|
|
|
Then
can anyone be saved outside the Church?
 he only honest answer to this question
is, “I don’t know”—but this requires some
explanation.
You see, if I simply gave you
the technical theological answer of the Church, you could just say, “I
don’t agree.” So, to say anything psychologically meaningful, we
need to bypass a technical answer and deal directly with doubt
itself.
To do this, let’s begin
with what the Gospels say.
The Testimony
of the Gospels
The testimony of the Gospels
makes it quite clear that only through Christ can a person enter the Kingdom
of Heaven.
|
So Jesus said
again, “Amen, amen, I say to you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who
came [before Me] are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to
them. I am the gate. Whoever enters through Me will be saved, and will come
in and go out and find pasture. . . .” |
|
|
—John
10:7-9 |
|
|
|
|
|
I am the way
and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through
Me. |
|
|
—John 14:6 |
|
This testimony also makes it
clear that baptism is a prerequisite for life
in Christ. (Let’s not forget, though, that in the early Church baptism
was an event of singular importance, unlike the mere social formality it
often becomes in today’s world. In the early Church, baptism meant a
sincere repentance of past sins, a literal
rejection of the pagan social world, and a dedication
to the holiness of a chaste body and pure heart,
at all costs, persevering unto death.) So, can someone unbaptized be saved?
According to the testimony of the early Church, “No.”
|
Whoever believes
and is baptized will be saved; whoever does not believe will be
condemned. |
|
|
—Mark
16:16 |
|
The testimony of the Gospels
also makes it clear that the Eucharist is essential for life in
Christ.
|
Amen, amen,
I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood,
you do not have life within you. |
|
|
—John 6:53 |
|
Now, can someone who denies Christ
be saved? According to the testimony of the Gospels,
“No.”
|
God so loved
the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him
might not perish but might have eternal life. For God did not send His Son
into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through
Him. Whoever believes in Him will not be condemned, but whoever does not
believe has already been condemned, because he has not believed in the Name
of the only Son of God. |
|
|
—John
3:16-18 |
|
Can someone who denies the grace
offered to us through the Church be saved? According to the testimony of
the Gospels, “No.”
|
I am the vine,
you are the branches. Whoever remains in Me and I in him will bear much fruit,
because without Me you can do nothing. Anyone who does not remain in Me will
be thrown out like a branch and wither; people will gather them and throw
them into a fire and they will be burned. |
|
|
—John
15:5-6 |
|
Therefore, the Gospels make it
perfectly clear that only through Jesus can we find salvation. Saint Peter
summed it up with these words:
|
There is no salvation
through anyone else, nor is there any other Name under Heaven given to the
human race by which we are to be saved. |
|
|
—Acts 4:12 |
|
OK. There are the many answers
given to us by Scripture.
Possibility
But what about possibility?
Can God do whatever He wants? And the answer is,
“Yes.”
|
For I tell you,
God can raise up children to Abraham from these stones. |
|
|
—Matthew
3:9 |
|
Then will God bring into
His presence someone from outside the Church? Or, said in another way, can
someone who does not know Christ somehow manage to keep Christ’s
commandments to love and to serve others out of an ardent, all-consuming
love for God? And, can this same person recognize
sin for what it is and manage to not die in a state of unrepentant mortal
sin? Well, it’s possible. There can be hope for those who avoid all
sin and who have been baptized with the desire for holiness.
Now, the Catechism of the
Catholic Church, quoting Lumen gentium, makes the following
point:
|
Those who, through
no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church, but
who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try
in their actions to do His will as they know it through the dictates of their
conscience—those too may achieve eternal
salvation.[1] |
|
|
—Catechism
of the Catholic Church, 847 |
|
Note carefully here that it’s
one thing to acknowledge that anyone may achieve salvation, and it’s
something else entirely whether anyone to whom that narrow door of salvation
is open will actually manage to fit through it.
So there’s the possibility.
And now let’s look directly at that possibility: Would you want to
risk the eternal welfare of your soul on speculation?
Purgatory
Beyond
Speculation
If God had wanted to just snap
His fingers and say, “You’re all saved,” then why did He go
to all the trouble of the Incarnation and Passion? The fact is, just wiping
sin away would have violated our
free will—and it would also violate divine
justice, as Jesus told Saint Faustina,
|
My mercy does
not want [the suffering in Purgatory], but justice demands
it. |
|
|
—Diary,
20 |
|
And so the Incarnation and Passion
show us, beyond any speculation, that the only path to salvation is through
our willingly taking up our cross through suffering
service to others, in loving obedience to God’s
will.
 According to the testimony
of the mystics, such as Saint Catherine of Genoa, who literally wrote the
book about
Purgatory [2], we can understand something
very important about all this.
As Saint Catherine learned, all
that separates a soul in hell from a soul in Purgatory
is sorrow for sin. Those
souls in hell are in hell, and eternally separated from God, precisely because,
in their physical lives, they declared their lack of love for God through
their refusal to acknowledge and repent their sins.
|
No matter what
religion you practice now, at the moment of your death you will find yourself
standing before Christ in the light of divine truth. Every act of your life
will be accounted for. It will all come down to two questions: did you really
love God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your
strength, and did you love your neighbor as yourself? Truth will be
absolute. There can be no excuses, no
deception. |
|
Repentance
Consequently, the whole key to
salvation is
repentance.
Assuming you have no unrepentant
mortal sins (sins that completely sever the
relation with God), in Purgatory all imperfections will be burned away. What
is left over will be sent to heaven, to enjoy everlasting life with
God.
|
You might think
here of imperfections as rust on metal, like your car. The more severe the
rust, the more metal has been consumed. When the rust is cleaned away, there
will be a lot of holes in the metal, right? So a soul with a lot of imperfections
will have a lot of “holes” in it when those imperfections are burned
out of it in Purgatory, and therefore not very much substance to get to heaven.
In contrast, a soul who has lived a holy life has very much substance for
heaven.
And note this,
too: the soul, unlike metal, can, through spiritual purgation (with the
assistance of the Sacraments of the Church) while in this world, clean off
old “rust” from past sins and have new life grow back to fill the
old holes—before getting to Purgatory. That’s a precious
gift from God. |
|
Taking Doubt
Seriously
Now, consider the full implications
of this. Only in Christ are we told what sin really is. And only through
Christ’s mercy can we receive absolution for
our sins once we acknowledge them. Nowhere, other than in the Catholic Church,
are we offered the opportunity and the graces
to see the full extent of sin, to name it as sin, and to repent
it.
It’s a horrifying thought,
but those persons who claim to live “good” lives and yet continue
to live in sin—even as they claim that it as
not sin—are fooling only themselves. And how do they fool themselves?
They fool themselves by not taking their doubt seriously enough to say, “I
don’t know; I could be wrong.” After all, once you can say “I
don’t know” you have only one sane response: set aside speculation
and stop taking risks.
Notes
1. Note that this passage refers to those persons
who never heard of Christ. Those who have heard of Christ but
reject Him present a different case, and such persons would do well to listen
to these words of Christ Himself: “Whoever rejects Me and does not accept
My words has something to judge him: the word that
I spoke, it will condemn him on the last day” (John 12:48).
2. The online text (which is now in the public
domain) may be found at www.catholic-forum.com:
Treatise
on Purgatory by Saint Catherine of Genoa.
No
advertising—no sponsor—just the simple truth . . .
|
|
  
|
Read
an excerpt from a homily attributed to