When I was a child in the 1950’s, we wanted to convert the world. Kids would say “I want to go to China” or “I want to go to the Middle East.” That missionary fervor is gone now.
With these words, an old priest I knew expressed his dismay at the lost confidence in the Faith and zeal for evangelization that he had grown up around. This is not merely the nostalgia of one priest; it was also noticed by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger—later Pope Benedict XVI— who recounted hearing a colleague express the view that “one should actually be grateful to God that He allows there to be so many unbelievers in good conscience.” So, this colleague thought, it was better to leave people where they were in safety and not bring them into the Catholic Faith, which he saw as a burden. “In the last few decades, notions of this sort have discernibly crippled the disposition to evangelize,” Ratzinger observed.
The notion of the Catholic Faith as a burden is a sad one—and it’s far from the truth. The Catholic Faith is freeing and enlightening. God’s loving grace gives us the ability to live according to that Faith, otherwise unattainable by our own natural strength. This reality is absent from the view of Ratzinger’s colleague. Still, to logically follow the colleague’s notion, let’s explore what he meant by “unbelievers in good conscience.”
The Catholic Church teaches that there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church, which Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium describes thus in paragraph 14:
Basing itself upon Sacred Scripture and Tradition, [the Council] teaches that the Church, now sojourning on earth as an exile, is necessary for salvation. Christ, present to us in His Body, which is the Church, is the one Mediator and the unique way of salvation […] Whosoever, therefore, knowing that the Catholic Church was made necessary by Christ, would refuse to enter or to remain in it, could not be saved.
It continues by saying that one is united to the Church by formal membership, by explicit desire for membership as a catecumen, or in the case of non-Catholics, united by implicit desire for membership, which is what Ratzinger’s colleague meant by “unbelievers in good conscience.” Lumen Gentium paragraph 16 explains it this way:
Those also can attain to salvation who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church, yet sincerely seek God and moved by grace strive by their deeds to do His will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience.
The Church uses the phrase “invincibly ignorant” as a shorthand for someone who doesn’t know some truth through no fault of their own. The “vincibly ignorant” refers to those who retain some moral responsibility for an unknown truth of which they could have learned with reasonable effort. In this article, we are addressing primarily those ignorant of the truth about the necessity of Christ and the Catholic Church.
As we saw with Cardinal Ratzinger’s account, there is a danger in overemphasizing the possibility of salvation for those who are invincibly ignorant which can lead one to downplay the necessity and importance of Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church. There may arise a temptation to “leave people where they are” and even to think that it is better not to evangelize them.
Let it be said: it is still of great importance that we evangelize these, and there are very good reasons as to why we should bring them into the Catholic Faith as formal members. Invincible ignorance alone is not enough to save someone; they must also have an implicit desire to enter the Church via good faith seeking of God. But even then, we should desire their conversion and full communion. Why?
First, not everyone is invincibly ignorant; there are those who are morally culpable for remaining outside the Catholic Church. They may know enough to have grappled with the truths of the Catholic Faith and yet remain uncommitted, perhaps due to family pressure or social approval, attachment to sin, personal or aesthetic preferences, and so forth. These people need to be evangelized.
Second, those who live outside the truth of Jesus Christ and the necessity of the Catholic Church are more susceptible to the perilous deceptions of Satan, especially those of overreliance on human reason, desire for material wealth and pleasures, general spiritual blindness to virtue—even human virtues attainable without knowledge of Divine Revelation, and despair. For these reasons, after speaking of the non-believers who are in good faith, paragraph 16 of Lumen Gentium says:
But often men, deceived by the Evil One, have become vain in their reasonings and have exchanged the truth of God for a lie, serving the creature rather than the Creator. Or some there are who, living and dying in this world without God, are exposed to final despair.
We cannot forget that the devil pursues those outside the Church as well. It is no mercy to deny them the hope and fortifying powers of Divine Revelation and sacramental grace.
Without the full moral teaching of God promulgated by the Church, they are more liable to enslavement by the passions due to errors and omissions about the morality that they do hold—errors and omissions that may even have been taught by their non-Catholic religions. For example, errors about contraception, of which the person is innocently unaware, could foster a recreational attitude towards sex that leads to sins of lust for which they are knowingly culpable. And if, for example, a baptized, non-Catholic Christian commits these sins, they have only perfect contrition along with the implicit desire for confession to forgive their sins. A person might be driven to despair due to not knowing about the mercy that comes from Jesus Christ through His Church in sacraments like baptism and confession.
Third, even if such a person lives in good faith and is going to be saved, they may have to experience a greater period of suffering in Purgatory, which could have been avoided or greatly lessened, because they lacked the means to remit temporal punishment due to sin. Think of indulgences, devout attendance of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, the use of holy water, intentional prayers from the faithful, and so on. We go to great lengths to reduce or avoid Earthly suffering, and we go out of our way to help others avoid suffering in this life as well. How much further ought we to go to help others avoid suffering in the afterlife!
Finally, even if none of the above applied to an invincibly ignorant person, and they would be saved with minimal time in Purgatory, as a Catholic their life—already so well-disposed—would bear greater fruit for the Kingdom of God and His glory. We should want everyone to be Catholic so that God may be glorified and that His Kingdom may advance on Earth. These considerations should fill us with gratitude and love of God for giving us the Catholic Faith out of His own love.
To know Christ fully in the Church He founded is to know who we really are made to be. It means being freed from our sins and the punishment due to them. It means knowing the truth with certainty so that we can make better decisions about our life as we journey towards God. It means having all the means of grace available to strengthen us to be holy and make this possible. Let us share that love with others and evangelize!
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