"Outside the Church there is no salvation" - what this means

I was just reading a post by someone on this dictum and the Catholic Church's teaching on it earlier today. It was the usual skeptical vitriol, alleging that the Church had totally changed her view on this. First, a bit about why this phrase would have ever gained any currency.

This conviction was especially prominent in the writings of St. Cyprian of Carthage (see Letter 73). That's not an accident. While it's true that the Romans were bothered by the fact that Christians would not participate in the required sacrifice to the Roman gods (Romans wouldn't have been bothered by someone's participating in both Christian and Roman rituals), it's also true that the exclusivism noted in the title to this entry springs to some extent from an environment in which the Christian faith had been persecuted.

Picture someone suffering and dying for the faith while another person who claims the same faith simply waltzes up to the Roman authorities and performs the required sacrifice. The martyr or confessor at that point has a right to feel that this is not a true Christian conviction. The opposition to idolatry is already a part of the basic Christian belief. Thus, if one is going to die for her faith, the benefits of that faith had better be the kinds of things one can't get anywhere else. Otherwise, upon notification that her religion was being persecuted, a person should simply switch to one that isn't being persecuted.

For a Christian to claim to be a pluralist in the style of John Hick is thus, in my view, simply a mistake that fails to honor the legacy of the early persecuted Church. On the other hand, another conviction developed early on in the Church, also from out of persecution, namely, that death through martyrdom, even prior to the ordinary baptism through water, could only bring honor (and, indeed, salvation) to the martyr. How could this be if the person had not yet formally entered into the Church outside of which there is no salvation? The answer came back that this was to be regarded as an exceptional case that came to be called the "baptism of blood."

Another movement in the early Church is important to track. While many at various stages postponed baptism for a variety of reasons (some not so honorable), the tradition of the Church would have been to baptize at a very particular time (as when the catechumen is baptized at the Easter Vigil, after having prepared for some months at least). Now, suppose that this catechumen simply dies of natural causes while formally a part of the catechumenate. Clearly, this person has expressed a desire to enter into the Church through baptism, but simply has not yet done so. In this case, the Church regarded the grace of Christ to be efficacious through the desire for the sacrament. Thus, the "baptism of desire." Now, the next question to ask is what level of desire is sufficient to qualify for the baptism of desire? This is a thorny question, and I don't propose to answer it, except to say that John Paul II was happy enough to talk about the "implicit faith" that he invoked while discussing Gandhi. Vatican II is important in this context. See Lumen Gentium, 16 at http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html.

Thus, there are a few things that the Church always needs to honor: 1) the experience of the martyr who dies for a faith she can't get anywhere else, 2) the justice of God, and 3) the accidental nature of human death, even while a person has the intention of being baptized. While the Church has defined the necessity of baptism on good scriptural grounds, one must remember that it the Church is also the custodian of God's revelation and how it must be interpreted, which includes teachings of the past. While infallible teachings cannot be repealed, they are not bound to the context in which they were originally articulated.

Hard case in Phoenix on abortion

This is the link to CNS on the story of a woman who was automatically excommunicated by consenting to an abortion at a Catholic hospital in Phoenix, sometime recently in May:

http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/1002085.htm

I just want to talk about why this is a hard case for a moment. On my facebook page, someone posted a link to a similar story and claimed that this summarized his feelings about the Catholic Church. The implication seemed to have been that the whole scenario was bizarre and its very existence made the Church's position look absurd.

Let me first note that abortion rights are an area on which many intelligent people disagree, and everyone should respect thoughtful voices with which they disagree. At the same time, I want to talk a bit about why this issue is a genuinely hard case. From a point of view rooted in Catholic teaching, it is wrong to engage in aggression toward a defenseless being. That does mean that wars of aggression are categorically wrong.

