Psychological Healing
in the Roman Catholic Mystic Tradition

Questions and Answers

Then can anyone be saved outside the Church?

Outline of the Answer • The Testimony of the Gospels • Doubt • The Risk of Speculation

 
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

 

Read an excerpt from a homily attributed to Saint Macarius, bishop

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.

 
Doubt

But what about doubt? 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 anyone 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? Well, it’s possible, but I really don’t know. Anyone who claims to know more than this rationally is just speculating.

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 doubt. And now let’s look directly at that doubt: Would you want to risk the eternal welfare of your soul on mere speculation?

 
The Risk of Speculation

You see, 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 refused to acknowledge and repent their sins.

So 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.

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—whether they acknowledge it as sin or not—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,” because once you can say “I don’t know” you have only one sane response: set aside speculation and stop taking risks.

 
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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.

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