In offering a few
thoughts on this well-known dogma, I will be drawing extensively on material
from Fr Brian Harrison OS, both published (Living
Tradition nos 149 and 150) and unpublished.
Apart from the Magisterial data and classical authors, of all I can
remember reading, the work of Fr Harrison has been far and away the most
illuminating. No surprise there, since I
know of no finer theologian active in the Church today.
Though we do have
our differences. For example, of
catechumens Fr Harrison says they are in
porticu Ecclesiae; neither inside nor outside the Church. I believe Fr Harrison and I are in agreement
about the underlying reality here, which of course is far more important than
the actual terms we use. Nevertheless I
find his terminology infelicitous. To
the best of my knowledge it has not been employed by any Magisterial document,
Doctor or Father of the Church.
To justify what, as
I say, appears to be novel terminology, Fr Harrison asks ‘When you are in the
portico of St Peter’s, are you inside or outside the Basilica?’ – to which he
replies Neither, for the boundaries have not been defined with sufficient
exactitude for either answer to be accurate.
My reply: you can be said
to be inside or outside, depending on what is meant by St Peter’s
Basilica. One person may take the term
as meaning what might be called the greater Basilica, in which case you are
inside, whereas for someone else, the Basilica proper does not begin until the
doors, in which case you are outside.
Fr Harrison however
may press the point by saying What if you have one foot inside the building and
one foot outside? – then, surely, you cannot be said to be either inside or
outside. I agree, in the sense that you are not completely inside or
outside. Or to put it another way, you
are partially inside and partially outside.
That is because a body has extension.
But you cannot extend this to set-membership, on pain of infringing the
Law of the Excluded Middle. For example,
you cannot be partly a member of a chess-club, or neither inside nor outside
the club. Now the language of Tradition
about membership of the Church is surely much more akin to being in a club than
to being partly inside a building. No
one ever speaks of being partially Catholic.
How then does the
Tradition deal with the case of catechumens?
For eg St Robert
Bellarmine and Pope Pius XII, they are outside the Church (though not in the
sense excluding from salvation) whereas in Vatican II (Lumen Gentium 14) they seem to be already inside. The apparent contradiction is resolved by the
definition of Church being broader in one case than in the other. (One traditional formulation is that certain
people may belong to the soul of the Church while not belonging to her body.)
Indeed, much of the
confusion surrounding the dictum Extra
Ecclesiam nulla salus – no salvation outside the Church – would appear to
be terminological. Take the case of
someone validly baptized as an adult into a virulently anti-Catholic sect; let
us suppose that, whatever other mortal sins he has committed, his heresy, at
least, is material rather than formal.
In the more common acceptation of the word, he would not be called a
Catholic, and yet, since there is only one true Church, if he has indeed been
validly baptized, he must have been baptized into that Church, and so it must
be correct, in a sense, to describe him at that moment as a Catholic, albeit
one who is badly-instructed and possibly even ill-disposed.
It is clear from the
work of Fr Harrison that in the phrase ‘no salvation outside the Church’ the
sense of ‘Church’ needs to be quite broad.
Nevertheless, from his writings we can glean cogent reasons for not
making the term so broad as to include adults who die without ever
explicitly professing faith in Christ.
The reward for obeying the grace to follow one’s conscience is that God
will provide, if need be in a miraculous way, the opportunity to make an act of
explicit faith in Christ before dying.
Not that this should
slacken our resolve to share the Catholic Faith. As Fr Harrison and Dr Ralph Martin agree, we
need to be far more active here, knowing that although salvation is just as possible
for an adult who dies without ever being consciously Catholic, ceteris paribus it is far more improbable
(1 Pet. 4:18). Someone unaware that the Catholic Church is the One True Church
will obviously not be able to access all the aids to salvation that are to be
found only in her. It is for this
reason that Vatican II promotes the missions with ‘sedulous care’ (Lumen Gentium 16).
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