Now, I don't know many of the specifics in this case, and it's clear that the nun in question was appealing to directive 47 of the Ethical Directives for Catholic Heath Care (http://www.usccb.org/meetings/2009Fall/docs/ERDs_5th_ed_091118_FINAL.pdf). That directive states: "Operations, treatments, and medications that have as their direct purpose the cure of a proportionately serious pathological condition of a pregnant woman are permitted when they cannot be safely postponed until the unborn child is viable, even if they will result in the death of the unborn child."

Even if the fetus is not viable, it still constitutes a human life, from a Catholic point of view. If it is viable, then the act of aborting it is tantamount to being an aggressor toward it. Consider a well known case in ethics at this point, from Kai Nielsen's "Against Moral Conservatism" (see Pojman's Moral Philosophy anthology). The case has it that a group of cave explorers is being led by a portly guide who gets stuck in the mouth of the cave as the tide is coming in. The tide will drown those below if they cannot climb to safety but the only way to safety is being plugged by our innocent guide, who can't get in or out. Luckily or unluckily, someone in the group has a stick of dynamite and the means to light it. Should you or should you not use the stick of dynamite to blow open the hole, thereby killing the man? This is supposed to be a case that helps decide whether we are consequentialists or not (do we determine our courses of action based on how the consequences shake out or do we steadfastly hold to our principles?).

The Catholic Church, as I understand it, does not side with consequentialism on this point. The reason for the clause about viability is that we don't want to have what philosophers call a "trolley problem" on our hands. The famous "trolley problem" is the case where a train cannot be stopped but it is drifting toward an area where five people are tied to the track. You, as the conductor, can throw the switch that will send the train down a track where only one person is tied up, but either way, someone will die.

If the fetus can live outside the mother, says the teaching of the Catholic Church, then we ought to try to save the fetus. If the death of the mother entails the death of the fetus, because the fetus has not yet attained viability, then we must try to save the mother (because otherwise both will die). The preference is for the child, because the mother is the one making the moral decisions, and she can't be an aggressor toward her child, but where the mother's death entails the death of the child, it can be possible to provide medical care whose intention is to heal the mother but whose indirect result is the death of the child.

I'm not going to weigh in on whether or to what extent this particular fetus was viable. More competent people than I make those decisions. One other thing that is important to note, and that non-Catholics may not understand: a person in a similar situation would need to confess the sin in the sacrament of reconciliation (confession) and the person would return to communion in the Church. I'm not sure what this particular nun's order will do about this, but that is another matter.

On Dialogue with Islam

Seyyed Hossein Nasr (see The Heart of Islam), one of my favorite writers on Islam, notes that the nearest parallel to the Qur'an in Christianity is not the Bible but Christ. Christ is the Word of God for Christians in a stronger sense than the Bible is the Word of God for Christians. For Muslims, the Qur'an is the central divine theophany itself, just as for Christians, Christ is the central theophany. Nasr goes on to compare the Prophet Muhammad to the Virgin Mary, and the use of Qur'anic Arabic (vehicle for the central divine theophany) within prayer to the reception of the body of Christ in communion. Regarding art, Nasr notes that in the place of Christian iconography there is Islamic calligraphy, which is unsurprising given the centrality of Qur'anic Arabic.

What does this mean for Christians regarding dialogue with Islam? It seems to me that in order to properly dialogue with Islam it is essential to have a fuller view of the diversity within the Christian tradition. Without an understanding of Eucharistic piety, it is difficult to understand the insistence on Qur'anic Arabic as a sacred language. Without an appreciation for icons in worship, it is difficult to grasp the respect given to calligraphy as something approaching a sacred art. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, without an appreciation for Marian piety it is difficult to understand why Muslims love the Prophet Muhammad so deeply. Consider Thomas Howard's passage (from his book On Being Catholic; apologies for loose quoting): "they all [other saints] bore witness to the Word. This woman [Mary] bore the Word."

It may be a difficulty for Americans in particular as the American sensibility seems to me to be informed by its largely Protestant formation.