So, you're saying that the Church's teaching wasn't wrong. It was merely misunderstood for umpteen centuries?
No, laypeople were not properly catechized in what the doctrine
actually meant. The church has never restricted salvation to people who receive water baptism and formally enter the RC. But the doctrine is extremely complicated.
There was a clerical elitism that had seeped into the pre-Vatican II Catholic ethos, which hadn't existed in the early or even patristic church. It's still in the process of being suppressed by Pope Francis, although its dying out now because he is appointing so many new bishops and cardinals who support his theological stance.
Amongst scholastics and educated theologians, the dogma "
there is no salvation outside the church" was recognised as being far more flexible in essence than it appears when presented uncontextualized. The traditional pre-Vatican II teaching of the Church recognises four varieties of baptism: water baptism, baptism by desire, baptism by blood and baptism by implicit desire.
The Fathers of the Second Vatican Council retained this dogmatic teaching but 'smoothed' over the language - to remove offensive, old-style terminology like '
heathens,' '
heretics', '
nonbelievers', '
Muhammadans,' '
infidels' and the idea that pious non-Christians sincerely following their conscience were actually '
baptised' by an assumed implicit desire for the truth of the Catholic Faith.
Firstly, you can had "
baptism by desire". This is the case of a person who, comes to believe in the Christian or Catholic Faith, but dies before they can receive water baptism i.e. Pope Innocent II who reigned from 1130-1143. He wrote to the Bishop of Cremona in a letter entitled
Apostolicam Sedem:
"...We assert without hesitation (on the authority of the holy Fathers Augustine and Ambrose) that the 'priest' whom you indicated (in your letter) though he had died without the water of baptism, because he persevered in the Faith of Holy Mother Church and in the confession of the name of Christ, was freed from original sin and attained the joys of the heavenly fatherland. Read [brother] in the eighth book of Augustine's City of God where among other things it is written: 'Baptism is administered invisibly to one whom not contempt of religion, but death excludes.' Read again the book also of the blessed Ambrose concerning the death of Valentinian where he says the same thing. Therefore, to questions concerning the dead, you should hold the opinions of the learned Fathers, and in your church you should join in prayers and you should have sacrifices offered to God for the 'priest' mentioned..."
- Pope Innocent II (1130-1143)
Secondly, you can have "
baptism by blood" if a person dies a martyr without water immersion In this manner, St. Emerentiana, St. Respicius the brother martyrs Sts. Donatien and Rogatien and St. Victor of Braga were never baptised with water but died catechumens.
Thirdly (and this is the most important in terms of non-Christians), you can have "
baptism by implicit desire". This last form was explained by St. Alphonsus de Liguori:
“…Baptism, therefore, coming from a Greek word that means washing or immersion in water, is distinguished into Baptism of water, of spirit, and of blood. … But Baptism of spirit is perfect conversion to God by contrition or love of God above all things accompanied by an explicit or implicit desire for true Baptism of water, the place of which it takes as to the remission of guilt…It is called ‘of spirit’ because it takes place by the impulse of the Holy Spirit. Now it is de fide that men are also saved by Baptism of spirit, by virtue of the Canon Apostolicam, ‘de presbytero non baptizato’ and of the Council of Trent, session 6, Chapter 4 where it is said that no one can be saved 'without the laver of regeneration or the desire…Who can deny that the act of perfect love of God, which is sufficient for justification, includes an implicit desire of Baptism, of Penance, and of the Eucharist. He who wishes the whole wishes the every part of that whole and all the means necessary for its attainment. In order to be justified without baptism, an infidel must love God above all things, and must have an universal will to observe all the divine precepts, among which the first is to receive baptism: and therefore in order to be justified it is necessary for him to have at least an implicit desire of that sacrament…”
- Saint Alphonsus Maria de Liguori (1696 – 1787), Doctor of the Church
Cardinal Juan De Lugo (a. d. 1583-1660), Spaniard, post-Reformation Roman Catholic, Jesuit, Theological Professor, and a Cardinal writing in Rome under the eyes of Pope Urban VIII. He wrote this in one of his works:
“…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, did and do so in general 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
Here is the old Catholic Encycoepedia on it:
Catholic Encyclopedia (~1913): Baptism: Substitutes for the Sacrament: “The Fathers and theologians frequently divide baptism into three kinds: the baptism of water (aquæ or fluminis), the baptism of desire (flaminis), and the baptism of blood (sanguinis). However, only the first is a real sacrament. The latter two are denominated baptism only analogically, inasmuch as they supply the principal effect of baptism, namely, the grace which remits sins. It is the teaching of the Catholic Church that when the baptism of water becomes a physical or moral impossibility, eternal life may be obtained by the baptism of desire or the baptism of blood.”
The Church: “Thus, even in the case in which God Saves men apart from the Church, He does so through the Church’s graces. They are joined to the Church in spiritual communion, though not in visible and external communion. In the expression of theologians, they belong to the soul of the Church, though not to its body.”
In 1713 Pope Clement XI condemned in his dogmatic Bull "Unigenitus" the proposition of the Jensenist Quesnel that "
no grace is given outside the Church" just as Pope Alexander VIII had already condemned in 1690 the Jansenistic proposition of Arnauld: "
Pagans, Jews, heretics, and other people of the sort, receive no influx [of grace] whatsoever from Jesus Christ". We subsequently have plentiful magisterial teaching from binding encyclicals and catechisms, including those of Popes Pius IX, Saint Pius X and Pius XII. See:
Holy Office [Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith], Aug 9, 1949, condemning doctrine of L. Feeney (DS 3870):
"It is not always required that one be actually incorporated as a
member of the Church, but this at least is required: that one adhere
to it in wish and desire. It is not always necessary that this be
explicit...God accepts even an implicit will, called by that name because it is
contained in the good disposition of soul in which a man wills to
conform his will to the will of God."
So, the doctrine shouldn't be misinterpreted to exclude from salvation anyone who hasn't received water baptism in the RC and Vatican II didn't revoke the doctrine, since there was nothing in fact to revoke apart from common misconceptions - it just ecumenicized and liberalised the language used to explain it.
The only real doctrinal development was the recognition by the Second Vatican Council in
Lumen Gentium that atheists could also be redeemed despite not explicitly believing in God, through the same mechanism of baptism by implicit desire. Since there had been so few, if any, atheists prior to the enlightenment this wasn't surprising - the church had never been compelled to address the issue of their afterlife fate.
. Don't suppose he'd been in a church since the previous Christmas. But everyone treated him with tolerant good humour, I'm pleased to say. I think the priest thought "Well, at least he is here now".)
