Can people of non-Christian religions go to heaven? What does the Church say?

Q:  Dear Father John, I am confused. Jesus said he is the way the truth and the light, but the Church has moved away from believing salvation lies only in the Church. Even learned people in the Church (my Spiritual Director included) now say that God is bigger than we can comprehend so we need to be open to the possibility that God is calling even those outside the Church. It makes the line very gray as to the purpose of evangelization. Can you comment? Thank you.

A: I hope that the answer to this question will be simpler than you might have thought. This question has generated reams of theological speculation, argument, and even bitter diatribes. In fact, it became so problematic back in the eighties and nineties that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, under the leadership of then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, actually published (with the full approval of Blessed Pope John Paul II) a thorough treatment of the issue, which you may want to read (give yourself some time and a full pot of tea; it is a rich, but somewhat long and somewhat dense). The document is called Dominus Iesus.

Christ and Bridges

The short answer to your question is this: Anyone who ends up in Heaven is a member of the Church. Heaven is communion with God, it is being a fully mature member of his family. The only bridge to Heaven is Christ – he is the only Savior, and only his self-sacrifice on the Cross opened the gates of Heaven and atoned for human sin. I believe that all the “learned people in the Church” you refer to in your question would agree with those statements. If they don’t, well, you will have to ask them to explain to you how they understand numbers 846 and 847 of the Catechism.

Now, in theory it is possible to cross a bridge without knowing the name of that bridge. You can even cross a bridge, in the fog, for example, without realizing that you are crossing a bridge. This is an image that can help us understand how a person could be saved, could enter heaven and become a full member of God’s family for all eternity, without being a Catholic here on earth. The condition for that, according to Church teaching, is that the person in question, through no fault of their own, “do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church” but even so “seek God with a sincere heart, and moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they see it” (Catechism, #847).

Our Limits and Our Calling

Obviously, you and I are incapable of judging whether some are seeking God with a sincere heart, or whether their non-membership in the Catholic Church is “through no fault of their own.” Furthermore, through God’s Providence, we have come to know the name of the bridge; we have been given, by the sheer gift of God’s grace, the wisdom “for salvation through faith in Jesus Christ.” The greatest act of love we can make towards our neighbor is to share that faith with those haven’t yet received it, or who have lost it. As Pope Benedict XVI affirmed in his first public homily as Pope: “… the purpose of our lives is to reveal God to men… There is nothing more beautiful than to know Him and to speak to others of our friendship with Him.” This is the meaning behind what the Church has always called – and still calls – the “missionary mandate” (Catechism #849): “Having been divinely sent to the nations that she might be ‘the universal sacrament of salvation,’ the Church, in obedience to the command of her founder and because it is demanded by her own essential universality, strives to preach the Gospel to all men.”

Means vs Ends

The main point of recent discussion about these truths has to do more with the way we approach this missionary mandate, not its validity. Since the Second Vatican Council, the Church has made a concerted effort to reach out to people of other religions in a respectful way – respecting them as people, respecting the search for truth and salvation that their religion represents – and not with a condemning tone.

A few years ago, I wrote a couple of short essays on the subject of a Catholic’s view of non-Christian religions, and of non-Catholic Christians. They are available for reading and downloading here. You may want to read them over and reflect on them.

But make no mistake about it. Although we are called to respect all people and their search for religious truth, Jesus Christ alone remains the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and all salvation comes from him “through the Church which is his Body” (Catechism #846).

Please explain plenary indulgences and purgatory! – Part I

Q: Dear Father John, Please explain Plenary Indulgences. If one confession fulfills the requirement of plenary indulgences 8 days before and 8 days after, it seems to me that if someone went to Communion everyday, prayed for the intentions of the Holy Father everyday and prayed the rosary before the Blessed Sacrament everyday, that she could release 17 souls from purgatory in 17 days. Is that right?

A: Aside from the problem of mathematical piety which we will discuss later, you are basically right, if indeed this person had the intention of obtaining an indulgence as she performed those acts of piety, and if this person were truly detached from personal sin. But we do have to be a bit careful here, so as not to have a simplistic view of indulgences. Let’s review.

An indulgence is simply a favor granted by the Church – to which, remember, Christ gave the “keys of the Kingdom” and the “power to bind and loose on earth and in heaven” (see Matthew 16).

