Path to salvation

In his article “The long journey to meet other Christians”  (April 22-29), Evans Chama gives the meaning of this phrase of St Cyprian of Carthage as “those outside the Church lacked the means of salvation, risking damnation”.

Yet for St Cyprian this was not an absolute statement about everyone who was not a member of the Catholic Church. It was directed against people who had knowingly and willingly broken away from Catholic unity, or who remained outside the Church by their own informed choice.

A look at the context in which popes and councils of later times used this phrase shows that they continued to use it with the same meaning.

When the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 said that “the universal Church of the faithful is one, outside of which no one at all can be saved”, it was speaking to such breakaway groups as the Albigensians, Cathars, Amalricians and Waldensians, not to the Indians of South America who had never heard of Jesus.

When Pope Boniface VIII wrote in 1302 that there is “one holy Catholic Church…outside of which there is neither salvation nor forgiveness of sins”, he was speaking against those states which wanted to separate their people from the Catholic Church and form national churches.

Again, when Pope Pius IX in 1854 rejected the view that “the path to salvation can be found in any religion at all”, he had in mind the “one religion is as good as another” mentality of European liberalism, which looked at religion merely in terms of its benefit to society.

He clearly restates the Church’s traditional understanding of “outside the Church there is no salvation” in 1863: “We all know that those who suffer from invincible ignorance with regard to our holy religion, if they keep the precepts of the natural law which have been written by God in the hearts of all, if they are prepared to obey God, and if they lead a virtuous life, can, by the power of divine light and grace, attain eternal life.  God, who knows completely the minds and souls, the thoughts and habits of all, will not permit, in accord with his infinite goodness and mercy, anyone who is not guilty of a voluntary fault to suffer eternal punishment”.

So before Vatican II a hundred years later produced an expanded version of this teaching in article 16 of its Constitution on the Church, the Catholic understanding of St Cyprian’s phrase at the head of this article had been clear for 1700 years: that only those people are in trouble with God who wilfully choose to be outside the Catholic Church; and God does not exclude anyone from salvation just because that person through no fault of their own is not a Catholic.

Bonaventure Hinwood OFM, Pretoria