has been, and until the end of time will be, the procedure of Christ’s Church on earth. This is the work of Christ in the world.
In recent years there has been a growing tendency on the part of some Catholic publicists to teach that the attitude of the Church towards the world, and so, by inference, the work of the Church has been modified in our generation. These men have come to believe that today the work of Christ in the world consists preeminently in combating such errors as secularism and totalitarianism. These anti-religious doctrines are of course assailable on purely natural grounds, and they are objectionable, not only to Catholics, but also to many outside the fold. Consequently, according to this group of Catholic theorists, they can most effectively be attacked and destroyed, not by the Catholic Church acting as a unit, but rather by some quasi-religious confederation of men of good will, including both Catholics and non-Catholics. Thus they come to hold that the great work for Christ in the modern world is, for all practical purposes at least, done by an organization quite distinct from the society into which our Lord formed His disciples. In this way the Catholic Church would be compelled to be content with a share of the loyalty and affection which its children owe to the company which fights in this world for the cause of Christ.
The tendency to parcel out the work of Christ between the Catholic Church and other organizations is far more dangerous than the other two. It offers a perverted interpretation of actual fact, while the other two appeal to non-existent entities. The “invisible” Church of Christ in this world is a chimera. The
Church as an “institution” does not differ from the Church of the sacraments. There is, however, such a thing as a real association of Catholics with those not of the household of the faith for the accomplishment of social and economic good, and for the effective combatting of moral evil. Such associations are quite laudable and quite familiar, but it would be calamitously erroneous to believe that a society thus formed was competent to do our Lord’s work in the world.
The fundamental error on the part of those who contribute towards this third tendency to minimize a Catholic’s loyalty to his Church lies in their belief that the doctrine of the Church, or at least its policy, with reference to association with non-Catholics has changed during the past few years. It is a part of the mystery of the Church that the members of Christ’s Mystical Body live in the world, dwelling and associating with those not numbered among our Lord’s disciples, yet distinguished from their fellows by their membership in the house of God. Our Lord made it perfectly clear that He neither prayed nor wished that His followers should be taken out of the world.7 From the very beginning, the numbers [sic – should perhaps be “members”] of our Lord’s Church have been associated with non-Catholics in various states and in different lesser moral bodies. Catholics co-operated with non-Catholics for the wellbeing of the Roman Empire, while other Catholics worked with other non-Catholics for the benefit of Persia.
Sometimes these states and these lesser societies in which our Lord’s disciples were associated with those not of the fold were mutually antagonistic. Usually they professed devotion for justice and hostility to evil. The Catholics who have entered or who have lived in these various societies since the beginning of the Church have doubtless frequently considered them beneficent. They did not, however, make the mistake of believing that any other society shared with the Church its particular function of doing the work of Christ in the world.
It is important for us to remember that the position of the Church has not changed, and will not change. Its children still live and associate with those not of the fold. They are permitted to join, as indeed they must join, with those not of the true faith for the procurement of the benefits requisite to society. They live as citizens of diverse and sometimes mutually hostile states.
They are counted, along with non-Catholics, in various societies which are pledged to procure not only material, but also cultural and social benefits, and to combat the ills that threaten civilization itself. Yet, in the midst of all these shifting associations, the Church within which they dwell and which they love as Christ loved it stands firm. Our Lord lives and rules within it as He has since the day of its inception. Within that Church He commands, as He always has commanded, that its members love one another with a special and manifest affection. He works, and His members work with Him, to draw other men towards that Church in order that through it they may enjoy with us the benefits of association with Him. The world, in the midst of which His members dwell, is still arrayed against him. Yet, among His members, He is in the world.
The company of His followers, the one society that must fight to stay together against the hostile efforts of the city of man in order to continue the work of the redemption is, and always will be, the Catholic Church. To that Church, now as ever, the Catholic must give the affectionate allegiance due to the house of God. No other group in this world stands above it. No other society shares, or can share, its function as the company within which Christ lives and works.
Catholics, whom our Lord commands to love their Church, can fail in their loyalty towards it, not only through imagining some other group which is supposed to share in the Church’s prerogatives, but also by making one portion of the Church more important than the whole. Those who exalt the Church within their country, or their diocese, or their religious order, as in some way deserving of affection at the expense of the entire Catholic society tend only to divide the kingdom of God. So, in a much more blatant fashion, do those who indulge in the vagaries of anticlericalism, and those who, on the pretext of seeking greater perfection, look with disdain upon their fellow Catholics and upon the spiritual instructions utilized by their fellow Catholics. Men will not he harmed by movements such as these if they reflect upon the fact that Christ dwells, and wishes to be loved, in the Church Catholic which He formed and which He guides in the world.
The Catholic University of America, Washington, D. C.
JOSEPH CLIFFORD FENTON
---
1. AAS, XXXV (1943), 224.
2. Cf. Otto Karrer, Religions of Mankind (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1938), p. 262.
3. Cf. Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd.; New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., Inc. 1931), I, 231.
4. The Catholic Centre (London: Sheed and Ward, 1943), p. 139.
5. Cf. DB, 1821.
6. Cf. Acts, 2:40.
7. Cf. John, 17:15.
20071030
The Holy Office Letter on the Necessity of the Church
The science of sacred theology has been greatly aided by Archbishop Cushing’s action in publishing the full text and the official English translation of the Holy Office letter on the Church’s necessity for salvation. This letter, the third of three Roman documents to directly deal with this dogma over the course of the last ten years, contains the accurate and authoritative explanation of a divinely revealed truth that had been very frequently misinterpreted in recent Catholic writing. The publication of this document can and should serve to bring about a decided improvement in the treatment of the dogma of the Church’s necessity for salvation in our popular Catholic literature.
The text of the letter consists of twenty-four paragraphs. The first three of these are introductory, and speak of the circumstances that prompted the issuance of this message. The following sixteen deal with “explanationes…ad doctrinam pertinentes.” The last five paragraphs contain “invitamenta atque exhortationes, quae ad disciplinam spectant.”
In the introduction, the letter asserts that it is dealing with a grave or serious controversy which has been stirred up (excitata) by people connected with St. Benedict Center and Boston College. It further states that the Holy Office believes that the controversy arose in the first place because of a failure properly to grasp and to appreciate the axiom “extra Ecclesiam nulla sallus,” and that the dispute became embittered by reason of the fact that some of those associated with St. Benedict Center and with Boston College refused respect and obedience to legitimate ecclesiastical authorities.
Both here and in the doctrinal part of the letter we encounter the clear implication that the Holy Office is taking cognizance of many varieties of mistakes about the Catholic Church’s necessity for salvation. When the letter sets out to place the blame for the embitterment of the controversy, it directly inculpates the St. Benedict Center group, which was guilty of disrespect and disobedience to ecclesiastical authority, and which, incidentally, was originally punished precisely for that disobedience. When, on the other hand, the document speaks of the origin of the dispute, it simply ascribes the controversy itself to a failure to know and to appreciate the formula “extra ecclesiam nulla sallus.” Those who have studied in any detail the copious modern writings on this subject are well aware that there have been several faulty explanations of this dogma published during the first part of the present century.[1]
Thus what makes this letter from the Holy Office so outstandingly important is the fact that it sets out, not only to correct the basic misinterpretation of the dogma made by the St. Benedict Center group, but to show the doctrinal quality of the teaching itself and to offer an accurate, full, and authoritative outline of its explanation. In accomplishing its purpose, the Holy Office letter has given to Catholic theologians by far the most complete and detailed exposition of the dogma that the Catholic Church is necessary for salvation which has yet to come from the ecclesiastical magisterium.
The specifically doctrinal portion of the Holy Office letter opens with a paragraph which repeats what the Vatican Council taught about those truths which we are bound to believe with the assent of divine and Catholic Faith. The letter tells us that “we are bound to believe with divine and Catholic faith all of those things contained in God’s message that comes to us by way of Scripture or Tradition (quae in verbo Dei scripto vel tradito continentur), and which are proposed by the Church, not only in solemn judgment, but also by its ordinary and universal teaching activity, to be believed as divinely revealed.[2]
Now the teachings we are obliged to believe with the assent of divine and Catholic faith are the truths which we know as the dogmas of the Catholic Church. These dogmas are truths which the apostles of Jesus Christ preached to His Church as statements which had been supernaturally communicated or revealed by God Himself. They constitute the central or primary object of the Church’s infallible teaching activity.
It is important to note that our Holy Office letter describes the doctrine “that there is no salvation outside the Church,” not only as an infallible teaching, but also as a dogma. It insists, in other words, that this doctrine is not merely something connected with God’s public and supernatural message, but that it belongs to the revealed message itself. The doctrine is presented as a truth which the apostles themselves delivered to the Church as a statement which God had supernaturally revealed to men through Our Lord. It is one of the truths with which the Church is primarily and essentially concerned.
In thus designating this teaching as a dogma of the Church, the Holy Office letter merely repeated what Pope Pius IX had taught in his allocution Singulari quadam, issued Dec. 9, 1854, and in his encyclical Quanto conficiamur moerore, published on Aug. 10, 1863.[3] Thus our document does not make any new contribution on this particular point. It merely recalls, for a generation which might have forgotten the fact, the sovereign truth that the teaching with which it is concerned is an actual part of divine public revelation.
Our letter also brings out two important consequences of the fact that the doctrine of the Church’s necessity for eternal salvation is actually a Catholic dogma. The first implication is that this truth is one of “those things which the Church has always preached and will never cease to preach.” The second implication is to be found in the fact that God has entrusted the authoritative and infallible explanation of these revealed truths, not to private judgment, but to the teaching authority of the Church alone. Both of these implications are highly important for our contemporary theologians. As a matter of fact, the Holy Father himself took up these two points in his encyclical Humani generis, which, though it appeared two years before the publication of the full text of the Holy Office letter, was actually written a year after this document.[4]
In the context of the present discussion and the misunderstandings which occasioned the writing of our letter, the reminder that the Church has never ceased to preach and will never cease to preach the truth that it is necessary for man’s salvation is timely and advantageous. It is important to note that the letter uses the term “praedicare, to preach.” By employing this word, the document assures us that, during every part of its history, the Catholic Church continues to set forth publicly and openly the teaching it has received from God through Our Lord and His apostles. Thus the Holy Office does more than merely affirm that the Church has always conserved and guarded its doctrinal treasures. It insists that the Church has never ceased to teach its own dogma.
Now there has been a long tendency on the part of some Catholic writers to imagine that certain dogmas of the Church tend to grow obsolete, and that, in the interests of its own progress, the Church does not insist too rigorously upon those teachings which are represented as out of touch with modern conditions. Pope Leo XIII reproved one aspect of this tendency in his letter Testem benevolentiae.[5] It is perfectly manifest that the one dogma of the Church which its enemies would consider as least in line with the currents of modern thought is the teaching that there is no salvation outside of the true Church. Similarly a mentality like that of the St. Benedict Center group would tend to hold that, at least in our time, the Church universal has not been teaching the dogma of its own necessity for man’s salvation effectively.
Moreover, this statement of the Holy Office letter comes as a rebuke to the more extreme forms of the much discredited “state of siege” theory, according to which the Church has in some way modified its doctrinal life since the days of the Council of Trent by adopting an artificially defensive position. Our letter assures us at this point that the Church will never pass over or soft-pedal any of its dogmas, in the interests of a so-called defensive mentality or for any other reason.
The second implication or consequence noted by the Holy Office letter is equally timely. In insisting upon the fact that Our Saviour has confined the explanation of His dogma, not to private judgment, but to the ecclesiastical magisterium alone, the letter makes it perfectly clear that Catholics are to be guided in their understanding of revealed truth by the official teachers of the Church, and not by any merely private authors, however ingenious and influential these latter may be. And, to put the matter as concretely as possible, Catholics are not to accept any teachings of private writers, even when these teachings seem particularly in harmony with the modern mentality, if these teachings are not strictly in accord with the doctrine of the magisterium. It is quite obvious that private teachings of this sort have been presented in recent times, on the subject of the Church’s necessity for salvation and in other sections of ecclesiology.
These first three paragraphs in the doctrinal portion of the Holy Office letter deal with the fact that the teaching that “there is no salvation outside the Church” is a dogma of the Catholic faith, and with two of the consequences that follow upon that fact. The remainder of the doctrinal section (the only one with which we are directly concerned in this article) is given over to an exposition of the way in which the Church itself understands and teaches the dogma of its own necessity for eternal salvation. In these few paragraphs, theologians will find that three distinctions, long used by the Church’s traditional theologians in their explanation of the Church’s necessity for salvation, are here, for the first time, presented clearly and decisively in an authentic statement of the Church’s magisterium as employed by the teaching Church itself in its own understanding and explanation of the dogma. They are (1) the distinction between a necessity of precept and the necessity of means, (2) the distinction between belonging to the Church in re and belonging to it in voto, and (3) the distinction between an explicit and an implicit intention or desire to enter the Catholic Church. It is precisely because all of these distinctions are used for the first time in a document of the magisterium to explain the Church’s necessity for salvation that this letter is one of the most important Roman documents of recent times.
First, the Holy Office shows us that the classical distinction between the necessity of precept and the necessity of means, long used by competent theologians in explaining the dogma of the Church’s necessity for salvation, actually enters into the Church’s own understanding and explanation of this doctrine. Dealing with the Church’s necessity of precept, the letter brings out the fact that the command, “to be incorporated by Baptism into the Mystical Body of Christ, which is the Church, and to remain united to Christ and to His Vicar.” Is one of the orders which Our Lord actually commissioned His apostles to teach to all nations. The document goes on to explain the Church’s necessity of precept to mean that “no one will be saved who, knowing the Church to have been divinely established by Christ, nevertheless refuses to submit to the Church or withholds obedience from the Roman Pontiff, the Vicar of Christ on earth.”