By means of this favor, the Church applies the merits won by Christ and the saints to repair the damage that sins cause to our soul. We don’t obtain God’s forgiveness through an indulgence, rather we obtain the remission of what is traditionally called “temporal punishment” for sin. This is an important concept to consider. It connects both to the doctrine of indulgences, and also to that of purgatory.

A Trip to Purgatory

C.S. Lewis explained purgatory with a memorable image. Imagine that a young man leaves home to go off and fight in a war. He is gone for a long time, and when he finally returns, his clothes are tattered, he’s half-starved, he is caked with mud and covered with blood, his head is bandaged, both his legs are broken and one arm is in a homemade sling.

But, he is alive, and he has made his way home. Will he go right into the dining room where the family is having a birthday dinner? No. He is not fit for such a celebration, and he wouldn’t even want to make an appearance in his unpleasant condition. He has to go and get cleaned up, and the doctors will have to look at him and set those broken bones and change those bandages, and he’ll have to get his strength back, and he’ll have to undergo physical therapy to recover from his injuries.

The process may take a while, and it will probably be uncomfortable, even painful. It may take a full year before he’s 100% healthy and able to participate fully in family affairs. But in the end, he’ll take his rightful seat at the family feast.

That temporary recovery period is like purgatory. Our life on earth is a spiritual war. Our selfishness and sins not only offend God (the offense that confession removes, as God grants us his forgiveness), but they also do damage to our souls. They form and deepen spiritual habits, tendencies, and attitudes that are contrary to the gospel. And that damage needs to be repaired; every last scrap of selfishness and sinfulness has to be removed, or purified, before we are able to live in the perfect intimacy with God that heaven requires.

This purification can happen either in this life, or after we die. If it happens after we die, it is called purgatory – the state in which all remaining selfishness is purged from our souls.

Understanding that concept of purification lays the groundwork for understanding the value of indulgences, which we will look at next time …

Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC, ThD

What does it mean to have a “personal relationship” with Jesus?

Q: Dear Father John, What does it mean to have a “personal relationship with Christ?” I pray regularly (rosary, Liturgy of the Hours, etc) and go to mass regularly, however, I don’t know that “personal relationship” would describe my understanding and experience of God. Am I missing something?

A: Maybe, but maybe not. Let’s start answering your question with a question: When you “pray and go to Mass regularly,” why do you do it? Take a moment to answer that question for yourself before you continue reading… Why do you carve time out of your busy schedule to pray and worship God the Father through Jesus Christ in union with the Holy Spirit? Most likely, your personal answer fits into one of the following three generic answers.

Falling into Routine

First, we can pray and worship out of routine. It’s like punching our spiritual time-clock. We have always gone to Mass and always prayed, ever since we were kids, and we feel a kind of comfortable inertia in continuing to do so. We have a vague sense that one ought to do such things, and we have a vague sense that if I fail to do them we will feel guilty for some reason, and we don’t want to add an uncomfortable guilty feeling to our already over-stressed emotional world. So we keep going through the motions of being a Catholic. Just as it would strike an American citizen as somehow incongruent not to celebrate the Fourth of July, it strikes a cultural Catholic as somehow incongruent not to engage in some basic spiritual practices. If you “say your prayers” just because doing so has become part of your internal comfort zone, you may have fallen into what theologians call spiritual routine.

When I was in eighth grade I remember sleeping over at a friend’s house. As we went down to the basement to go to bed, his parents were sitting on the couch watching television, the wife cuddling against the husband, who had his arm around her. They looked like a happy couple. Two months later they were divorced. I asked me friend how they could be so happy together, and then get divorced. My friend told me that they just kept up appearances for the kids’ sake, but there was no love in it. That’s falling into routine.

Fright School

Second, we can pray and worship out of fear. This can be akin to superstition. We have the idea in our heads that if we stop going to Mass, praying the Rosary, or making our morning offering, God will become angry, punish us, make our lives miserable, and maybe even send us to Hell. In this case, our spiritual commitments (prayer and worship) are like paying taxes to a tyrant, or being extorted by a strong-man: if we pay our dues, the Boss won’t bother us.

