Or Cardinal De Lugo, responding to objections to baptism by implicit desire based on a faulty reading of
Unam Sanctam:
“…It would follow that a Jew or other non-Christian could be saved; for he could have a supernatural faith in the one God, and be invincibly ignorant about Christ…The possibility of salvation for such a person is not ruled out…moreover, such a person should not be called a ‘non-Christian’, because, even through he has not been visibly joined to the church, still, interiorly he has the virtue of habitual and actual faith in common with the church, and in the sight of God he will be reckoned with the Christians…”
- Cardinal Juan de Lugo (1583-1660), De Libro hominis arbitrio et divina libri X
“…the members of the various Christian sects, of the Jewish and Mohammedan communions, and of the non-Christian philosophies, who achieved and achieve their salvation, do so simply by God’s grace aiding their good faith instinctively to concentrate itself upon, and to practise, those elements in the cultus and teaching of their respective sect, communion or philosophy, which are true and good and originally revealed by God…”
-Cardinal Juan De Lugo (a. d. 1583-1660), De Fide, Disputations
These theological arguments are very old.
Pope Paul VI recognized this in relation to atheists:
"...The Church can regard no one as excluded from its motherly embrace, no one as outside the scope of its motherly care. It has no enemies except those who wish to make themselves such. Its catholicity is no idle boast. It was not for nothing that it received its mission to foster love, unity and peace among men...Though We speak firmly and clearly in defence of religion, and of those human, spiritual values which it proclaims and cherishes, Our pastoral solicitude nevertheless prompts Us to probe into the mind of the modern atheist, in an effort to understand the reasons...
They are obviously many and complex, and we must come to a prudent decision about them, and answer them effectively. They sometimes spring from the demand for a more profound and purer presentation of religious truth, and an objection to forms of language and worship which somehow fall short of the ideal. These things we must remedy. We must do all we can to purify them and make them express more adequately the sacred reality of which they are the signs. We see these men serving a demanding and often a noble cause, fired with enthusiasm and idealism, dreaming of justice and progress and striving for a social order which they conceive of as the ultimate of perfection, and all but divine.
This, for them, is the Absolute and the Necessary...Again we see these men taking pains to work out scientific explanation of the universe by human reasoning, and they are often quite ingenuously enthusiastic about this.
It is an enquiry which is all the less reprehensible in that it follows rules of logic very similar to those which are taught in the best schools of philosophy...They are sometimes men of great breadth of mind, impatient with the mediocrity and self-seeking which infects so much of modern society. They are quick to make use of sentiments and expressions found in our Gospel, referring to the brotherhood of man, mutual aid, and human compassion...We do not therefore give up hope of the eventual possibility of a dialogue between these men and the Church
They are obviously many and complex, and we must come to a prudent decision about them, and answer them effectively. They sometimes spring from the demand for a more profound and purer presentation of religious truth, and an objection to forms of language and worship which somehow fall short of the ideal. These things we must remedy. We must do all we can to purify them and make them express more adequately the sacred reality of which they are the signs. We see these men serving a demanding and often a noble cause, fired with enthusiasm and idealism, dreaming of justice and progress and striving for a social order which they conceive of as the ultimate of perfection, and all but divine.
This, for them, is the Absolute and the Necessary...Again we see these men taking pains to work out scientific explanation of the universe by human reasoning, and they are often quite ingenuously enthusiastic about this.
It is an enquiry which is all the less reprehensible in that it follows rules of logic very similar to those which are taught in the best schools of philosophy...They are sometimes men of great breadth of mind, impatient with the mediocrity and self-seeking which infects so much of modern society. They are quick to make use of sentiments and expressions found in our Gospel, referring to the brotherhood of man, mutual aid, and human compassion...We do not therefore give up hope of the eventual possibility of a dialogue between these men and the Church..."
- ECCLESIAM SUAM, ENCYCLICAL OF POPE PAUL VI , AUGUST 6, 1964
In other words, many atheists are sincere, intelligent and socially conscious people who just don't find the claims made on behalf of religion intellectually persuasive.
Or as the Second Vatican Council's pastoral constitution
Gaudium et Spes (1965) put it:
Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern Word-Gaudium et Spes
"Atheism results not rarely from a violent protest against the evil in this world...For, taken as a whole, atheism is not a spontaneous development but stems from a variety of causes, including a critical reaction against religious beliefs, and in some places against the Christian religion in particular. Hence believers can have more than a little to do with the birth of atheism. To the extent that they neglect their own training in the faith, or teach erroneous doctrine, or are deficient in their religious, moral, or social life, they must be said to conceal rather than reveal the authentic face of God and religion..."
The Church here recognizes that, at least to some extent, unbelief arises "
through [our] fault, through [our] fault, through [our] most grievous fault", partly because we just aren't making persuasive, credible arguments in favour of religious belief.
And Catholicism is, and has always been, the largest Christian denomination. Nobody else in the Christian family matches us our 1.1 billion souls.
That said, from a purely secular reading of scripture it doesn't look like Jesus regarded anything other than works and purity of heart as necessary requirements for salvation. He doesn't seem to have particularly bothered about beliefs.
Jesus instructed his audience to stop thinking in terms of the "
received wisdom" of their ancestors, as one scholar notes:
The Sermon on the Mount
Jesus was well aware that much of what he was going to say would be in fundamental contradiction to what the masses had been taught. He recognized that there would be a chasm, an incompatibility, between the prevailing orthodoxy (either popular, clerical, or both) that they had been raised in and that which he was advocating (Mt. 9:16, for example).
Indeed, he plainly told his audience that they already possessed the ability to make their own value judgements about his ministry, and that they shouldn't look for divine signs in the heavens to validate it:
Luke 12:57
“And why do you not judge for yourselves what is right?"
That is a literal Greek translation of this verse:
GRK Δια τι δε και αφ' εαυτων δεν κρινετε το δικαιον
This is not an appeal to authority or sacred writ but to conscience, intuition and reason. One commentator, for instance, transliterates the meaning of this injunction as follows: "
Why, even without signs, do you not judge rightly of me and of my doctrine by the natural light of reason and of conscience?" (
J. R. Dummelow, op. cit., p. 755).
