Last week I posted The Separated Children, and have received many fine kind and challenging comments, all confirming my assumption that I would need to follow up with some further explanation. I do this with a bit of trepidation, because, as I press this button to post, I fully realize that I will probably draw even more heated critiques, but I do so precisely because I want your feedback.

I wrote this parable after many years of wrestling with a conundrum. In essence, this parable is my attempt to explain (from a Catholic perspective) how I have come to understand the long history of how the Catholic Church has reached out to non-Catholic Christians. Maybe some background.

This year is the 20th anniversary of our work in the Coming Home Network International (CHNetwork) helping non-Catholic Christians come home to the Catholic Church. Over these twenty years, more than 2200 non-Catholic ministers from over 100 different denominations / traditions have contacted us, usually between 2-5 new contacts per week. To date, a little over half of these have been received into the Catholic Church, while slightly less than half are still on the journey. A nearly equivalent number of non-Catholic lay Christians have also contacted us for help, thousands have connected with our online services and Forum, and thousands more of life-long Catholics have joined us as partners in our lay apostolate.

But herein lyeth my conundrum. Over these twenty years, many Catholic priests, bishops, and Cardinals have affirmed our work, even contributing to our support, and even sometimes, in private, emphasizing that these non-Catholic clergy need to bravely follow their consciences. Yet, in all these years, I have never heard any Catholic bishop, Cardinal, or pope state publicly that our separated Christian brethren need to come home to the Church, or particularly that an ordained practicing non-Catholic minister should stop performing his or her non-Catholic sacraments, resign, and return to the Catholic Church, for the sake of his salvation.

Now, many of you reading this probably are thinking, “Well, good golly (or stronger language), why would you even think they should do this!?” But I added the phrase “for the sake of his salvation” to emphasize precisely the key to my ongoing conundrum. There are many reasons to be drawn to the beauty and truth of the Church that Jesus established in His apostles centered around Peter, but the bottom line has always been the haunting seriousness of what the Catholic Church has always taught: that outside the Church there is no salvation, or extra Ecclesiam nulla salus.

I remember, during my own journey to the Catholic Church, how I was taken aback by the following statement by St. Augustine, whom even as a Calvinist I had always considered a great defender of the Christian gospel:

A man cannot have salvation, except in the Catholic Church. Outside the Catholic Church he can have everything except salvation. He can have honor, he can have Sacraments, he can sing alleluia, he can answer amen, he can possess the gospel, he can have and preach faith in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit; but never except in the Catholic Church will he be able to find salvation (Augustine, Discourse to the people of the church at Caesarea, AD 418).

Certainly the long history of how this dogma has been understood, expressed, and applied needs to be understood in its historic context and with charity, as “reformulated positively” since Vatican II to mean “all salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is his Body” (CCC, 846). Yet still, in Lumen Gentium 14 as well as in the Catechism, the Church continues to proclaim, “Hence they could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse either to enter it or to remain in it.”

In my parable, the letters sent by the father to his separated children represent the many Church documents and conciliar statements promulgated over the centuries warning non-Catholic Christians of their need to come home for the sake of their salvation. Sending out his elder sons and their safe-at-home siblings represent the efforts by Catholic bishops, priests, evangelists, religious orders, and laity over the centuries to win back separated Christians, and, as I stated in the parable, history shows that sometimes the ways they expressed this dogma came across a bit harsh and unproductive.

I’ve struggled for a long time with this dogma, especially in relation to our work, but after much reading, discussions, and reflection, I have come to a conclusion that culminates in what I’ve tried to say in the rest of this parable of The Separated Children: that, since the middle of the twentieth century, the Holy Spirit has been leading the Church in the process of a “development of doctrine” concerning the understanding and expression of extra Ecclesiam nulla salus, both in relationship to baptized non-Catholic Christians, as well as all people in the wider family of God.

I believe that behind this development was the progressive influence of secularism, relativism, individualism, industrialism, and totalitarianism during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, represented in the parable as the “powerful arch enemy” that “invaded the region.” For the many centuries leading up to the modern era, when extra Ecclesiam nulla salus was publicly proclaimed by popes and councils, “schismatics, heretics,” and other non-Catholics were generally understood and addressed as groups, not as individuals, and the basic message the Church had for them was to come home for the sake of their salvation. Due to the historical contexts, the exhortation and implementation of extra Ecclesiam nulla salus was often perceived as a cudgel of judgement, leading to centuries of division between Catholics and non-Catholics. There was to be no ecumenical prayer, worship, Scripture study, or service, and any Catholics advocating or practicing these “ecumenical signs of indifferentism” were declared apostate—as expressed in the teachings and writings of Father Leonard Feeney in the late 1940s, as he reacted to the growing expression of this ecumenical development, as well as by modern sedevacantists.

But the rise of secularism, relativism, individualism, industrialism, and totalitarianism leading to the conflicts, wars, poverty, and unthinkable brutalities of the twentieth century, forced Catholics, non-Catholic Christians, even Jews and atheists, to work together, side-by-side, and face-to-face as never before to fight a common enemy. These calamities allowed Catholic laity, priests, bishops, and even popes, sometimes in foxholes, prisons, or soup-kitchens, to come to know non-Catholics as individual brothers and sisters. They came to recognize the authentic love and blessings of God in the lives and prayers of non-Catholic Christians, like C.S. Lewis, Corrie Ten Boom, and Dr. Billy Graham, and especially non-Catholic martyrs, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Jim Elliot.

This is exactly what Blessed Pope John Paul II exclaimed in the opening paragraphs of his encyclical Ut Unum Sint:

The courageous witness of so many martyrs of our century, including members of Churches and Ecclesial Communities not in full communion with the Catholic Church, gives new vigor to the Council’s call and reminds us of our duty to listen to and put into practice its exhortation. These brothers and sisters of ours, united in the selfless offering of their lives for the Kingdom of God, are the most powerful proof that every factor of division can be transcended and overcome in the total gift of self for the sake of the Gospel.

I believe that the Holy Spirit used this to change the hearts and consciences of many in the hierarchy, especially beginning with Blessed Pope John XXIII, who began emphasizing less and less the things that divide Christians and instead more and more the ways that Catholic and non-Catholic Christians are similar, ways in which the truths and gifts of the Catholic Church are shared outside the Church, not in a perfect way, but in ways by which God mercifully extends His grace, using these separated churches and ecclesial communities even as “means of salvation.”

This is what I tried to express in the change of the father’s attitude and approach in the parable. In the next installment, I’ll expand more on this.