In ancient pagan religions, proper worship depended on following formula perfectly. A priest had to offer an elaborate ceremony with perfect execution, or the god would not be pleased and it would go to waste. If during the ceremony the priest sneezed, for example, he would have to start all over again. In this religious vision, people are not children of a loving Father, but slaves of angry, fickle, and aloof deities.

Connected by Conviction

Third, we can pray and worship out of conviction. The word “conviction” comes from the same word that gives us “convinced.” Religious conviction is an internal state of assurance with regard to religious truth. The primary reason a convinced Christian prays and worships is because they sincerely believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, our Lord and Savior, Creator and Redeemer, and that he deserves our praise and we need his grace. If our spiritual life flows from conviction, then the actual activity we engage in during our times of prayer is conscious: we pay attention to the meaning of the words, we search the Scriptures for wisdom and guidance, we lift our hearts to God in thanksgiving and adoration, and we strive to conform how we live to what we discover in prayer – to what God wants for us (God’s will). In this case, our faith actually connects our mind and heart to God during our prayer. We are not just going through motions, and we are just paying our dues; we are actually encountering the God who speaks to his beloved children through the revelation of Jesus Christ.

The Bible Reminds Us

Praying and worshipping mainly out of conviction (as opposed to routine or fear), is what it means to have a “personal relationship with Christ.” On the one hand, we know that he knows us and is interested in our life (“I no longer call you slaves… I have called you friends… It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you and appointed you to go out and bear fruit…” (John 15: 15-16). Or, as St Paul put it, “I live by faith in the Son of God who has loved me and given himself up for me” (Galatians 2:20). And on the other hand, we put forth our own effort to follow his example and teaching, as a way to stay close to him, accept his invitation to become a disciple, and participate in his great project of building up the Church for the glory of God and the salvation of souls: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments…” (Jon 14:15). Christianity is about knowing, loving, and following a person, Jesus Christ. The essence of our religion is a personal relationship of faith, hope, and love.

The Pope Hits the Nail on the Head

As Pope Benedict XVI put it in his inaugural homily: “The Church as a whole and all her Pastors, like Christ, must set out to lead people out of the desert, towards the place of life, towards friendship with the Son of God, towards the One who gives us life, and life in abundance… There is nothing more beautiful than to be surprised by the Gospel, by the encounter with Christ. There is nothing more beautiful than to know Him and to speak to others of our friendship with Him… If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great. No! Only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed. Only in this friendship do we experience beauty and liberation” (Pope Benedict XVI, 24 April 2005).

Of course, we are all on our way to spiritual perfection, and so sometimes we fall into routine – at least, on the surface of our minds we can fall into routine; our conviction still exists, but it’s submerged under distraction or anxiety. That prayer is still valuable, and still pleasing to God – the remote motivation is right on target. But the more we can keep our convictions fresh, strong, and vibrant, the better. Likewise, I may find myself crawling out of bed on Sunday to get ready for Mass just because I know that missing Mass is a mortal sin, and I really don’t want to go to Hell. Some Christian faith and conviction is still present even in that slavish motivation. God can work with that. Yet, the more we understand what Mass really is, the more we will see obeying the precept to attend Mass as a joy, a relief, a mysterious encounter with eternity, and an opportunity to please God and build up his Kingdom. When we pray and worship out of conviction, we connect better with Christ, and his grace has more room to work in our souls.

Having a “personal relationship with Christ” doesn’t mean regularly having visions of him sitting on the easy chair in the living room or hearing him give us directions while we’re looking for the right exit off the Interstate. Rather, it simply means gradually learning to live our Christianity more and more from heart to Heart.

What does the “born again” experience have to do with our salvation, and with our friendship with Christ?

Q: Dear Father John, I am a fairly recent convert to the faith. My conversion took place over a period of 3 years in which I had a series of powerful experiences of God’s presence and action in my life. It wasn’t just coming into the Church for me – it was discovering that Jesus is a real person, someone interested in my life. During my conversion, I understood this turn-around (this discovery of Jesus) as being “born again.” I also have understood this kind of experience as being necessary to have my place secure in heaven. And yet, I now know so many Catholics who have never had this kind of experience. They don’t talk about Jesus as if he is a real person. But they seem to think their place in heaven is secure anyway. This is all kind of vague, but I guess my basic question is: What does the “born again” experience have to do with our salvation, and with our friendship with Christ? Am I overemphasizing it, or are other people under-emphasizing it?

