Can someone be saved outside the Catholic Church? Trent Horn explores the Catholic doctrine of salvation and the distinction between denominations and apostolic churches.
Transcript:
The church teaches that there’s no salvation outside the church, but yet they’ve named multiple saints who were outside of the church when they lived, or they were martyred outside of the church, such as St. Gregory of Merrick, who I believe was part of the Armenian church, and he lived years and years and years past when they, you know, the Armenians separated, the Armenian Apostolic Church. So how can those two coincide?
Sure. Well, I think it’s important to remember that there is a distinction between different, there are denominations that have broken off from the Catholic Church, and there are legitimate apostolic churches. So to bring everything back, we have the dogma there is no salvation outside of the church. There is no, God has provided the means of salvation through the universal or Catholic Church. But as the Second Vatican Council teaches, it says that the Church of Jesus Christ subsists in the Catholic Church, and other Christians have more or less, you know, more perfect and less perfect connections to the Catholic Church, especially in the cases of those churches that have still retained their apostolic roots. So you have the communities that have sprung off from the Protestant Reformation, those would be properly called, we don’t actually call them churches, because they don’t have the sacrament of holy orders, they don’t have apostolic succession. So we recognize them as denominations or ecclesial communities, communities from the Reformation. But among the Eastern Orthodox and among the Oriental Orthodox, we recognize a stronger connection to the church Catholic. And in the case of St. Gregory of Narek, I believe he lived in the 10th century, there is a recognition that even after you have the Oriental Orthodox churches that broke away during the Council of Chalcedon, still many faithful Catholics within those denominations within those groups. And a lot of progress has been made in reestablishing communion with the Oriental Orthodox and understanding that many of the theological disagreements there tend to be more over semantics than over hard theological data.
So the fact that the church recognizes God working through different members of these apostolic churches, and I’d have to, I’m not as familiar as St. Gregory of Narek to go back to see his exact theological schema, but the church is capable of recognizing God working through these different individuals who are still very much connected to the church Catholic, even if there’s still some imperfections in their ultimate communion with the church that they still have valid holy, their church sells valid holy orders, they still have valid sacraments. So I hope that’s helpful for you. If you’d like more information on the, as someone I said to the previous caller, it sort of deals with the veneration of saints like St. Claudia, for example, definitely check out our website at Catholic.com.