Who do we think we are?

Some of us will remember a time when we used to say that outside the Church, there is no salvation!  This was a slippery saying because we also thought that there were lots of exceptions to it.  It was a closed-Church idea.  We at least used to think that we would be in the right lane for salvation whereas others were at risk!  I think it became obvious that this was not even a sensible thing to say because we all experienced the goodness that was in people around us.

There are historical reasons why this became a common way of thinking about what it meant to be a Catholic but as time went along, it became clear that we had to rethink that idea.  This had been happening before Vatican II.  In fact, in the time of Pope Pius XII, who died in 1958, an American priest called Fr Feeney was condemned for proposing a strict interpretation of the saying.

Along with so much else, this saying was subject to a thorough rethinking in the course of Vatican II.  Vatican II looked back on the whole history of the Church and paid special attention to the times which preceded its immediate past, so it looked back into the Scriptures, into the works of the Fathers of the Church (Church leaders from 2nd to 7th century), to the whole course of the Middle Ages and then to the more recent centuries.  It was particularly attentive to those things which were constant throughout the Church’s history as well as to things which only appeared in certain times.  Many of these changeable things occurred because of particular needs of their time. 

With regard to the saying that outside the Church there was no salvation, Vatican II came up with a different vision of the Church which was better grounded in the Scriptures and which appeared constantly throughout the Catholic tradition despite the differences which arose in different eras of the Church’s life.  

Next week, we will look more closely at what Vatican II had to say.

By Fr Frank O’Loughlin

Published: 11 October 2024