A: I think I detect two different questions in your note.

God and Emotions

The first is: Does someone have to have a deeply felt born-again experience in order to get into heaven? The answer is no. It doesn’t have to be deeply felt. It doesn’t have to be emotional. It just has to be real. There is a difference between “emotional” and “real.” On the one hand, I can have a profoundly moving emotional experience in the movie theater, but the drama that caused it wasn’t real. On the other hand, I can have a profound but un-dramatic relationship with a relative who is confined to a hospital bed, someone I visit regularly over an extended period of time without experiencing any strong emotions during those visits. Normally, some kind of interaction happens between the realm of real interpersonal experience and the realm of intense emotion, but we must keep in mind that the two realms only overlap; they are not equivalent. The same thing goes for our friendship with Christ.

Remember, God deals with each of us in a personal, individual way. He has given you (and many of us) a very dramatic, emotionally undeniable experience of his love, his truth, and his presence. But to others he gives different graces. I have known people who have lived in deep intimacy with God for more than 80 years without ever having a “born-again” experience. It’s as if they are continually, quietly born again every day, every time they go to confession, every time they go to Mass. This is real. It proves its reality in the way they live, the way they pray. Remember Matthew 25? The “final exam” on Judgment Day isn’t whether or not we had an emotional, dramatic born-again experience. The wisdom of the Church also provides for a gradual growth in intimacy with Christ, and a quiet, discrete way of giving one’s life to Christ over and over again through the years, through the liturgy and the sacraments. I think you and I should be grateful for the dramatic, emotional born again experiences that God has given us. God knows we need them, and that’s why he gives them to us. But it is not our place to define how God should work in everyone else’s life. We need to trust his wisdom, and the wisdom of his Church. And we also need to make sure that our love for Christ isn’t built solely on those positive emotional experiences; it would constitute the classic mistake of loving the gifts more than the Giver of the gifts, and it can get us into trouble.

Our Place in Heaven

Second question: Is your place in heaven secure? Yes. Is mine? Yes. Is everyone’s? Yes. The place is secure. God “will’s all men’s salvation” as St Paul puts it. The INSECURE part is whether we will end up occupying it. That doesn’t depend just on God. It also depends on us. Remember, the essence of Christianity is a living relationship with Jesus Christ, a friendship with him. Now, common sense tells us that no real friendship automatically lasts forever. I can break a friendship. I can leave my friends and not come back to them. This is because I am a human being; I am free. This freedom is not eliminated by Christ. He doesn’t make us less human when he offers us his friendship. It is possible to backslide. It is possible to be seduced by the devil and to abandon Christ. Just look at the New Testament – Judas, Peter… This is why the New Testament at times seems to contradict itself. Our salvation is assured, because it depends on God; AND our salvation is a process, to be “worked out in fear and trembling” (Phil 2:12). It’s kind of a paradox, but it’s clear. We can fall away: “We ought, then, to turn our minds more attentively than before to what we have been taught, so that we do not drift away” (Heb 2:1). The most eloquent scriptural explanation of this comes from Revelation 2, 3, and 4. It’s all about Christ warning the Churches that they need to keep watch, they need to do their part to keep the faith, to keep their friendship with Christ vibrant and growing. This isn’t meant to be scary. If we make a decent effort to keep our prayer life in shape, if we stay close to the sacraments and continually follow God’s will as shown in Church teaching and in our well-formed conscience, the friendship will keep growing. That’s why we can have that quiet assurance in our hearts and look forward to heaven (this is the virtue of hope). But we can’t put it on automatic pilot. Real friendships don’t work like that (this is the sin of presumption).

Both of these issues can have a strong effort on our efforts towards spiritual growth. If we are too concerned about concocting emotional experiences, our prayer life and sacramental life may start leaning towards self-centeredness instead of Christ-centeredness. If we become obsessed about whether or not our salvation is assured, the devil can use that worry to cause interior turbulence, leading to distractions and, once again, self-absorption.

I hope these reflections have settled your mind, and I also hope they help you discover the magnificent variety of ways in which God touches the hearts of his beloved children.

Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC