Too Exclusive?

DEFENSE

That’s not the teaching of the Catholic Church.

The Church holds that “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” (CCC 847).

Although a person who knows the truth of the Faith is obliged to embrace it—to do otherwise would be to knowingly and deliberately reject the truth—God is not going to send people to hell merely be- cause they are not Christian or Catholic.

We need not fear that someone will be damned simply because they never heard of Jesus. According to the above, for people to be lost they would need to:

• reject the gospel or the Church through their own fault,
• refuse to sincerely seek God,
• refuse to be moved by God’s grace, or
• refuse to do God’s will as they understand it according to their conscience.

  Ultimately, the same principle applies to everyone: “God predestines no one to go to hell; for this, a willful turning away from God (a mortal sin) is necessary, and persistence in it until the end” (CCC 1037).

  God “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4), but even if they are hindered from arriving at a full knowledge of the truth in this life, he still has ways of reaching them with his grace: “Since Christ died for all, and since all men are in fact called to one and the same destiny, which is divine, we must hold that the Holy Spirit offers to all the possibility of being made partakers, in a way known to God, of the Paschal mystery [i.e., Jesus’ saving death on the Cross]” (CCC 1260).

  Thus the Church acknowledges that the kind of prayer by which one “walks with God . . . is lived by many righteous people in all religions” (CCC 2569).