The Sacred Congregation’s letter thus states explicitly that there is a serious command issued by Our Lord Himself to all men, a command that they should enter and remain within the true Church. The man who disobeys that command is guilty of serious sin. If he should die in that state of willful disobedience, he will inevitably be lost forever. Such is the basic meaning of the Church’s necessity of precept, as explained by the letter from the Holy Office, and as understood by the Church itself.
This document also teaches us, however, there is more than a necessity of precept involved in the dogma of the Catholic Church’s necessity for salvation. It insists upon the fact that Our Lord has “also decreed the Church to be a means of salvation, without which no one can enter the kingdom of eternal glory.” In other words, Our Saviour has done two things: He has commanded all men to enter the Church; and He has established this society as one of the supernatural resources apart from which no man can enjoy the Beatific Vision as a member of the Church triumphant in heaven.
This statement by the Holy Office is tremendously important in the field of dogmatic theology. For many years past there have been attempts on the part of some Catholic writers to depict the Church’s necessity for salvation as exclusively or almost exclusively a mere necessity of precept. Now the authoritative voice of the Roman Church itself assures us that the Church is necessary both with the necessity of precept and with the necessity of means. This letter is the first authoritative document in which this truth is set forth clearly and explicitly.
Likewise of tremendous moment is the letter’s use of the classical theological distinction between belonging to the Church in re and belonging to it in voto. Henceforth those who wish to explain Catholic teaching on this point should use these two distinctions (necessity of precept as distinct from necessity of means: belonging to the Church in re as distinct from belonging to it in voto.), if they are to act as faithful exponents of Catholic truth. It is interesting to note that the Holy Office has made no use of such terminology as “the soul and the body of the Church,” or “the Church as the ordinary means of salvation,” in setting forth what the Church itself has always understood as the meaning of its own necessity for eternal salvation.
Furthermore, it is also interesting to see the connotations of the terms “votum” and “desiderium,” used here by the Holy Office communication. These terms are translated, not incorrectly, but perhaps somewhat inadequately, in the official English translation of the letter as “desire” and “yearning.” In employing these terms the Holy Office makes it clear that, in order to be saved, men must either be attached to the Church actually or in re as members, or be joined to the Church by a genuine act of the will, intending or desiring to become members.
In other words, according to the connotations of these two terms, the explicit votum by which a man may be joined to the Church so as to achieve his salvation must be a real desire or intention, and not a mere velleity. The act of the will in which the implicit salvific votum of the Church is contained must likewise be more than a mere velleity. This operation also must be a real and effective act of the will.
In teaching that a votum or a desiderium of the Church can, under certain circumstances, suffice to bring a man to the attainment of the Beatific Vision, we must not forget that the Holy Office letter likewise uses a procedure which has been employed by the traditional Catholic theologians for many years. It classifies the Church itself, along with the sacraments of Baptism and Penance, among “those helps to salvation which are directed toward man’s final end, not by intrinsic necessity, but only by divine institution.” Conversely, of course, it thus implies the existence of other resources which are ordered to man’s ultimate goal by way of intrinsic necessity. Realties like the Church itself, and the sacraments of Baptism and Penance, may under certain circumstances achieve their effect when they are processed or used only in intention or desire. Helps of the other classification, like sanctifying grace, faith, and charity, must, on the other hand, be possessed or used in re if they are to achieve their purpose at all.
The letter applies this principle when it assures us that, in order for a man to obtain eternal salvation, “it is not always required that he be incorporated into the Church actually as a member, but it is necessary that at least he be united to her by desire and longing.” Such, of course, has been the explicit teaching of traditional Catholic theologians since the days of Thomas Stapleton and St. Robert Bellarmine.[6] It is a commonplace of Catholic theology that a man could be saved if, finding it impossible to actually to join the Church as a member, he really sincerely intended or desired to live within this society.
The Holy Office then proceeds against what has been perhaps the most obstinate and important error of the St. Benedict Center group when it explains that “this desire need not always be explicit, as it is in catechumens”; but that “when a person is involved in invincible ignorance, God accepts also an implicit desire, so called because it is included in that good disposition of soul whereby a person wishes his will to be conformed to the will of God.”
It is noteworthy that the theologians of the Church have never included the doctrine of the Church itself among those supernatural truths which must be held explicitly if there is to be the necessary minimum for an act of true and salvific divine faith. The Holy Office letter, however, does not go to this theological reasoning, but directly to the authoritative teaching of Pope Pius XII in his encyclical Mystici Corporis to back up its contention. That encyclical effectively taught the possibility of salvation for persons who have only an implicit desire to enter and to live within the Catholic Church.
In the text of the Mystici Corporis, the Sovereign Pontiff clearly and authoritatively taught the requisites for actual membership in the Church. He issued as his own teaching the Bellarminian doctrine that “Actually only those are to be included as members of the Church who have not been so unfortunate as to separate themselves from the unity of the Body, or been excluded by legitimate authority for grave faults committed.”[7] He likewise, however, spoke of the possibility of salvation for those who “are related to the Mystical Body by a certain unconscious yearning and desire (inscio quodam desiderio ac voto).” He depicted such individuals as existing in a state “in which they cannot be sure of their salvation” since “they still remain deprived of those many heavenly gifts and helps which can only be enjoyed in the Catholic Church.”[8]
The Holy Office interprets these teachings of the Mystici Corporis as a condemnation of two errors. One of them, that defended explicitly by members of the St. Benedict Center group, is the doctrine that no man be saved if he has only an implicit desire or intention to enter the Church. The other is the teaching that men may be saved “equally well (aequaliter)” in any religion. For the previous condemnation of this latter error the letter refers to two pronouncements by Pope Pius IX, his allocution Singulari quadam and his encyclical Quanto conficiamur moerore.[9]
Finally the letter brings out two points which many of the writers who have dealt with this question have passed over all too quickly. It insists that, in order to be effective for eternal salvation, any intention or desire of entering the Church, whether explicit or implicit must be animated by perfect charity. No benevolence on a merely natural plane can suffice to save man, even when that man actually intends to enter and to live within the true Church of Jesus Christ. Non-membership in the Church, even on the part of a man who wishes to become a Catholic, does not in any way dispense from the necessity of those factors which are requisite for the attainment of the Beatific Vision by intrinsic necessity, and not merely by reason of divine institution.
Furthermore, the Holy Office also insists upon the necessity of true and supernatural faith in any many who attains eternal salvation. A man may be invincibly ignorant of the Catholic Church, and still be saved by reason of an implicit desire or intention to enter and to live within that society. But, if he is saved, he achieves the Beatific Vision as one who has died with genuine supernatural faith. He must actually and explicitly accept as certain some definite truths which have been supernaturally revealed by God. He must accept explicitly and precisely as revealed truths the existence of God as the Head of the supernatural order and the fact that God rewards good and punishes evil. Our letter manifestly alludes to this necessity when it quotes, in support of its teaching on the necessity of supernatural faith in all those who are saved, the words of the Epistle to the Hebrews: “For he who comes to God must believe that God exists and is a rewarder of those who seek Him.”[10]
Now most theologians teach that the minimum explicit content of supernatural and salvific faith includes, not only the truths of God’s existence and of His action as the Rewarder of good and the Punisher of evil, but also the mysteries of the Blessed Trinity and the Incarnation. It must be noted at this point that there is no hint of any intention on the part of the Holy Office, in citing this text from the Epistle to the Hebrews, to teach that explicit belief in the mysteries of the Blessed Trinity and of the Incarnation is not required for the attainment of salvation. In the context of the letter, the Sacred Congregation quotes this verse precisely as a proof of its declaration that an implicit desire of the Church cannot produce its effect “unless a person has supernatural faith.”
Still, the teaching of the letter must be seen against the backdrop of the rest of Catholic doctrine. And it is definitely a part of the Catholic doctrine that certain basic revealed truths must be accepted and believed explicitly, even though other teachings contained in the deposit of faith may, under certain circumstances, be believed with only an implicit faith. True and supernatural faith, we must remember, is not a mere readiness to believe, but an actual belief, but an actual belief, the actual acceptance as certainly true of definite teachings which have actually been revealed supernaturally by God to man.[11] Furthermore, this salvific and supernatural faith is an acceptance of these teachings, not as naturally ascertainable doctrines, but precisely as revealed statements, which are to be accepted on the authority of God who has revealed them to man.
The doctrinal portion of the Holy Office letter ends with the declaration that, in the light of what the document itself has taught, “it is evident that those things which are proposed in the periodical ‘From the Housetops,’ fascicle 3, as the genuine teaching of the Catholic Church are far from being such and are very harmful both to those within the Church and those without.” The issue of From the Housetops to which the letter refers contained only one article, written by Mr. Raymond Karam of the St. Benedict Center group, and entitled “Reply to a Liberal.”
The most important error contained in that article was a denial of the possibility of salvation for any man who had only an implicit desire to enter the Catholic Church. There was likewise bad teaching on the requisites for justification, as distinguished from the requisites for salvation. The first of these faults has been indicated in a previous issue of The American Ecclesiastical Review.[12]
The Holy Office letter is by far the most complete authoritative statement on and explanation of the Church’s necessity for salvation yet issued by the Holy See. A tremendous number of documents in the past have asserted the dogma. The encyclical Mystici Corporis showed clearly that the explanation of this teaching involved a recognition of the fact that salvation is possible for men “who are related to the Mystical Body of the Redeemer by a certain unconscious yearning and desire.”[13] The encyclical Humani generis reproved those who “reduce to an empty formula the necessity of belonging to the true Church in order to gain eternal salvation.”[14]
It remained for the present document to state and to use the distinction between the necessity of precept and the necessity of means, to explain this latter in terms of belonging to the Church in re and in voto, and explicitly to distinguish between explicit and implicit intentions of entering the Church. Because it has done these things, and because it has joined up the teaching on the Church’s necessity with the doctrines of the necessity of faith and of charity, the Holy Office letter will stand as one of the most important authoritative doctrinal statements of modern times.
Joseph Clifford Fenton
The Catholic University of America
Washington, D.C.
The text of the letter consists of twenty-four paragraphs. The first three of these are introductory, and speak of the circumstances that prompted the issuance of this message. The following sixteen deal with “explanationes…ad doctrinam pertinentes.” The last five paragraphs contain “invitamenta atque exhortationes, quae ad disciplinam spectant.”
In the introduction, the letter asserts that it is dealing with a grave or serious controversy which has been stirred up (excitata) by people connected with St. Benedict Center and Boston College. It further states that the Holy Office believes that the controversy arose in the first place because of a failure properly to grasp and to appreciate the axiom “extra Ecclesiam nulla sallus,” and that the dispute became embittered by reason of the fact that some of those associated with St. Benedict Center and with Boston College refused respect and obedience to legitimate ecclesiastical authorities.
Both here and in the doctrinal part of the letter we encounter the clear implication that the Holy Office is taking cognizance of many varieties of mistakes about the Catholic Church’s necessity for salvation. When the letter sets out to place the blame for the embitterment of the controversy, it directly inculpates the St. Benedict Center group, which was guilty of disrespect and disobedience to ecclesiastical authority, and which, incidentally, was originally punished precisely for that disobedience. When, on the other hand, the document speaks of the origin of the dispute, it simply ascribes the controversy itself to a failure to know and to appreciate the formula “extra ecclesiam nulla sallus.” Those who have studied in any detail the copious modern writings on this subject are well aware that there have been several faulty explanations of this dogma published during the first part of the present century.[1]
Thus what makes this letter from the Holy Office so outstandingly important is the fact that it sets out, not only to correct the basic misinterpretation of the dogma made by the St. Benedict Center group, but to show the doctrinal quality of the teaching itself and to offer an accurate, full, and authoritative outline of its explanation. In accomplishing its purpose, the Holy Office letter has given to Catholic theologians by far the most complete and detailed exposition of the dogma that the Catholic Church is necessary for salvation which has yet to come from the ecclesiastical magisterium.
The specifically doctrinal portion of the Holy Office letter opens with a paragraph which repeats what the Vatican Council taught about those truths which we are bound to believe with the assent of divine and Catholic Faith. The letter tells us that “we are bound to believe with divine and Catholic faith all of those things contained in God’s message that comes to us by way of Scripture or Tradition (quae in verbo Dei scripto vel tradito continentur), and which are proposed by the Church, not only in solemn judgment, but also by its ordinary and universal teaching activity, to be believed as divinely revealed.[2]
Now the teachings we are obliged to believe with the assent of divine and Catholic faith are the truths which we know as the dogmas of the Catholic Church. These dogmas are truths which the apostles of Jesus Christ preached to His Church as statements which had been supernaturally communicated or revealed by God Himself. They constitute the central or primary object of the Church’s infallible teaching activity.
It is important to note that our Holy Office letter describes the doctrine “that there is no salvation outside the Church,” not only as an infallible teaching, but also as a dogma. It insists, in other words, that this doctrine is not merely something connected with God’s public and supernatural message, but that it belongs to the revealed message itself. The doctrine is presented as a truth which the apostles themselves delivered to the Church as a statement which God had supernaturally revealed to men through Our Lord. It is one of the truths with which the Church is primarily and essentially concerned.
In thus designating this teaching as a dogma of the Church, the Holy Office letter merely repeated what Pope Pius IX had taught in his allocution Singulari quadam, issued Dec. 9, 1854, and in his encyclical Quanto conficiamur moerore, published on Aug. 10, 1863.[3] Thus our document does not make any new contribution on this particular point. It merely recalls, for a generation which might have forgotten the fact, the sovereign truth that the teaching with which it is concerned is an actual part of divine public revelation.
