Quote:
Originally posted by asaris
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?
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The church as people, no, the church as an idea, concept, set of beliefs, whatever you want to call it, yes.
The point is that the Catholic Church believes - and this is explicitly stated in the Vatican II documents - that it is the universal church meaning that it is the church of even those who do not believe in it. So, even those who do not believe in it are capable of being saved THROUGH it so long as they do not knowlingly reject it as the Truth. I don't think I need to point out that all three sources I cited in my previous post - which was almost my entire post in the first place - are either specifically from Catholic priests or from Catholic affiliated groups. Not to mention that a large portion of my knowledge of Catholicism comes from a doctorate holding Catholic theologian who has written multiple books on the subject and is the director of the university ministry program at the largest Catholic university in the US. My point is not to get into a "my source is bigger than your source" debate, but only to point out that these aren't things that I just thought up one day. Furthermore, let's not forget that there are priests and theologians in Catholicism who either explicitly or implicitly reject some of Vatican II's message. Yet, I can and have cited multiple priests (they're not too hard to find on general topics such as this), Catholic monks - one of which some people in the church would like to see Sainted, and Catholic theologians on the topic. I don't know how much more I have to do here. And as you can see, these are not new ideas. You'll notice the original copyright date on the last quotation in my previous post is 1938. Change - and the church is always changing in some regard - takes place slowly, and concerning these issues it is still in progress. There are many Catholic theologians who would equate the present transitions in theology with the previous 3 major transitions in Catholic history: the time immediately after Jesus life, Augustine, and then Aquinas.
EDIT: It must be said though that there is a fundamental point of yours that I couldn't agree more with and that's really the ultimate point here. We DON'T know anything regarding the salvation of anyone else, especially since we don't even know it for ourselves. And that's precisely why I find it extremely arrogant to say that non-Christians cannot be united with God. The Catholic Church teaches they can (note, can, not necessarily are) but ultimately the point is that only God can know.