In Soft Garments by Knox Ronald

Author:Knox, Ronald [Knox, Ronald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781586173005
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2010-10-07T04:00:00+00:00

XIII

THE UNCONSCIOUS CATHOLIC

EVERY SUNDAY, more or less, you are told how fortunate you are to be Catholics. And it is almost impossible for us, in listening to such expositions, not to be held up occasionally by a distracting thought: “That’s all very well, and it seems full of consolations for us; but after all, what about the other people? Most of us here are going about all day with people who aren’t Catholics and aren’t, as far as we can see, even on the way to becoming Catholics. They are nice people, good-living people many of them; nearly all, if you come to look beneath the surface, have excellent qualities tucked away; where exactly do they get off? Is there no chance for them in eternity? And if there is, how much of a chance is it, and how does it come to them? If we are going to accept the doctrine as apparently we must accept it, Extra ecclesiam nulla salus, isn’t it going to make us feel rather unhappy about our non-Catholic friends?” So I thought I would devote this morning to a consideration of that question. It is all familiar ground, I hope, to most of you; and it is pretty dull going. But it is important, I think, to have an answer to such difficulties as these, ready for those occasions when our Protestant friends say, “Of course, you think I’m going to hell; you have to.” Let’s just make certain that we don’t lay ourselves open to the charge of stuffiness on the one side, or land ourselves in theological misstatements on the other.

The gateway of all sacramental grace, as we know, is baptism. First of all, then, what is the position of the unbaptized? After all, for innumerable centuries before Christ the human race had to get on without the sacrament of baptism, and even now there are plenty of people in the world who have never had the chance of being baptized. If it comes to that, there are probably a good many of our friends who have never been baptized; the Jews and the Quakers for example, and the people whose parents didn’t hold with going to church at all. Well, when you are considering people like that, it is very important to keep two principles in mind. One is, that baptism is not necessarily baptism by water; there is such a thing as baptism of desire. It is quite certain, I mean, that a person who at the time of his death was anxious to be baptized, but could find nobody to do it for him or no water to do it with, would nevertheless become a member of Christ’s Mystical Body through his desire of baptism. And we can’t, evidently, be certain how far that principle may not extend; it’s certain that the Holy Patriarchs who died in the hope of a Messiah were saved through that hope, and it isn’t for us to say how many of the heathen

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.