Our letter also brings out two important consequences of the fact that the doctrine of the Church’s necessity for eternal salvation is actually a Catholic dogma. The first implication is that this truth is one of “those things which the Church has always preached and will never cease to preach.” The second implication is to be found in the fact that God has entrusted the authoritative and infallible explanation of these revealed truths, not to private judgment, but to the teaching authority of the Church alone. Both of these implications are highly important for our contemporary theologians. As a matter of fact, the Holy Father himself took up these two points in his encyclical Humani generis, which, though it appeared two years before the publication of the full text of the Holy Office letter, was actually written a year after this document.[4]
In the context of the present discussion and the misunderstandings which occasioned the writing of our letter, the reminder that the Church has never ceased to preach and will never cease to preach the truth that it is necessary for man’s salvation is timely and advantageous. It is important to note that the letter uses the term “praedicare, to preach.” By employing this word, the document assures us that, during every part of its history, the Catholic Church continues to set forth publicly and openly the teaching it has received from God through Our Lord and His apostles. Thus the Holy Office does more than merely affirm that the Church has always conserved and guarded its doctrinal treasures. It insists that the Church has never ceased to teach its own dogma.
Now there has been a long tendency on the part of some Catholic writers to imagine that certain dogmas of the Church tend to grow obsolete, and that, in the interests of its own progress, the Church does not insist too rigorously upon those teachings which are represented as out of touch with modern conditions. Pope Leo XIII reproved one aspect of this tendency in his letter Testem benevolentiae.[5] It is perfectly manifest that the one dogma of the Church which its enemies would consider as least in line with the currents of modern thought is the teaching that there is no salvation outside of the true Church. Similarly a mentality like that of the St. Benedict Center group would tend to hold that, at least in our time, the Church universal has not been teaching the dogma of its own necessity for man’s salvation effectively.
Moreover, this statement of the Holy Office letter comes as a rebuke to the more extreme forms of the much discredited “state of siege” theory, according to which the Church has in some way modified its doctrinal life since the days of the Council of Trent by adopting an artificially defensive position. Our letter assures us at this point that the Church will never pass over or soft-pedal any of its dogmas, in the interests of a so-called defensive mentality or for any other reason.
The second implication or consequence noted by the Holy Office letter is equally timely. In insisting upon the fact that Our Saviour has confined the explanation of His dogma, not to private judgment, but to the ecclesiastical magisterium alone, the letter makes it perfectly clear that Catholics are to be guided in their understanding of revealed truth by the official teachers of the Church, and not by any merely private authors, however ingenious and influential these latter may be. And, to put the matter as concretely as possible, Catholics are not to accept any teachings of private writers, even when these teachings seem particularly in harmony with the modern mentality, if these teachings are not strictly in accord with the doctrine of the magisterium. It is quite obvious that private teachings of this sort have been presented in recent times, on the subject of the Church’s necessity for salvation and in other sections of ecclesiology.
These first three paragraphs in the doctrinal portion of the Holy Office letter deal with the fact that the teaching that “there is no salvation outside the Church” is a dogma of the Catholic faith, and with two of the consequences that follow upon that fact. The remainder of the doctrinal section (the only one with which we are directly concerned in this article) is given over to an exposition of the way in which the Church itself understands and teaches the dogma of its own necessity for eternal salvation. In these few paragraphs, theologians will find that three distinctions, long used by the Church’s traditional theologians in their explanation of the Church’s necessity for salvation, are here, for the first time, presented clearly and decisively in an authentic statement of the Church’s magisterium as employed by the teaching Church itself in its own understanding and explanation of the dogma. They are (1) the distinction between a necessity of precept and the necessity of means, (2) the distinction between belonging to the Church in re and belonging to it in voto, and (3) the distinction between an explicit and an implicit intention or desire to enter the Catholic Church. It is precisely because all of these distinctions are used for the first time in a document of the magisterium to explain the Church’s necessity for salvation that this letter is one of the most important Roman documents of recent times.
First, the Holy Office shows us that the classical distinction between the necessity of precept and the necessity of means, long used by competent theologians in explaining the dogma of the Church’s necessity for salvation, actually enters into the Church’s own understanding and explanation of this doctrine. Dealing with the Church’s necessity of precept, the letter brings out the fact that the command, “to be incorporated by Baptism into the Mystical Body of Christ, which is the Church, and to remain united to Christ and to His Vicar.” Is one of the orders which Our Lord actually commissioned His apostles to teach to all nations. The document goes on to explain the Church’s necessity of precept to mean that “no one will be saved who, knowing the Church to have been divinely established by Christ, nevertheless refuses to submit to the Church or withholds obedience from the Roman Pontiff, the Vicar of Christ on earth.”
The Sacred Congregation’s letter thus states explicitly that there is a serious command issued by Our Lord Himself to all men, a command that they should enter and remain within the true Church. The man who disobeys that command is guilty of serious sin. If he should die in that state of willful disobedience, he will inevitably be lost forever. Such is the basic meaning of the Church’s necessity of precept, as explained by the letter from the Holy Office, and as understood by the Church itself.
This document also teaches us, however, there is more than a necessity of precept involved in the dogma of the Catholic Church’s necessity for salvation. It insists upon the fact that Our Lord has “also decreed the Church to be a means of salvation, without which no one can enter the kingdom of eternal glory.” In other words, Our Saviour has done two things: He has commanded all men to enter the Church; and He has established this society as one of the supernatural resources apart from which no man can enjoy the Beatific Vision as a member of the Church triumphant in heaven.
This statement by the Holy Office is tremendously important in the field of dogmatic theology. For many years past there have been attempts on the part of some Catholic writers to depict the Church’s necessity for salvation as exclusively or almost exclusively a mere necessity of precept. Now the authoritative voice of the Roman Church itself assures us that the Church is necessary both with the necessity of precept and with the necessity of means. This letter is the first authoritative document in which this truth is set forth clearly and explicitly.
Likewise of tremendous moment is the letter’s use of the classical theological distinction between belonging to the Church in re and belonging to it in voto. Henceforth those who wish to explain Catholic teaching on this point should use these two distinctions (necessity of precept as distinct from necessity of means: belonging to the Church in re as distinct from belonging to it in voto.), if they are to act as faithful exponents of Catholic truth. It is interesting to note that the Holy Office has made no use of such terminology as “the soul and the body of the Church,” or “the Church as the ordinary means of salvation,” in setting forth what the Church itself has always understood as the meaning of its own necessity for eternal salvation.
Furthermore, it is also interesting to see the connotations of the terms “votum” and “desiderium,” used here by the Holy Office communication. These terms are translated, not incorrectly, but perhaps somewhat inadequately, in the official English translation of the letter as “desire” and “yearning.” In employing these terms the Holy Office makes it clear that, in order to be saved, men must either be attached to the Church actually or in re as members, or be joined to the Church by a genuine act of the will, intending or desiring to become members.
In other words, according to the connotations of these two terms, the explicit votum by which a man may be joined to the Church so as to achieve his salvation must be a real desire or intention, and not a mere velleity. The act of the will in which the implicit salvific votum of the Church is contained must likewise be more than a mere velleity. This operation also must be a real and effective act of the will.
In teaching that a votum or a desiderium of the Church can, under certain circumstances, suffice to bring a man to the attainment of the Beatific Vision, we must not forget that the Holy Office letter likewise uses a procedure which has been employed by the traditional Catholic theologians for many years. It classifies the Church itself, along with the sacraments of Baptism and Penance, among “those helps to salvation which are directed toward man’s final end, not by intrinsic necessity, but only by divine institution.” Conversely, of course, it thus implies the existence of other resources which are ordered to man’s ultimate goal by way of intrinsic necessity. Realties like the Church itself, and the sacraments of Baptism and Penance, may under certain circumstances achieve their effect when they are processed or used only in intention or desire. Helps of the other classification, like sanctifying grace, faith, and charity, must, on the other hand, be possessed or used in re if they are to achieve their purpose at all.
The letter applies this principle when it assures us that, in order for a man to obtain eternal salvation, “it is not always required that he be incorporated into the Church actually as a member, but it is necessary that at least he be united to her by desire and longing.” Such, of course, has been the explicit teaching of traditional Catholic theologians since the days of Thomas Stapleton and St. Robert Bellarmine.[6] It is a commonplace of Catholic theology that a man could be saved if, finding it impossible to actually to join the Church as a member, he really sincerely intended or desired to live within this society.
The Holy Office then proceeds against what has been perhaps the most obstinate and important error of the St. Benedict Center group when it explains that “this desire need not always be explicit, as it is in catechumens”; but that “when a person is involved in invincible ignorance, God accepts also an implicit desire, so called because it is included in that good disposition of soul whereby a person wishes his will to be conformed to the will of God.”
It is noteworthy that the theologians of the Church have never included the doctrine of the Church itself among those supernatural truths which must be held explicitly if there is to be the necessary minimum for an act of true and salvific divine faith. The Holy Office letter, however, does not go to this theological reasoning, but directly to the authoritative teaching of Pope Pius XII in his encyclical Mystici Corporis to back up its contention. That encyclical effectively taught the possibility of salvation for persons who have only an implicit desire to enter and to live within the Catholic Church.
In the text of the Mystici Corporis, the Sovereign Pontiff clearly and authoritatively taught the requisites for actual membership in the Church. He issued as his own teaching the Bellarminian doctrine that “Actually only those are to be included as members of the Church who have not been so unfortunate as to separate themselves from the unity of the Body, or been excluded by legitimate authority for grave faults committed.”[7] He likewise, however, spoke of the possibility of salvation for those who “are related to the Mystical Body by a certain unconscious yearning and desire (inscio quodam desiderio ac voto).” He depicted such individuals as existing in a state “in which they cannot be sure of their salvation” since “they still remain deprived of those many heavenly gifts and helps which can only be enjoyed in the Catholic Church.”[8]
The Holy Office interprets these teachings of the Mystici Corporis as a condemnation of two errors. One of them, that defended explicitly by members of the St. Benedict Center group, is the doctrine that no man be saved if he has only an implicit desire or intention to enter the Church. The other is the teaching that men may be saved “equally well (aequaliter)” in any religion. For the previous condemnation of this latter error the letter refers to two pronouncements by Pope Pius IX, his allocution Singulari quadam and his encyclical Quanto conficiamur moerore.[9]
Finally the letter brings out two points which many of the writers who have dealt with this question have passed over all too quickly. It insists that, in order to be effective for eternal salvation, any intention or desire of entering the Church, whether explicit or implicit must be animated by perfect charity. No benevolence on a merely natural plane can suffice to save man, even when that man actually intends to enter and to live within the true Church of Jesus Christ. Non-membership in the Church, even on the part of a man who wishes to become a Catholic, does not in any way dispense from the necessity of those factors which are requisite for the attainment of the Beatific Vision by intrinsic necessity, and not merely by reason of divine institution.
Furthermore, the Holy Office also insists upon the necessity of true and supernatural faith in any many who attains eternal salvation. A man may be invincibly ignorant of the Catholic Church, and still be saved by reason of an implicit desire or intention to enter and to live within that society. But, if he is saved, he achieves the Beatific Vision as one who has died with genuine supernatural faith. He must actually and explicitly accept as certain some definite truths which have been supernaturally revealed by God. He must accept explicitly and precisely as revealed truths the existence of God as the Head of the supernatural order and the fact that God rewards good and punishes evil. Our letter manifestly alludes to this necessity when it quotes, in support of its teaching on the necessity of supernatural faith in all those who are saved, the words of the Epistle to the Hebrews: “For he who comes to God must believe that God exists and is a rewarder of those who seek Him.”[10]
Now most theologians teach that the minimum explicit content of supernatural and salvific faith includes, not only the truths of God’s existence and of His action as the Rewarder of good and the Punisher of evil, but also the mysteries of the Blessed Trinity and the Incarnation. It must be noted at this point that there is no hint of any intention on the part of the Holy Office, in citing this text from the Epistle to the Hebrews, to teach that explicit belief in the mysteries of the Blessed Trinity and of the Incarnation is not required for the attainment of salvation. In the context of the letter, the Sacred Congregation quotes this verse precisely as a proof of its declaration that an implicit desire of the Church cannot produce its effect “unless a person has supernatural faith.”
Still, the teaching of the letter must be seen against the backdrop of the rest of Catholic doctrine. And it is definitely a part of the Catholic doctrine that certain basic revealed truths must be accepted and believed explicitly, even though other teachings contained in the deposit of faith may, under certain circumstances, be believed with only an implicit faith. True and supernatural faith, we must remember, is not a mere readiness to believe, but an actual belief, but an actual belief, the actual acceptance as certainly true of definite teachings which have actually been revealed supernaturally by God to man.[11] Furthermore, this salvific and supernatural faith is an acceptance of these teachings, not as naturally ascertainable doctrines, but precisely as revealed statements, which are to be accepted on the authority of God who has revealed them to man.
The doctrinal portion of the Holy Office letter ends with the declaration that, in the light of what the document itself has taught, “it is evident that those things which are proposed in the periodical ‘From the Housetops,’ fascicle 3, as the genuine teaching of the Catholic Church are far from being such and are very harmful both to those within the Church and those without.” The issue of From the Housetops to which the letter refers contained only one article, written by Mr. Raymond Karam of the St. Benedict Center group, and entitled “Reply to a Liberal.”
The most important error contained in that article was a denial of the possibility of salvation for any man who had only an implicit desire to enter the Catholic Church. There was likewise bad teaching on the requisites for justification, as distinguished from the requisites for salvation. The first of these faults has been indicated in a previous issue of The American Ecclesiastical Review.[12]
The Holy Office letter is by far the most complete authoritative statement on and explanation of the Church’s necessity for salvation yet issued by the Holy See. A tremendous number of documents in the past have asserted the dogma. The encyclical Mystici Corporis showed clearly that the explanation of this teaching involved a recognition of the fact that salvation is possible for men “who are related to the Mystical Body of the Redeemer by a certain unconscious yearning and desire.”[13] The encyclical Humani generis reproved those who “reduce to an empty formula the necessity of belonging to the true Church in order to gain eternal salvation.”[14]
It remained for the present document to state and to use the distinction between the necessity of precept and the necessity of means, to explain this latter in terms of belonging to the Church in re and in voto, and explicitly to distinguish between explicit and implicit intentions of entering the Church. Because it has done these things, and because it has joined up the teaching on the Church’s necessity with the doctrines of the necessity of faith and of charity, the Holy Office letter will stand as one of the most important authoritative doctrinal statements of modern times.
Joseph Clifford Fenton
The Catholic University of America
Washington, D.C.
20070719
A Short Catechism on EENS
1 Q: Is there salvation outside the Church?
A: No, for it is a dogma that there is no salvation outside the Church (extra ecclesiam nulla salus).
2 Q: Can a non-Catholic be saved?
A: The question is misplaced, and needs to be reformulated - for all men have the potential to be saved.
3 Q: Is it the teaching of the Catholic Church, then, that all men who die as non-Catholics are eternally damned?
A: No - for it is not always required to be an actual member of the Church in order to attain eternal salvation.
4 Q: If there is no salvation outside the church, how can men who die as non-Catholics be saved - is this not a contradiction?
A: There is no such contradiction. There is a distinction between being "inside" the Church and being a "member" [i.e., a Catholic] of the Church.
5. Q: What is the proof for this distinction?
A: There are mainly two proofs for this:
More to come....
A: No, for it is a dogma that there is no salvation outside the Church (extra ecclesiam nulla salus).
2 Q: Can a non-Catholic be saved?
A: The question is misplaced, and needs to be reformulated - for all men have the potential to be saved.
3 Q: Is it the teaching of the Catholic Church, then, that all men who die as non-Catholics are eternally damned?
A: No - for it is not always required to be an actual member of the Church in order to attain eternal salvation.
4 Q: If there is no salvation outside the church, how can men who die as non-Catholics be saved - is this not a contradiction?
A: There is no such contradiction. There is a distinction between being "inside" the Church and being a "member" [i.e., a Catholic] of the Church.
5. Q: What is the proof for this distinction?
A: There are mainly two proofs for this:
- The first is the authority of the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office [Letter to the Archbishop Cusing; August 8, 1949] which declared: "that one may obtain eternal salvation, it is not always required that he be incorporated into the Church actually as a member."
- The second is the long held tradition which holds that catechumens may be saved by baptism of desire. Catechumens have never been considered members of the Church - that is, a part of the "faithful." Nevertheless when they die, Catholic tradition holds the possibility of salvation for them. Therefore one may be inside the Church without being a member.
More to come....
The Bull Unam Sanctam
The second of eight documents of the ecclesiastical magisterium with which we are concerned in this section is the famous bull Unam sanctam, issued by Pope Bonifice VIII on November 18, 1302. The opening and the closing passages on this pontifical pronouncement contain highly important statements of this dogma.
The opening section of the Unam sanctam states the dogma itself and gives insights into it not available in any previous declaration of the teaching Church.
The statement of the dogma in the Unam Sanctam differs somewhat from its assertion in the Firmiter. In the older document we find the statement that no one at all is saved outside the Catholic Church. The Unam sanctam, on the other hand, teaches us that salvation itself is not to be found outside this company. Quite obviously both of these propositions bring out the same meaning. They insist that the process of salvation is something found within the true kingdom of God on earth, and that a man has to be in some way within the social unity if he is to obtain this divine gift.
The first of these explanations offered here in the Unam Sanctam, the teaching that neither salvation nor remission of sins can be obtained outside the Catholic Church, is essentially important for the proper understanding of the doctrine of the necessity of the Church. The remission of sins, original or mortal, is absolutely necessary part of the process of salvation for the men of this world. In teaching us that this first salvation cannot take place outside of God's supernatural kingdom on earth, Pope Boniface VIII has focussed our attention on the nature of salvation itself.
Considered actively or as a process, salvation consists in saving a man, in transferring him from a bad condition, one in which the continuation of life is impossible, to a situation of security and enjoyment. In this way a man is saved if he is taken off a sinking ship and brought to another vessel in the seaworthy condition, and thence to his home ashore. Considered objectively, salvation is the benefit received by man who saved.
In the vocabulary of the faith and of sacred theology, the process of salvation takes place when a man is removed from the condition of spiritual death, or of original or mortal sin, and transferred to the condition in which he enjoys supernatural friendship of God and the possession of the life of supernatural grace. This process is brought to its final termination when, in the possession of [the] Beatific Vision, the man saved attains the ultimate and unending perfection of life of grace, and is forever exempt from the danger of losing it.
Thus, absolutely and ultimately, salvation in the theological order is to be found in the attainment of the Beatific Vision. The word is employed in this sense in the statement that there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church. But, for every individual who comes into this world in the state of original sin, the forgiveness of original or mortal sin is an integral and absolutely necessary part of the process of salvation. The most important lesson taught in the Unam sanctam is the truth that this remission of sin, original or mortal, cannot be obtained outside the one supernatural kingdom of God here on earth, the society which we know as the Catholic Church.
In order to understand this aspect of the mystery of the Church, we must take cognizance of the fact, presented to us in Catholic doctrine, that the Beatific Vision is a vital act, the ultimate and perfective expression of a genuinely supernatural life. Furthermore, we must also realize that in reality, by God's own institution, there is no situation available to men other than the sinful aversion from God or the possession of the supernatural life of sanctifying grace.
The Supernatural Order
The salvation to which the Catholic Church refers when it teaches the dogma of its own necessity is inherently and essentially a supernatural thing. The Beatific Vision, in the acquisition of which the process of salvation is completed, is the direct and clear intellectual apprehension of God in the Trinity of His Persons. As such, it is an act absolutely beyond the natural power or competence or exigencies of any creature, actual or possible. It is the kind of operation which may be called natural only to God Himself.
An act is said to be natural to some being when it lies within the area of his natural competence. In terms of understanding intelligence (and it is within the framework of understanding that the ultimate distinction between the natural and the intrinsically supernatural must be discerned), an act is natural when it is the apprehension of some reality within the sphere of the proper object or that creature's intelligence.
There can be, and there truly are, intellectual creatures completely superior to man. Yet, in every case, these creatures must inevitably and necessarily have their natural intellectual activity on the plane of their own being. Every creature, as a creature, is a being in which existence is something really distinct from essence. There is and there can be no creature which exists necessarily. All have received, and continue to receive, whatever being they possess from God Himself.
Hence the proper formal object of the intelligence of any created creature, actual or possible, is necessarily something on the created level. From the examination of the reality within the compass of that proper formal object, any intellectual creature is able to arrive at a knowledge of God insofar as He is knowable as the First Cause of creatures. The clarity and profundity of this knowledge will be more perfect in proportion as the created intellect itself is more perfect. Thus the natural knowledge of God by a created pure spirit would be immensely better than any natural knowledge of Him available to man, a rational animal. But this natural knowledge of God by a created pure spirit would, in the last analysis, remain within the range of understanding of God known through the examination of the effects He has produced in the created universe. This would mean an intellectual knowledge of God in the unity of His Nature, but not of the Blessed Trinity.
One the other hand, there is a type of knowledge of God which is natural only to God Himself. In the infinitely perfect act of understanding which is in no way really distinct from Himself, the Triune God sees Himself perfectly in the Trinity of Persons, really distinct from one another, but subsisting in one and the same divine nature with which each three persons is identified.
The basic truth about God's dealings with His intellectual creatures is to be found in the fact that it has pleased His goodness and wisdom to endow these intellectual creatures with the kind of knowledge of Him which He possesses Himself. Thus, from the created pure spirit (the angels), and for the entire human race, God has established and end or a final perfection completely distinct and superior to the final end which these intellectual creatures would naturally have been ordered. By the force of His degree the only ultimate and eternal perfection and beatitude available to these intellectual creatures is this intrinsically supernatural good, the knowledge and the possession of Himself in the Trinity of Divine Persons in the clarity of the Beatific Vision.
This immediate intellectual cognizance of God in the Trinity of His Persons is, by its very essence, something above and beyond the natural needs and deserts of intellectual creatures. Furthermore, it is a vital act, accompanied by and belonging with a complexus of other acts which, taken together, constitute a true supernatural life. The love of friendship for God, as understood in the Trinity of His Persons, is one of those acts.
Now, the second truth about the supernatural order is the fact that God, in His wisdom and goodness, has willed to give the Beatific Vision to His intellectual creatures as something they have earned or merited. Quite obviously this benefit is not to be earned through the performance of any activity on a merely natural plane. The only kind of activity which can truly merit the Beatific Vision is activity within the supernatural order itself, the working of the essentially supernatural life. Hence, every intellectual creature called to the possession and enjoyment of the Beatific Vision, there is a period in which this life of the Beatific Vision is meant to be lived in a preparatory or militant stage. For the children of Adam, this period is to be found in the life of this world.
Hence God wills that men should live and grow in the life of the Beatific Vision in this world so as to be able to merit the eternal possession and enjoyment of the Triune Go in the world to come. In this period of trail and preparation it is quite obvious that the Beatific Vision itself is not available. The thing being merited is not being enjoyed while it is being merit. Consequently, during the period of this life, the supernatural awareness of God which guides and enlightens the supernatural lie is that of divine faith. This consists in the certain acceptance of God's own message about Himself and about the eternal and salvific decrees of His providence in our regard. It is essentially supernatural, in that it tells us of God in the Trinity of His Persons. Faith is intrinsically a preparation and a substitute for the Beatific Vision itself, since it conveys information about that very Reality which we hope eventually to understand and to see in the glory of the Beatific Vision. At the same time it is completely distinct and superior to any merely natural knowledge about God.
The love of charity which will accompany the Beatific Vision in the saints for all eternity also is meant to accompany the act and the virtue of divine faith in this world. And, where this charity is present, the supernatural life itself exists and operates. Where it is not present, there is no supernatural life, although faith and hope may still exist.
The immediate supernatural principles of the supernatural life in this world are various infused theological and moral virtues and the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost. The ultimate intrinsic and created supernatural principle of this life is the quality known as sanctifying grace. This quality acts as the ultimate intrinsic created principle of the supernatural life in this world and in the next.
Now the process of salvation consists primarily in the bestowal of this life of sanctifying grace upon a person who has hitherto not possessed it. Ultimately it consists in granting of the Beatific Vision to this individual. For, according to God's own institution, as He has made known to us in the message He has revealed to us in Jesus Christ His Son, the life of sanctifying grace in heaven, the life of the Beatific Vision itself, can be enjoyed only as the continuation and the fruition of the life of grace which has begun to operate in this world, and which is existent at the very moment when the individual passes from this life to the next. The only men who will see God in heaven are those who have passed from this life in the state of grace.
Thus there are two factors to be considered in the bestowal of the Beatific Vision. The first is the giving of the life of grace to the person in this world. The second is the actual attainment of the clear understanding and possession of the Triune God in heaven. It is the teaching of the Unam sanctam that both of those factors or benefits are available only within the Catholic Church.
The Terminus a quo In The Process of Salvation
The gift fact which the documents of the Church designate as "salvation" is the Beatific Vision, the ultimate flowering of the supernatural life of sanctifying grace which must begin in this world. A man is said to be saved, ultimately, when he receives the supernatural benefit of the Beatific Vision. The term "salvation," however, involves more than this.
The key fact which must be taken into consideration in any theological explanation of salvation is the truth that actually the bestowal of the life of sanctifying grace is inseparable from the remission of original or mortal sin in the world which we live. There have been cases in which this was not so. Our Lord, in His human nature, possessed in a completely perfect manner all the gifts of sanctifying grace and, both by reason of His Person and by reason of the fact that He was not descended from Adam by a process of carnal generation, He was never in anyway stained with the guilt of original sin.
His Blessed Mother was immaculately conceived. By the pre-applied merits of His Passion and death, she was preserved from any taint of sin from the very moment she began to exist. In her case, also, the granting of the gift of sanctifying grace was not accompanied by any remission of sin. With her, the beginning of existence coincided with the beginning of the supernatural life of sanctifying grace. Likewise, Adam and Eve, before the fall, were constituted in grace from the first moment of their existence. With them, however, the second granting of the life of grace was brought about through the remission of sin.
In every one of their descendants this same thing has occurred except for the cases of Our Lord and His Blessed Mother. Mary expected, every person born into the family of Adam through the process of carnal regeneration has come into this world in the state of original sin. Both this origin sin and the mortal sin of men commit during the course of their lives are incompatible with the live of grace. And, by the institution of God Himself, the stain of sin can be removed only by the granting of the life of grace.
The state of sin, original or mortal, is a state of aversion from or enmity with God. The removal of that state is accomplished when, and only when, the person who has hitherto been in the state of sin is constituted in the condition of friendship with God and is properly ordered to Him. And there is no situation other than that of sanctifying grace itself which a man can be well ordered toward God.
To be well ordered toward God, or to be in a state of friendship with Him, a man must be working toward the goal God Himself has set for him. And, according to God's own revealed message, the one goal or end in the attainment of which man may find his ultimate and eternal beatitude is that of the Beatific Vision. There is no other ultimate end available to man. If he fails to attain this objective then, whatever he may seem to have accomplished during the course of his earthly life, he will have been forever a failure. There is no state of neutrality toward God, and there is no possible state of merely natural friendship with Him available to the children of Adam.
In other words, all and only the persons who are not in the state of grace are those in the state of original or mortal sin. All and only the persons who are not in the state of original or mortal sin o both possess the life of sanctifying grace. Hence, according to God's own institution, the process by which a man who has hitherto not been in a state of grace receives this supernatural life from God is necessarily the process by which his original or mortal sin is forgiven. The terminus a quo of the transfer by which a man is brought into the state of supernatural grace is necessarily, for the children of Adam, the state of original and mortal sin.
Our Lord's Function in the Remission of Sin and the Granting of the Life of Grace.
