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Regarding God's gender: Just to be clear, I didn't think it was a major point of your post, but I was just nitpicking again.
Not to belabor the point, but I don't think the Catholic church is as charitable as you make them out to be. If they were, what would be the point of saying that salvation is only through the Catholic Church, even if one doesn't need to explicitly be a member of the church? On your reading, all one needs to do is seek God honestly and try to follow his will, since it's doubtful there are many people who believe that the Catholic Church is the one true church and do not belong to it.
My own belief, which I don't think is too far from what the Catholic Church believes though with different emphases, is the following. We know that all those who hear the good news of Jesus Christ and respond to it by accepting him as Lord are saved. We know that all those who hear the good news and reject it are damned. What we don't know are the two following things:
1. What happens to those who don't hear the good news. God is completely just, so would not be acting wrongly in condemning them to hell. God is not required to save anyone. But God is also completely merciful, so it would not be beyond comprehension if, in the same way he takes my feeble strivings towards Christ and attributes them to me as righteousness, to take those strivings of those who haven't heard the good news and attribute them as righteousness.
2. We don't know what 'hear' means in this context. In the literal sense, of course, it refers to those who died before the coming of Christ, or before they were able to hear the good news. But it could easily also refer to those who, for various reasons, weren't in a position to hear the gospel in a metaphorical sense, people who were driven away from the church by the evildoing of persons who claim to be members of the Church, for example. We don't know.
In the end, the safest thing is to say that we know how one may be saved. We don't know what happens to anyone else, and we are told not to judge. I take the words of Paul very seriously: "I do not even judge myself." I don't know whether or not I will be saved -- how can I judge anyone else?
Again, I'm not sure how close this is to the Catholic position. I'll ask my theologian roommate next time I see him, since I trust his knowledge about this sort of thing.
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"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."
"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
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