It is a basic and central part of God's revealed message that the remission of sin, the process in which the supernatural life of sanctifying grace is infused into a soul which has hitherto been deprived of it, is possible only through and in Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. It is in Our Lord, according to St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians, that "we have redemption through his blood, the remission of sins, according to the riches of his grace." [Eph., 1:7] And St. Peter, in his first Epistle, speaks of "the God of all grace, who hath called us unto his eternal glory in Christ Jesus." [1Peter., 5:10] In fact one may say that the central message of the New Testament is the fact that salvation and remission of sins are possible only in and through Our Lord.
By His suffering and death, He redeemed us and freed us from the bonds of iniquities. The actual graces or divine aids by which a man is enabled to move toward the love of charity for God and the hatred of sin which come together at the moment of justification have been merited for us by Our Lord. So too are graces by which a man is effectively and freely moved to justification and to increase in the life of grace required, along with the remission of sin, in the process of justification.
Moreover, justification, the actual transfer of a man from the state of original or mortal sin into the state of sanctifying grace, is only possible in Our Lord. Hence the dogma of the Catholic Church's necessity for attainment of eternal salvation and for the remission of sin manifests itself as the clear and accurate statement of the meaning actually conveyed in the scriptural expression "in Christ Jesus". Neither justification nor glorification -- that is, neither the remission of our sins nor attainment of the Beatific Vision -- is possible except "in Christ Jesus." And the Church, in the divinely inspired epistles of St. Paul, is represented precisely though metaphorically as "the Body of Christ." To be "in Christ Jesus," then, is to be "within" the Mystical Body of Christ, Our Lord's one and only true Church or kingdom.
It is highly important for us to realize that, in asserting the dogma of its own necessity for salvation and for the living of the life of sanctifying grace, the Catholic Church is simply stating in a non-figurative fashion the very truth which Our Lord Himself expounded through His use of the metaphor of the vine and the branches. Our Lord taught:
Now, by divine constitution of the Church militant in the New Testament, the social unity is the one social unit within which men may partake worthily of the Eucharistic banquet. Our Lord's own ecclesia is the one and only company within which the Eucharist itself was instituted and for which it was intended. The Eucharistic sacrifice is offered, and the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist is received rightly and properly only within this community. Conversely, any man who fruitfully and worthily partakes of this Eucharistic feast is within the true Church, at least by intention.
Our Lord's statement that "he that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood abideth in me: and I in him" is definately not restricted to the physical reception of the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist. A spiritual reception of the Eucharist which consists in a desire (even an implicit desire) to partake in the Sacrament and to profit from that reception is sufficient for this union with Our Lord in the case of a person for whom actual reception or physical reception of the Sacrament is, for one reason or another, really impossible.
Thus, Our Lord explains the matter, salvation and the supernatural life of sanctifying grace are possible for the member of the Church who is within this society as one of its integral parts., and who is vitally joined to Our Lord by worthy reception of the Sacrament of His Love. It is also possible for the Catholic who is unable physically to receive the Sacrament, but who, with a desire of the Sacrament and of its effects and with the intention of charity animating that desire, is integrated into the Church, the household of the living God, within which and for which that sacrifice is offered and that sacrament is confected. It is also possible for the non-member of the Church [i.e., a non Catholic] who, unable to attain membership in Christ's Mystical Body and enlightened by true and supernatural divine faith, loves God with the affection of true charity and, in that love, forms at least an implicit desire of the sacrament and of its salvific effects. In this last case the man who possesses this deisre, presenting it to God in the form of prayer, will receive the guerdon he seeks, union with Our Lord in His company, which is the Church. The man is brought into the Church (though obviously not constituted as a member of the Chuch) and into spiritual and salvific reception of Our Lord's Body and Blood, through the force of his prayer and desire that are animated and motivated by divine charity.
This is the meaning of the teaching about the Church's necessity for the attainment of eternal salvation and for the remission of sins which has been brought out so powerfully and profoundly in the Unam sanctam. In this great document of Pope Boniface VII brings out his teaching principally by the use of two of the metaphorical scriptural names or designations of the Church. He employs the name and the notion of the Church as "Spouse of Christ" to show that those who are within the Church are within the reality which may be said to constitute one body with Him. And he employs the term "Mystical Body" to designate the Church as a social unit within which alone there is intimate and salvic contact with Our Divine Redeemer. And thus, in his enunciation and explanation of the dogma, he brings out, in the technically expressive terminology of sacred theology, the very lesson which Our Lord brought out so forcefully in figurative language He used in teaching His disciples.
The Dogma and the Error of Quesnel
When the Unam sanctam teaches us that there can be no remission of sins outside the Catholic Church, it is telling us, actually, that it is impossible to obtain the life of sanctifying grace or to live that life outside the supernatural kingdom of God. It is brining out the divinely revealed truth that, by God's own institution, the life of sanctifying grace is to be possessed and derived from Our Lord by those whoa re united with Him, abiding in Him, in His Mystical Body, which is the Catholic Church.
We must be especially clear, both in our concepts and in our terminology, on this point. What the Unam sanctam certainly implies in declaring the necessity of the Church of the remission of sins, is the truth that the life of sanctifying grace and the supernatural habitus of sanctifying grace can be obtained and possessed only within the Church. In the light of Catholic doctrine, however, it is both certain and obvious that actual graces are offered to and received by men who are definitely "outside the Church," in the sense in which this expression is employed in the ecclesiastical documents which state the dogma of the Church's necessity for the attainment of eternal salvation. As a matter of fact the proposition that "no grace is granted outside the Church (extra ecclesiam nulla conceditur gratia)" is one of these condemned explicitly by Pope Clement XI in his dogmatic constitution Unigenitus, issuesd September 8, 1713, and directed against the teachings of Pasquier Quesnel. [Denz., 1379]
It is certain with the certitude of divine faith itself that actual graces are really necessary to prepare men for and to move them to the very acts by which they come to be "within the Church." Thus, in the light of Catholic teaching, it is obvious that these graces are offered and granted to men who are really outside the Church, lacking both real membership in the supernatural kingdom and any real desire of membership.
Except in the case of a true moral miracle, such as that which occurred in the instantaneous conversion of St. Paul, the process of justification (which can terminate only within the true Church) is preceded by a series of acts which, together, constitute a preparation for justification. In a famous chapter of its decree on justification the Council of Trent listed and briefly explained some of these acts, as they occur in the case of one who has hitherto lacked the true faith. Under the heading it speaks of acts of faith, of salutary fear, of hope, of initial love of God, and of pre-baptismal penance. The process of this preparation for justification, according to this chapter, ends with the intention to receive baptism, to begin a new live, and to observe God's commandments. [Cf. Denz., 798]
Now an unbaptized person who has not the Christian faith is in no sense within the Catholic Church. He does not begin to live within it, either as a member or as one who sincerely desires to become a member even when he begins to make his initial act of faith. Yet, according to the clear and infallibly true teaching of the Catholic Church, divine grace is absolutely require, not oly for the eliciting of the act of faith itself, but even for what the Second Council of Orange calls the "affectus credulitatis," [Cf. Denz., 178] the disposition or willingness to believe. This actual grace is definitely given to men who are outside the Church. And thus the assertion that no grace is granted outside the Church is completely incompatible with Catholic teaching, even though it is Catholic doctrine that the life of supernatural grace itself is not to be obtained or possessed outside the Church.
The Church's Unity and Unicity
The basic teaching of this opening section of the Unam sanctam is the truth that the supernatural life of sanctifying grace can neither begin nor continue apart from and outside Our Lord's Mystical Body. Thus it constitutes a powerful and supremely accurate commentary on those passages of Sacred Scripture which show us that the supernatural life of grace cannot exist other than in and through Our Lord, and thus in His company, the society which was and is so intimately joined to Our Saviour that persecution of it was described by Him as persecution of Himself.
The presentation of this truth is made especially forceful in this document by its insistence that this community outside which there is neither salvation nor remission of sins, is genuinely one and unique. Pope Boniface VIII appeals to scriptural images, like that of the ark of Noe and the seamless robe of Christ. He adduces the teaching in the Canticle of Canticles that the beloved, the figure of the Church, is truly and only one. He appeals to the fact that in the Church there is "one Lord, one faith, one baptism," and to the bounds of unity existing within the Church. Finally, he points to the unity of the Church's leadership, exercised by the Bishop of Rome by the authority and in the name of one spiritual and supreme Head, Jesus Christ.
In thus insisting on the unity of the company outside which there is no salvation, the Unam sanctam brings out supremely practical implications of this dogma. The Church within which men must enter and dwell if they are to attain the remission of their sins and the possession and final flowering of the supernatural life is definitely one community, undivided in itself, and quite distinct from every other social unity in existence. This one company is the ecclesia which all must seek to enter, and within which they must remain if they are to be pleasing to God in this world and in the next. The dogma of the Church's necessity for the attainment of eternal salvation, as seen in his light, is certainly not an affair of mere theory or speculation, but a truth which men must accept as revealed by God Himself, and which they must use as a guiding principle in their own lives.
The Church's Visibility
The intensely practical presentation of this dogma in the Unam sanctam is increased by this document's insistence on the visbility of the one society within which alone men may find salvation and the forgiveness of their sins. The true Church which is necessary for the attainment of salvation is the one society over which Peter and his successors rule by Our Lord's own commission. Our Lord confided all of His sheep, all of the people whom the Father had given to Him to be brought to eternal life, to the care of Peter. Those individuals who describe themselves as not confided to St. Peter and his successors, and thus are not owing obedience to them, characterize themselves as not being among the sheep of Christ. They show themselves to be outside the company within which alone there is salvific contact with Our Lord.
This strong and realistic teaching of the Unam sanctam is most perfectly manifested in the definition in which this document ends.
These points are brought out with particular clarity in the Unam sanctam:
(1) The Church is necessary, not only for attainment of salvation itself, but for the forgiveness of sins, which is inseparable from the granting of supernatural life of sanctifying grace.
(2) The Church is necessary for the attainment of salvation and of the life of grace precisely because it is the Body and the Spouse of Christ.
(3) Attainment of salvation in the Church involves union with the Bishop of Rome.
(4) The dogma of the Church's necessity for the attainment of eternal salvation cannot be explained accurately in terms of any "invisible Church."
End.
The opening section of the Unam sanctam states the dogma itself and gives insights into it not available in any previous declaration of the teaching Church.
We are bound by the obligation of faith to believe and to hold the one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church, and we firmly believe and sincerely profess this [Church] outside of which there is neither salvation or remission of sins (extra quam nec salus estm nec remissio peccatorum). This, the spouse in the Canticle proclaims: "One is my dove: my perfect one is but one. She is the only one of her mother, the chosen of her that bore her." This signifies (repraesentat) the one Mystical Body, of which Christ is the Head and God [is the Head] of Christ. In this [dove and perfect one] there is "one Lord, one faith, one baptism." Certainly there was one ark of Noe at the time of the deluge, and it prefigured the one Church. The ark, which was finished in one cubit, has one ruler and commander, namely Noe. We read that all things that subsisted on the earth and which were outside of the ark were destroyed. And we venerate this [Church] as the only one, since the Lord says in the Prophet: "Deliver, O God, my soul from the sword: my only one from the hand of the dog." The Lord prayed for the soul--that is, for Himself the Head--and at the same time for the body. He called the only Church a body because of the unity of faith, the unity of sacraments, and the unity of charity of the Church, the Spouse. This [Church] is the Lord's seamless robe which was not cut, but for which lost were cast. Therefore there is one body, one Head, of the only Church, not two like a monster; Christ and Peter, the Vicar of Christ, and Peter's successor, since the Lord said to Peter himself: "Feed my sheep." He says "my [sheep] universally, and not "these" or "those" in particular, and thus it is understood that He entrusted all [His sheep] to him. If, therefore, the Greeks or other say that they have not been entrusted to Peter and to his Successor, they necessarily admit that they are not of the sheep of Christ, since the Lord says, in John, that there is one fold and shepherd. 1The first section of the Unam sanctam contains the statement of the dogma and three tremendously valuable explanations. The necessity of the Church for the attainment of eternal salvation is described in terms of the relation of the supernatural life of sanctifying grace o salvation itself, in terms of the unity and unicity of God's true ecclesia, and in terms of the visibility of that ecclesia in the condition of the New Testament.
The statement of the dogma in the Unam Sanctam differs somewhat from its assertion in the Firmiter. In the older document we find the statement that no one at all is saved outside the Catholic Church. The Unam sanctam, on the other hand, teaches us that salvation itself is not to be found outside this company. Quite obviously both of these propositions bring out the same meaning. They insist that the process of salvation is something found within the true kingdom of God on earth, and that a man has to be in some way within the social unity if he is to obtain this divine gift.
The first of these explanations offered here in the Unam Sanctam, the teaching that neither salvation nor remission of sins can be obtained outside the Catholic Church, is essentially important for the proper understanding of the doctrine of the necessity of the Church. The remission of sins, original or mortal, is absolutely necessary part of the process of salvation for the men of this world. In teaching us that this first salvation cannot take place outside of God's supernatural kingdom on earth, Pope Boniface VIII has focussed our attention on the nature of salvation itself.
Considered actively or as a process, salvation consists in saving a man, in transferring him from a bad condition, one in which the continuation of life is impossible, to a situation of security and enjoyment. In this way a man is saved if he is taken off a sinking ship and brought to another vessel in the seaworthy condition, and thence to his home ashore. Considered objectively, salvation is the benefit received by man who saved.
In the vocabulary of the faith and of sacred theology, the process of salvation takes place when a man is removed from the condition of spiritual death, or of original or mortal sin, and transferred to the condition in which he enjoys supernatural friendship of God and the possession of the life of supernatural grace. This process is brought to its final termination when, in the possession of [the] Beatific Vision, the man saved attains the ultimate and unending perfection of life of grace, and is forever exempt from the danger of losing it.
Thus, absolutely and ultimately, salvation in the theological order is to be found in the attainment of the Beatific Vision. The word is employed in this sense in the statement that there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church. But, for every individual who comes into this world in the state of original sin, the forgiveness of original or mortal sin is an integral and absolutely necessary part of the process of salvation. The most important lesson taught in the Unam sanctam is the truth that this remission of sin, original or mortal, cannot be obtained outside the one supernatural kingdom of God here on earth, the society which we know as the Catholic Church.
In order to understand this aspect of the mystery of the Church, we must take cognizance of the fact, presented to us in Catholic doctrine, that the Beatific Vision is a vital act, the ultimate and perfective expression of a genuinely supernatural life. Furthermore, we must also realize that in reality, by God's own institution, there is no situation available to men other than the sinful aversion from God or the possession of the supernatural life of sanctifying grace.
The Supernatural Order
The salvation to which the Catholic Church refers when it teaches the dogma of its own necessity is inherently and essentially a supernatural thing. The Beatific Vision, in the acquisition of which the process of salvation is completed, is the direct and clear intellectual apprehension of God in the Trinity of His Persons. As such, it is an act absolutely beyond the natural power or competence or exigencies of any creature, actual or possible. It is the kind of operation which may be called natural only to God Himself.
An act is said to be natural to some being when it lies within the area of his natural competence. In terms of understanding intelligence (and it is within the framework of understanding that the ultimate distinction between the natural and the intrinsically supernatural must be discerned), an act is natural when it is the apprehension of some reality within the sphere of the proper object or that creature's intelligence.
There can be, and there truly are, intellectual creatures completely superior to man. Yet, in every case, these creatures must inevitably and necessarily have their natural intellectual activity on the plane of their own being. Every creature, as a creature, is a being in which existence is something really distinct from essence. There is and there can be no creature which exists necessarily. All have received, and continue to receive, whatever being they possess from God Himself.
Hence the proper formal object of the intelligence of any created creature, actual or possible, is necessarily something on the created level. From the examination of the reality within the compass of that proper formal object, any intellectual creature is able to arrive at a knowledge of God insofar as He is knowable as the First Cause of creatures. The clarity and profundity of this knowledge will be more perfect in proportion as the created intellect itself is more perfect. Thus the natural knowledge of God by a created pure spirit would be immensely better than any natural knowledge of Him available to man, a rational animal. But this natural knowledge of God by a created pure spirit would, in the last analysis, remain within the range of understanding of God known through the examination of the effects He has produced in the created universe. This would mean an intellectual knowledge of God in the unity of His Nature, but not of the Blessed Trinity.
One the other hand, there is a type of knowledge of God which is natural only to God Himself. In the infinitely perfect act of understanding which is in no way really distinct from Himself, the Triune God sees Himself perfectly in the Trinity of Persons, really distinct from one another, but subsisting in one and the same divine nature with which each three persons is identified.
The basic truth about God's dealings with His intellectual creatures is to be found in the fact that it has pleased His goodness and wisdom to endow these intellectual creatures with the kind of knowledge of Him which He possesses Himself. Thus, from the created pure spirit (the angels), and for the entire human race, God has established and end or a final perfection completely distinct and superior to the final end which these intellectual creatures would naturally have been ordered. By the force of His degree the only ultimate and eternal perfection and beatitude available to these intellectual creatures is this intrinsically supernatural good, the knowledge and the possession of Himself in the Trinity of Divine Persons in the clarity of the Beatific Vision.
This immediate intellectual cognizance of God in the Trinity of His Persons is, by its very essence, something above and beyond the natural needs and deserts of intellectual creatures. Furthermore, it is a vital act, accompanied by and belonging with a complexus of other acts which, taken together, constitute a true supernatural life. The love of friendship for God, as understood in the Trinity of His Persons, is one of those acts.
Now, the second truth about the supernatural order is the fact that God, in His wisdom and goodness, has willed to give the Beatific Vision to His intellectual creatures as something they have earned or merited. Quite obviously this benefit is not to be earned through the performance of any activity on a merely natural plane. The only kind of activity which can truly merit the Beatific Vision is activity within the supernatural order itself, the working of the essentially supernatural life. Hence, every intellectual creature called to the possession and enjoyment of the Beatific Vision, there is a period in which this life of the Beatific Vision is meant to be lived in a preparatory or militant stage. For the children of Adam, this period is to be found in the life of this world.
Hence God wills that men should live and grow in the life of the Beatific Vision in this world so as to be able to merit the eternal possession and enjoyment of the Triune Go in the world to come. In this period of trail and preparation it is quite obvious that the Beatific Vision itself is not available. The thing being merited is not being enjoyed while it is being merit. Consequently, during the period of this life, the supernatural awareness of God which guides and enlightens the supernatural lie is that of divine faith. This consists in the certain acceptance of God's own message about Himself and about the eternal and salvific decrees of His providence in our regard. It is essentially supernatural, in that it tells us of God in the Trinity of His Persons. Faith is intrinsically a preparation and a substitute for the Beatific Vision itself, since it conveys information about that very Reality which we hope eventually to understand and to see in the glory of the Beatific Vision. At the same time it is completely distinct and superior to any merely natural knowledge about God.
The love of charity which will accompany the Beatific Vision in the saints for all eternity also is meant to accompany the act and the virtue of divine faith in this world. And, where this charity is present, the supernatural life itself exists and operates. Where it is not present, there is no supernatural life, although faith and hope may still exist.
The immediate supernatural principles of the supernatural life in this world are various infused theological and moral virtues and the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost. The ultimate intrinsic and created supernatural principle of this life is the quality known as sanctifying grace. This quality acts as the ultimate intrinsic created principle of the supernatural life in this world and in the next.
Now the process of salvation consists primarily in the bestowal of this life of sanctifying grace upon a person who has hitherto not possessed it. Ultimately it consists in granting of the Beatific Vision to this individual. For, according to God's own institution, as He has made known to us in the message He has revealed to us in Jesus Christ His Son, the life of sanctifying grace in heaven, the life of the Beatific Vision itself, can be enjoyed only as the continuation and the fruition of the life of grace which has begun to operate in this world, and which is existent at the very moment when the individual passes from this life to the next. The only men who will see God in heaven are those who have passed from this life in the state of grace.
Thus there are two factors to be considered in the bestowal of the Beatific Vision. The first is the giving of the life of grace to the person in this world. The second is the actual attainment of the clear understanding and possession of the Triune God in heaven. It is the teaching of the Unam sanctam that both of those factors or benefits are available only within the Catholic Church.
The Terminus a quo In The Process of Salvation
The gift fact which the documents of the Church designate as "salvation" is the Beatific Vision, the ultimate flowering of the supernatural life of sanctifying grace which must begin in this world. A man is said to be saved, ultimately, when he receives the supernatural benefit of the Beatific Vision. The term "salvation," however, involves more than this.
The key fact which must be taken into consideration in any theological explanation of salvation is the truth that actually the bestowal of the life of sanctifying grace is inseparable from the remission of original or mortal sin in the world which we live. There have been cases in which this was not so. Our Lord, in His human nature, possessed in a completely perfect manner all the gifts of sanctifying grace and, both by reason of His Person and by reason of the fact that He was not descended from Adam by a process of carnal generation, He was never in anyway stained with the guilt of original sin.
His Blessed Mother was immaculately conceived. By the pre-applied merits of His Passion and death, she was preserved from any taint of sin from the very moment she began to exist. In her case, also, the granting of the gift of sanctifying grace was not accompanied by any remission of sin. With her, the beginning of existence coincided with the beginning of the supernatural life of sanctifying grace. Likewise, Adam and Eve, before the fall, were constituted in grace from the first moment of their existence. With them, however, the second granting of the life of grace was brought about through the remission of sin.
In every one of their descendants this same thing has occurred except for the cases of Our Lord and His Blessed Mother. Mary expected, every person born into the family of Adam through the process of carnal regeneration has come into this world in the state of original sin. Both this origin sin and the mortal sin of men commit during the course of their lives are incompatible with the live of grace. And, by the institution of God Himself, the stain of sin can be removed only by the granting of the life of grace.
The state of sin, original or mortal, is a state of aversion from or enmity with God. The removal of that state is accomplished when, and only when, the person who has hitherto been in the state of sin is constituted in the condition of friendship with God and is properly ordered to Him. And there is no situation other than that of sanctifying grace itself which a man can be well ordered toward God.
To be well ordered toward God, or to be in a state of friendship with Him, a man must be working toward the goal God Himself has set for him. And, according to God's own revealed message, the one goal or end in the attainment of which man may find his ultimate and eternal beatitude is that of the Beatific Vision. There is no other ultimate end available to man. If he fails to attain this objective then, whatever he may seem to have accomplished during the course of his earthly life, he will have been forever a failure. There is no state of neutrality toward God, and there is no possible state of merely natural friendship with Him available to the children of Adam.
In other words, all and only the persons who are not in the state of grace are those in the state of original or mortal sin. All and only the persons who are not in the state of original or mortal sin o both possess the life of sanctifying grace. Hence, according to God's own institution, the process by which a man who has hitherto not been in a state of grace receives this supernatural life from God is necessarily the process by which his original or mortal sin is forgiven. The terminus a quo of the transfer by which a man is brought into the state of supernatural grace is necessarily, for the children of Adam, the state of original and mortal sin.
Our Lord's Function in the Remission of Sin and the Granting of the Life of Grace.
It is a basic and central part of God's revealed message that the remission of sin, the process in which the supernatural life of sanctifying grace is infused into a soul which has hitherto been deprived of it, is possible only through and in Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. It is in Our Lord, according to St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians, that "we have redemption through his blood, the remission of sins, according to the riches of his grace." [Eph., 1:7] And St. Peter, in his first Epistle, speaks of "the God of all grace, who hath called us unto his eternal glory in Christ Jesus." [1Peter., 5:10] In fact one may say that the central message of the New Testament is the fact that salvation and remission of sins are possible only in and through Our Lord.
By His suffering and death, He redeemed us and freed us from the bonds of iniquities. The actual graces or divine aids by which a man is enabled to move toward the love of charity for God and the hatred of sin which come together at the moment of justification have been merited for us by Our Lord. So too are graces by which a man is effectively and freely moved to justification and to increase in the life of grace required, along with the remission of sin, in the process of justification.
Moreover, justification, the actual transfer of a man from the state of original or mortal sin into the state of sanctifying grace, is only possible in Our Lord. Hence the dogma of the Catholic Church's necessity for attainment of eternal salvation and for the remission of sin manifests itself as the clear and accurate statement of the meaning actually conveyed in the scriptural expression "in Christ Jesus". Neither justification nor glorification -- that is, neither the remission of our sins nor attainment of the Beatific Vision -- is possible except "in Christ Jesus." And the Church, in the divinely inspired epistles of St. Paul, is represented precisely though metaphorically as "the Body of Christ." To be "in Christ Jesus," then, is to be "within" the Mystical Body of Christ, Our Lord's one and only true Church or kingdom.
It is highly important for us to realize that, in asserting the dogma of its own necessity for salvation and for the living of the life of sanctifying grace, the Catholic Church is simply stating in a non-figurative fashion the very truth which Our Lord Himself expounded through His use of the metaphor of the vine and the branches. Our Lord taught:
1 I am the true vine: and my Father is the husbandman. 2 Every branch in me that beareth not fruit, he will take away: and every one that beareth fruit, he will purge it, that it may bring forth more fruit. 3 Now you are clean, by reason of the word which I have spoken to you. 4 Abide in me: and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abide in the vine, so neither can you, unless you abide in me. 5 I am the vine: you the branches. He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same beareth much fruit: for without me you can do nothing. 6 If any one abide not in me, he shall be cast forth as a branch and shall wither: and they shall gather him up and cast him into the fire: and he burneth. 7 If you abide in me and my words abide in you, you shall ask whatever you will: and it shall be done unto you. 8 In this is my Father glorified: that you bring forth very much fruit and become my disciples. [John 15]Our Lord Himself explained the reality of this "abiding" in Him which was requisite for the life of grace and of salvation in the Eucharistic Discourse itself.
Then Jesus said to them: Amen, amen, I say unto you: except you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you. 54 He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath everlasting life: and I will raise him up in the last day. 55 For my flesh is meat indeed: and my blood is drink indeed. 56 He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood abideth in me: and I in him. 57 As the living Father hath sent me and I live by the Father: so he that eateth me, the same also shall live by me. 58 This is the bread that came down from heaven. Not as your fathers did eat manna and are dead. He that eateth this bread shall live for ever. 59 These things he said, teaching in the synagogue, in Capharnaum. [John 6]Thus, according to this teaching by Our Lord, the beginning, the continutation, the development, and the eternal possession of the supernatural life, the life on the level of God rather than the mere natural life of the creature, is completely dependent upon abiding in Him. And, as He has clearly explained, the individual in whom Our Lord abides, and who dwells or abides in Our Lord, is the one who partakes of the Eucharistic banquet of Our Lord's Body and Blood. Quite obviously Our Lord is speaking in terms of a worthy reception of the Eucharist.
Now, by divine constitution of the Church militant in the New Testament, the social unity is the one social unit within which men may partake worthily of the Eucharistic banquet. Our Lord's own ecclesia is the one and only company within which the Eucharist itself was instituted and for which it was intended. The Eucharistic sacrifice is offered, and the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist is received rightly and properly only within this community. Conversely, any man who fruitfully and worthily partakes of this Eucharistic feast is within the true Church, at least by intention.
Our Lord's statement that "he that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood abideth in me: and I in him" is definately not restricted to the physical reception of the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist. A spiritual reception of the Eucharist which consists in a desire (even an implicit desire) to partake in the Sacrament and to profit from that reception is sufficient for this union with Our Lord in the case of a person for whom actual reception or physical reception of the Sacrament is, for one reason or another, really impossible.
Thus, Our Lord explains the matter, salvation and the supernatural life of sanctifying grace are possible for the member of the Church who is within this society as one of its integral parts., and who is vitally joined to Our Lord by worthy reception of the Sacrament of His Love. It is also possible for the Catholic who is unable physically to receive the Sacrament, but who, with a desire of the Sacrament and of its effects and with the intention of charity animating that desire, is integrated into the Church, the household of the living God, within which and for which that sacrifice is offered and that sacrament is confected. It is also possible for the non-member of the Church [i.e., a non Catholic] who, unable to attain membership in Christ's Mystical Body and enlightened by true and supernatural divine faith, loves God with the affection of true charity and, in that love, forms at least an implicit desire of the sacrament and of its salvific effects. In this last case the man who possesses this deisre, presenting it to God in the form of prayer, will receive the guerdon he seeks, union with Our Lord in His company, which is the Church. The man is brought into the Church (though obviously not constituted as a member of the Chuch) and into spiritual and salvific reception of Our Lord's Body and Blood, through the force of his prayer and desire that are animated and motivated by divine charity.
This is the meaning of the teaching about the Church's necessity for the attainment of eternal salvation and for the remission of sins which has been brought out so powerfully and profoundly in the Unam sanctam. In this great document of Pope Boniface VII brings out his teaching principally by the use of two of the metaphorical scriptural names or designations of the Church. He employs the name and the notion of the Church as "Spouse of Christ" to show that those who are within the Church are within the reality which may be said to constitute one body with Him. And he employs the term "Mystical Body" to designate the Church as a social unit within which alone there is intimate and salvic contact with Our Divine Redeemer. And thus, in his enunciation and explanation of the dogma, he brings out, in the technically expressive terminology of sacred theology, the very lesson which Our Lord brought out so forcefully in figurative language He used in teaching His disciples.
The Dogma and the Error of Quesnel
When the Unam sanctam teaches us that there can be no remission of sins outside the Catholic Church, it is telling us, actually, that it is impossible to obtain the life of sanctifying grace or to live that life outside the supernatural kingdom of God. It is brining out the divinely revealed truth that, by God's own institution, the life of sanctifying grace is to be possessed and derived from Our Lord by those whoa re united with Him, abiding in Him, in His Mystical Body, which is the Catholic Church.
We must be especially clear, both in our concepts and in our terminology, on this point. What the Unam sanctam certainly implies in declaring the necessity of the Church of the remission of sins, is the truth that the life of sanctifying grace and the supernatural habitus of sanctifying grace can be obtained and possessed only within the Church. In the light of Catholic doctrine, however, it is both certain and obvious that actual graces are offered to and received by men who are definitely "outside the Church," in the sense in which this expression is employed in the ecclesiastical documents which state the dogma of the Church's necessity for the attainment of eternal salvation. As a matter of fact the proposition that "no grace is granted outside the Church (extra ecclesiam nulla conceditur gratia)" is one of these condemned explicitly by Pope Clement XI in his dogmatic constitution Unigenitus, issuesd September 8, 1713, and directed against the teachings of Pasquier Quesnel. [Denz., 1379]
It is certain with the certitude of divine faith itself that actual graces are really necessary to prepare men for and to move them to the very acts by which they come to be "within the Church." Thus, in the light of Catholic teaching, it is obvious that these graces are offered and granted to men who are really outside the Church, lacking both real membership in the supernatural kingdom and any real desire of membership.
Except in the case of a true moral miracle, such as that which occurred in the instantaneous conversion of St. Paul, the process of justification (which can terminate only within the true Church) is preceded by a series of acts which, together, constitute a preparation for justification. In a famous chapter of its decree on justification the Council of Trent listed and briefly explained some of these acts, as they occur in the case of one who has hitherto lacked the true faith. Under the heading it speaks of acts of faith, of salutary fear, of hope, of initial love of God, and of pre-baptismal penance. The process of this preparation for justification, according to this chapter, ends with the intention to receive baptism, to begin a new live, and to observe God's commandments. [Cf. Denz., 798]
Now an unbaptized person who has not the Christian faith is in no sense within the Catholic Church. He does not begin to live within it, either as a member or as one who sincerely desires to become a member even when he begins to make his initial act of faith. Yet, according to the clear and infallibly true teaching of the Catholic Church, divine grace is absolutely require, not oly for the eliciting of the act of faith itself, but even for what the Second Council of Orange calls the "affectus credulitatis," [Cf. Denz., 178] the disposition or willingness to believe. This actual grace is definitely given to men who are outside the Church. And thus the assertion that no grace is granted outside the Church is completely incompatible with Catholic teaching, even though it is Catholic doctrine that the life of supernatural grace itself is not to be obtained or possessed outside the Church.
The Church's Unity and Unicity
The basic teaching of this opening section of the Unam sanctam is the truth that the supernatural life of sanctifying grace can neither begin nor continue apart from and outside Our Lord's Mystical Body. Thus it constitutes a powerful and supremely accurate commentary on those passages of Sacred Scripture which show us that the supernatural life of grace cannot exist other than in and through Our Lord, and thus in His company, the society which was and is so intimately joined to Our Saviour that persecution of it was described by Him as persecution of Himself.
The presentation of this truth is made especially forceful in this document by its insistence that this community outside which there is neither salvation nor remission of sins, is genuinely one and unique. Pope Boniface VIII appeals to scriptural images, like that of the ark of Noe and the seamless robe of Christ. He adduces the teaching in the Canticle of Canticles that the beloved, the figure of the Church, is truly and only one. He appeals to the fact that in the Church there is "one Lord, one faith, one baptism," and to the bounds of unity existing within the Church. Finally, he points to the unity of the Church's leadership, exercised by the Bishop of Rome by the authority and in the name of one spiritual and supreme Head, Jesus Christ.
In thus insisting on the unity of the company outside which there is no salvation, the Unam sanctam brings out supremely practical implications of this dogma. The Church within which men must enter and dwell if they are to attain the remission of their sins and the possession and final flowering of the supernatural life is definitely one community, undivided in itself, and quite distinct from every other social unity in existence. This one company is the ecclesia which all must seek to enter, and within which they must remain if they are to be pleasing to God in this world and in the next. The dogma of the Church's necessity for the attainment of eternal salvation, as seen in his light, is certainly not an affair of mere theory or speculation, but a truth which men must accept as revealed by God Himself, and which they must use as a guiding principle in their own lives.
The Church's Visibility
The intensely practical presentation of this dogma in the Unam sanctam is increased by this document's insistence on the visbility of the one society within which alone men may find salvation and the forgiveness of their sins. The true Church which is necessary for the attainment of salvation is the one society over which Peter and his successors rule by Our Lord's own commission. Our Lord confided all of His sheep, all of the people whom the Father had given to Him to be brought to eternal life, to the care of Peter. Those individuals who describe themselves as not confided to St. Peter and his successors, and thus are not owing obedience to them, characterize themselves as not being among the sheep of Christ. They show themselves to be outside the company within which alone there is salvific contact with Our Lord.
This strong and realistic teaching of the Unam sanctam is most perfectly manifested in the definition in which this document ends.
Hence We declared, state, define, and assert that for every human creatre submission to the Roman Pontiff (subesse Romano Pontifici) is absolutely necessary for salvation (omnino de necessitate salutis). [Denz., 469]During our own times, prior to the issuance of the encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi, there was a manifest tendency on the part of some Catholic writers to teach of the existence of a so-called "invisible Church," in some way distinct from the organization over which the Roman Pontiff presides, and to ascribe to the imaginary entity the necessity for salvation. The closing sentence of the Unam sanctam had long ago rendered this position absolutely untenable from a theological point of view. As this document showed most clearly, the Church outside which there is neither salvation nor the remission of sins is, in fact, the society over which the Roman Pontiff presides as the Vicar of Christ and as the successor of St. Peter. It is the society designated by the Bellarminian definition of the true Church, as the assembly of men united in the same profession of the same Christian faith and by the communion of the same sacraments, under the rule of the legitimate pastors, and especially of the Roman Pontiff, the one Vicar of Christ on earth. [Cf. De ecclesia militante, c. 2]
These points are brought out with particular clarity in the Unam sanctam:
(1) The Church is necessary, not only for attainment of salvation itself, but for the forgiveness of sins, which is inseparable from the granting of supernatural life of sanctifying grace.
(2) The Church is necessary for the attainment of salvation and of the life of grace precisely because it is the Body and the Spouse of Christ.
(3) Attainment of salvation in the Church involves union with the Bishop of Rome.
(4) The dogma of the Church's necessity for the attainment of eternal salvation cannot be explained accurately in terms of any "invisible Church."
End.
20070718
The Fourth Oecumenical Council of the Latern
In the Firmiter, the first chapter of the doctrinal declaration of the Fourth Lateran Council, we find the following declaration: "There is, then, one universal Church of the faithful (una...fidelium universalis ecclesia), outside of which no one at all is saved (extra quam nullus omnino salvatur)."1
This formula bears a singular resemblance to one contained in the profession of faith prescribed by Pope Innocent III in 1209 for the Waldensians who wished to return to the Catholic Church: "We believe in our hearts and we profess orally that there is one Church, not that of the heretics, but the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic [Church], outside of which we believe that no one will be saved."2
Each of these documents represent three distinct statements as truths actually revealed by God, and consequently as doctrines which men are obligated to accept with the assent of divine faith itself. By immediate and necessary implication, they condemn as heretical the teaching contradictory to these three dogmas of the Catholic faith. They assert that:
(1) It is divinely revealed that there is only one true ecclesia or Church of God.
(2) It is a divinely revealed truth that this one true ecclesia is the Roman Catholic Church, the social unit properly termed "the universal Church of the faithful".
(3) No one at all, according to God's own revelation, can be saved if, at the moment of his death, he is "outside" this society.
As a result, according to the teaching of these documents, it would be heretical to imagine that there is more than one social unity in this world that can be designated as God's true ecclesia, that the Roman Catholic Church is not this true ecclesia, or that any person could attain to salvation outside of the Roman Catholic Church.
In a study like ours, the special value of these two documents is to be found in the fact that they place the dogma of the Church's necessity for the attainment of salvation against its proper background, and that they. particularly the statement of the Lateran Council, bring out clearly the real and complete necessity of the Church according to the actual designs of God's providence.
These two declarations of the teaching Church during the pontificates of Pope Innocent III set the dogmas of the Church's necessity for the attainment of eternal salvation in their proper perspective precisely because they state this teaching against the background of the divinely revealed truths that there is only one true supernatural kingdom of God (or ecclesia) in the world, and that this ecclesia is the Roman Catholic Church. This true supernatural kingdom of God on earth, God's ecclesia, is something definable and understandable in terms of its necessity for the attainment of the Beatific Vision. If we are to understand the terminology of the teaching set forth by the Fourth Council of the Lateran, we must realize that the men who drew up this profession of faith and all the men of the thirteenth century, both Catholics and heretics, were well aware of the fact that "the social unit outside of which no one at all is saved" and "the true Church or kingdom of God" are objectively identical. The heretics denied that the social unit over which the Bishop of Rome presides as visible head is actually the true ecclesia of God described in the Scriptures. But they certainly would not and did not question the fact that, wherever it was to be found, this true ecclesia is the company outside of which no one at all may attain the possession of the Beatific Vision.
For all these men, Catholics and heretics alike, the genuine Church of God was the company of His chosen people, the people of His covenant it was the company of those who professed their acceptance of the divine and supernatural law by which God directs men to the attainment of the one ultimate and eternal happiness available to them, the happiness which is to be obtained only in the possession of the Beatific Vision. The true Church was the beneficiary of God's promises. It was the repository of His supernatural revelation. It dwelt in this world as in a place of pilgrimage, awaiting the glory of the fatherland of heaven.
They knew that the Church triumphant in heaven was to be the continuation and the flowering of the Church militant now existing on this earth, and that the people of the Church triumphant were, in point of fact, the people who had passed from this life "within" the Church militant and living the life of sanctifying grace. Thus they saw that the Church militant was actually something understandable in terms of necessity for the attainment of eternal salvation.
The profession of faith of the Fourth Lateran Council and the formula which the returning Waldensians were obliged to accept both insisted upon the unity and the unicity of the Church outside of which no one can be saved. Both asserted that this ecclesia definable and understandable as the social unit outside of which no one can attain eternal salvation, is the religious society over which the Bishop of Rome presides. The profession of faith for the returning Waldensians states that this ecclesia of God is not the Church of heretics, but that it is "the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic" Church. The Firmiter teaches exactly the same thing when it asserts that this one ecclesia outside of which no one at all is saved is the "one universal Church of the faithful."
The term fidelis had and still has a definite teachnical meaning in the language of Christianity. The fidelis, or the faithful, are not merely the individuas who have made an act of divine faith in accepting the teaching of God's public and Christian revelation. They are actually those who have made the baptismal profession of faith, and who have not cut themselves off from the unity of the Church by public apostasy or heresy or schism and have not been cast out of the Church by the process of excommunication. In other words, according to the present terminology of sacred theology, the fidelis is simply the Catholic, the member of the Catholic Church. Thus the Church of the faithful, the universalis ecclesia fidelium, is nothing but the visible Catholic Church itself. And the formula of the Fourth Council of the Lateran tells us that this ecclesia fidelium is the one supernatural kingdom of God on earth, the company outside of which no one at all can attain eternal salvation.
Actually, in the traditional language of the Church, the term christianus itself had a wider application than the word fidelis. A catechumen might be designated as a christianus, but never as a fidelis.3 A man gained the dignity and the position of a fidelis through the reception of the sacrament of baptism. The sacrament is precisely the sacrament of the faith. By the force of the character it imparts, it incorporates the person who receives it into that community which is the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ. The effect pf that incorporation is broken only by public heresy or apostasy, by schism. or by the full measure of excommunication. The man in whom the incorporating work of baptismal character remains unbroken is the fidelis, the member of the Catholic Church. The social unit composed of these fideles is, according to the teaching of the Fourth Lateran Council, the true Church, outside which no one at all is saved.
Now, the Council teaches that a man must be in some way "within" the Church of the faithful in order to be saved. It does not, however, in anyway teach or even imply that no one other than one of the fideles can actually attain the Beatific Vision. And, for that matter, no other authoritative declaration of the Church issues such a teaching or supports any such implication. It is not, and it has never been, the teaching of the Catholic Church that only actual members of the Church can attain eternal salvation. According to the teaching of the Church's own magisterium, salvation can be attained and, as a matter of fact, has been attained by persons who, at the moment of their death, were not members of this Church. The Church has thus never confused the notion of being "outside the Church" with that of being a non-member of this society.
Thus the Fathers of the Fourth Lateran Council and all other churchmen who have drawn up authoritative statements of the Church's teaching on the necessity of the Church for the attainment of eternal salvation were well aware of what St. Augustine had taught about men who suffered martyrdom for the sake of Christ before having had the opportunity to receive the sacrament of baptism. In his De civitate Dei, St. Augustine taught that "whosoever dies for Christ, not having received the laver of regeneration, has this avail him for the forgiveness of sins as much as if these sins had been forgiven in the sacred fount of baptism."4 Since the forgiveness of mortal or original sin is accomplished only in the infusion of the life of sanctifying grace, the person whose sins are forgiven is in the state of grace. If such a person dies in the state of grace, he will inevitably attain to the Beatific Vision. He will be saved, as having died "within" and not "outside" the true Church.
Furthermore, they knew that there is no such thing as real membership in the Church militant of the New Testament, the true and only ecclesia fidelium, apart from the reception of the sacrament of baptism. Thus, when the Fathers of the Fourth Oecumenical Council of the Lateran, and the other authoritative teachings of the Catholic Church, followed St. Augustine in holding that a men could be saved if he died as a martyr for Our Lord while still unbaptized, they were clearly showing that, in their declarations that no one can be saved outside the Church, they did not mean that only members of the Church may obtain the Beatific Vision. The unbaptized martyr for Our Lord passed from this life "within" the ecclesia fidelium, despite the fact that he died without having attained the status of Fidelis.
Again, the Fathers of the Fourth Oecumenical Council of the Lateran were well aware of the fact that an unbaptized man could be saved even if he did not die a martyr's death. ALl of them accepted as Catholic doctrine the teaching St. Ambrose had set forth in his sermon De oblitu Valentiniani:
Such was the doctrinal background against which the Fathers of the Lateran Council issued their teaching on the necessity of the Catholic Church for the attainment of the Beatific Vision. They believed that non-members of the Catholic Church could achieve salvation. This, when they taught that no one at all could be saved "outside" the one Church of the faithful, they obviously did not mean to say that being outside of the Church was equivalent to being a non-member of this social unit.
On the other hand, they just as obviously did not mean that being a member of the Church, or even desiring to enter the Church, constituted any absolute guarantee of salvation. It is unfortunately possible to have a man die as a member of the true Church, and die in the state of mortal sin. It is likewise possible to have a man actually desire to enter the Church, and die before he had the opportunity to be baptized, and to have that man lose his soul through some other offense against God. In other words, it is possible for a man to lose his soul if he dies "within" the Church. The Fourth General Council of the Lateran brought out the fact that it is absolutely impossible to attain to eternal salvation if a man passes from this life "outside" the true Church.
Thus, according to the infallibly true teaching of the section of the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council, we may draw the following conclusions:
(1) At the moment of death a man must be in some way "within" the Catholic Church (either as a member or as one who desires and prayers to enter it) if he is to attain to eternal salvation.
(2) There is absolutely no exceptions to this rule. Otherwise the statement that "no one at all (nullus omnino) is saved outside of the one universal Church of the faithful would not be true. And that statement is true. It is an infallible dogmatic pronouncement of an Oecumenical Council of the Catholic Church.
(4) Any attempt to explain the Church's necessity for salvation that it is only the "ordinary" means, or by imagining that it is requisite only for those who are aware of its dignity and position, is completely false and unacceptable.
End.
This formula bears a singular resemblance to one contained in the profession of faith prescribed by Pope Innocent III in 1209 for the Waldensians who wished to return to the Catholic Church: "We believe in our hearts and we profess orally that there is one Church, not that of the heretics, but the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic [Church], outside of which we believe that no one will be saved."2
Each of these documents represent three distinct statements as truths actually revealed by God, and consequently as doctrines which men are obligated to accept with the assent of divine faith itself. By immediate and necessary implication, they condemn as heretical the teaching contradictory to these three dogmas of the Catholic faith. They assert that:
(1) It is divinely revealed that there is only one true ecclesia or Church of God.
(2) It is a divinely revealed truth that this one true ecclesia is the Roman Catholic Church, the social unit properly termed "the universal Church of the faithful".
(3) No one at all, according to God's own revelation, can be saved if, at the moment of his death, he is "outside" this society.
As a result, according to the teaching of these documents, it would be heretical to imagine that there is more than one social unity in this world that can be designated as God's true ecclesia, that the Roman Catholic Church is not this true ecclesia, or that any person could attain to salvation outside of the Roman Catholic Church.
In a study like ours, the special value of these two documents is to be found in the fact that they place the dogma of the Church's necessity for the attainment of salvation against its proper background, and that they. particularly the statement of the Lateran Council, bring out clearly the real and complete necessity of the Church according to the actual designs of God's providence.
These two declarations of the teaching Church during the pontificates of Pope Innocent III set the dogmas of the Church's necessity for the attainment of eternal salvation in their proper perspective precisely because they state this teaching against the background of the divinely revealed truths that there is only one true supernatural kingdom of God (or ecclesia) in the world, and that this ecclesia is the Roman Catholic Church. This true supernatural kingdom of God on earth, God's ecclesia, is something definable and understandable in terms of its necessity for the attainment of the Beatific Vision. If we are to understand the terminology of the teaching set forth by the Fourth Council of the Lateran, we must realize that the men who drew up this profession of faith and all the men of the thirteenth century, both Catholics and heretics, were well aware of the fact that "the social unit outside of which no one at all is saved" and "the true Church or kingdom of God" are objectively identical. The heretics denied that the social unit over which the Bishop of Rome presides as visible head is actually the true ecclesia of God described in the Scriptures. But they certainly would not and did not question the fact that, wherever it was to be found, this true ecclesia is the company outside of which no one at all may attain the possession of the Beatific Vision.
For all these men, Catholics and heretics alike, the genuine Church of God was the company of His chosen people, the people of His covenant it was the company of those who professed their acceptance of the divine and supernatural law by which God directs men to the attainment of the one ultimate and eternal happiness available to them, the happiness which is to be obtained only in the possession of the Beatific Vision. The true Church was the beneficiary of God's promises. It was the repository of His supernatural revelation. It dwelt in this world as in a place of pilgrimage, awaiting the glory of the fatherland of heaven.
They knew that the Church triumphant in heaven was to be the continuation and the flowering of the Church militant now existing on this earth, and that the people of the Church triumphant were, in point of fact, the people who had passed from this life "within" the Church militant and living the life of sanctifying grace. Thus they saw that the Church militant was actually something understandable in terms of necessity for the attainment of eternal salvation.
The profession of faith of the Fourth Lateran Council and the formula which the returning Waldensians were obliged to accept both insisted upon the unity and the unicity of the Church outside of which no one can be saved. Both asserted that this ecclesia definable and understandable as the social unit outside of which no one can attain eternal salvation, is the religious society over which the Bishop of Rome presides. The profession of faith for the returning Waldensians states that this ecclesia of God is not the Church of heretics, but that it is "the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic" Church. The Firmiter teaches exactly the same thing when it asserts that this one ecclesia outside of which no one at all is saved is the "one universal Church of the faithful."
The term fidelis had and still has a definite teachnical meaning in the language of Christianity. The fidelis, or the faithful, are not merely the individuas who have made an act of divine faith in accepting the teaching of God's public and Christian revelation. They are actually those who have made the baptismal profession of faith, and who have not cut themselves off from the unity of the Church by public apostasy or heresy or schism and have not been cast out of the Church by the process of excommunication. In other words, according to the present terminology of sacred theology, the fidelis is simply the Catholic, the member of the Catholic Church. Thus the Church of the faithful, the universalis ecclesia fidelium, is nothing but the visible Catholic Church itself. And the formula of the Fourth Council of the Lateran tells us that this ecclesia fidelium is the one supernatural kingdom of God on earth, the company outside of which no one at all can attain eternal salvation.
Actually, in the traditional language of the Church, the term christianus itself had a wider application than the word fidelis. A catechumen might be designated as a christianus, but never as a fidelis.3 A man gained the dignity and the position of a fidelis through the reception of the sacrament of baptism. The sacrament is precisely the sacrament of the faith. By the force of the character it imparts, it incorporates the person who receives it into that community which is the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ. The effect pf that incorporation is broken only by public heresy or apostasy, by schism. or by the full measure of excommunication. The man in whom the incorporating work of baptismal character remains unbroken is the fidelis, the member of the Catholic Church. The social unit composed of these fideles is, according to the teaching of the Fourth Lateran Council, the true Church, outside which no one at all is saved.
Now, the Council teaches that a man must be in some way "within" the Church of the faithful in order to be saved. It does not, however, in anyway teach or even imply that no one other than one of the fideles can actually attain the Beatific Vision. And, for that matter, no other authoritative declaration of the Church issues such a teaching or supports any such implication. It is not, and it has never been, the teaching of the Catholic Church that only actual members of the Church can attain eternal salvation. According to the teaching of the Church's own magisterium, salvation can be attained and, as a matter of fact, has been attained by persons who, at the moment of their death, were not members of this Church. The Church has thus never confused the notion of being "outside the Church" with that of being a non-member of this society.
Thus the Fathers of the Fourth Lateran Council and all other churchmen who have drawn up authoritative statements of the Church's teaching on the necessity of the Church for the attainment of eternal salvation were well aware of what St. Augustine had taught about men who suffered martyrdom for the sake of Christ before having had the opportunity to receive the sacrament of baptism. In his De civitate Dei, St. Augustine taught that "whosoever dies for Christ, not having received the laver of regeneration, has this avail him for the forgiveness of sins as much as if these sins had been forgiven in the sacred fount of baptism."4 Since the forgiveness of mortal or original sin is accomplished only in the infusion of the life of sanctifying grace, the person whose sins are forgiven is in the state of grace. If such a person dies in the state of grace, he will inevitably attain to the Beatific Vision. He will be saved, as having died "within" and not "outside" the true Church.
Furthermore, they knew that there is no such thing as real membership in the Church militant of the New Testament, the true and only ecclesia fidelium, apart from the reception of the sacrament of baptism. Thus, when the Fathers of the Fourth Oecumenical Council of the Lateran, and the other authoritative teachings of the Catholic Church, followed St. Augustine in holding that a men could be saved if he died as a martyr for Our Lord while still unbaptized, they were clearly showing that, in their declarations that no one can be saved outside the Church, they did not mean that only members of the Church may obtain the Beatific Vision. The unbaptized martyr for Our Lord passed from this life "within" the ecclesia fidelium, despite the fact that he died without having attained the status of Fidelis.
Again, the Fathers of the Fourth Oecumenical Council of the Lateran were well aware of the fact that an unbaptized man could be saved even if he did not die a martyr's death. ALl of them accepted as Catholic doctrine the teaching St. Ambrose had set forth in his sermon De oblitu Valentiniani:
But I hear that you are sorrowing because he [the Emperor Valentinian II] did not receive the rites of baptism. Tell me, what else is there in us but will, but petitions? Now, quite recently it was his intention to be baptized before coming into Italy. He let it be known that he wanted to be baptized by me very shortly, and it was for that reason above all others, that he decided to have me sent for. Does he not, then, have the grace he desired? Does he not have what he prayed for? Surely, because he prayed for it, he has received it. Hence it is that "the soul of the just man will be at rest, what ever kind of death may overtake him."5St. Ambrose was speaking of an instance in which a man who had been a catechumen had died before he had an opportunity to receive the sacrament of baptism. He had passed from this life, then, as a non-member of the ecclesia fidelium. At the moment of his death he was not one of the fidelies. Yet, according to St. Ambrose, this man had died a good death. He had prayed for the grace of baptism, and God had given him this answer to his prayer.6 He had passed from this life "within" rather than "outside" the Church of the faithful. He had beenable to attain eternal salvation.
Such was the doctrinal background against which the Fathers of the Lateran Council issued their teaching on the necessity of the Catholic Church for the attainment of the Beatific Vision. They believed that non-members of the Catholic Church could achieve salvation. This, when they taught that no one at all could be saved "outside" the one Church of the faithful, they obviously did not mean to say that being outside of the Church was equivalent to being a non-member of this social unit.
On the other hand, they just as obviously did not mean that being a member of the Church, or even desiring to enter the Church, constituted any absolute guarantee of salvation. It is unfortunately possible to have a man die as a member of the true Church, and die in the state of mortal sin. It is likewise possible to have a man actually desire to enter the Church, and die before he had the opportunity to be baptized, and to have that man lose his soul through some other offense against God. In other words, it is possible for a man to lose his soul if he dies "within" the Church. The Fourth General Council of the Lateran brought out the fact that it is absolutely impossible to attain to eternal salvation if a man passes from this life "outside" the true Church.
Thus, according to the infallibly true teaching of the section of the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council, we may draw the following conclusions:
(1) At the moment of death a man must be in some way "within" the Catholic Church (either as a member or as one who desires and prayers to enter it) if he is to attain to eternal salvation.
(2) There is absolutely no exceptions to this rule. Otherwise the statement that "no one at all (nullus omnino) is saved outside of the one universal Church of the faithful would not be true. And that statement is true. It is an infallible dogmatic pronouncement of an Oecumenical Council of the Catholic Church.
(4) Any attempt to explain the Church's necessity for salvation that it is only the "ordinary" means, or by imagining that it is requisite only for those who are aware of its dignity and position, is completely false and unacceptable.
End.
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