Under Construction
[An article followed by my commentary]
The Editors, "Are There Atheists in Heaven," New Oxford Review (June 2018):
It was a touching scene. After circling a massive, decrepit public-housing complex on the outskirts of Rome, Pope Francis arrived at St. Paul of the Cross Church. There, the Holy Father participated in a question-and-answer session with children from the parish. After a few kids offered up the standard questions — e.g., “How did you feel when you were elected pope?” — a young boy who had been waiting his turn tentatively approached the microphone. But he stopped short, perhaps overwhelmed by the enormity of the moment. “I can’t do it,” he said, and he began sobbing into his hands. So Francis called the boy over and encouraged him to whisper his question into his ear. When the boy, named Emanuele, approached, Francis embraced him. With their heads almost touching, they spoke privately before Emanuele returned to his seat. Here’s an account of what followed, courtesy of Catholic News Service (Apr. 27):
Pope Francis said he had asked Emanuele if he could share the boy’s question and the boy agreed. “‘A little while ago my father passed away. He was a nonbeliever, but he had all four of his children baptized. He was a good man. Is dad in heaven?’”And just as surely, the Pope’s reply pleased Emanuele very much. As is evident from this episode, Francis has the heart of a pastor: his affable demeanor with the children, his warm embrace of a timid boy, and his concern for the sensitivities of those in his care mark him as a man who is eager to be close to his people, share in their joys and sorrows, and draw them into the sheepfold.
“How beautiful to hear a son say of his father, ‘He was good,’” the pope told the children. “And what a beautiful witness of a son who inherited the strength of his father, who had the courage to cry in front of all of us. If that man was able to make his children like that, then it’s true, he was a good man. He was a good man.
“That man did not have the gift of faith, he wasn’t a believer, but he had his children baptized. He had a good heart,” Pope Francis said.
“God is the one who says who goes to heaven,” the pope explained.
The next step in answering Emanuele’s question, he said, would be to think about what God is like and, especially, what kind of heart God has. “What do you think? A father’s heart. God has a dad’s heart. And with a dad who was not a believer, but who baptized his children and gave them that bravura [courage], do you think God would be able to leave him far from himself?”
“Does God abandon his children?” the pope asked. “Does God abandon his children when they are good?”
The children shouted, “No.”
“There, Emanuele, that is the answer,” the pope told the boy. “God surely was proud of your father, because it is easier as a believer to baptize your children than to baptize them when you are not a believer. Surely this pleased God very much.”
But — and with Francis, there’s always a but — his expansive notion of salvation is problematic. What he said about Emanuele’s father appears to contravene Catholic teaching — teaching Francis is sworn to uphold. In response to Emanuele’s question about whether his atheist father is in Heaven, Francis guided the children in the audience to the conclusion that God does not abandon “good” people, even though they don’t believe in Him, and so Emanuele’s father is not “far from” God. That, he told the boy, is your answer.
Now, nobody expects the Pope to crush a little boy’s spirit by confirming his fears about the precariousness of his atheist father’s eternal destination. That would be cruel and possibly a stumbling block to the child’s faith. But, as Francis well knows, whenever he speaks into a microphone, he is addressing not only those present but the whole world, in his capacity as leader of the Catholic Church. Therefore, his words are open to scrutiny. And it appears that the Pope has obfuscated one of the most fundamental tenets of the Christian religion: What one must do to be saved.
God, Francis said, has not abandoned Emanuele’s father. Truly, God is eternally faithful. But what about Emanuele’s father? He was faithless, a “nonbeliever,” an atheist. And the consequence of rejecting God is eternity in Hell. Heaven is reserved for believers. That’s Christianity 101. Surely, the Holy Father is familiar with this passage from the Gospel of John: “Whoever believes in him [Jesus] is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son” (3:18). Numerous passages to the same effect could be cited. Setting aside the question of invincible ignorance, which doesn’t apply here, Scripture is abundantly clear: Nonbelievers are condemned to eternity in Hell.
Yet Francis suggested that Emanuele’s father might be in Heaven, without, of course, saying so outright. He told Emanuele that because his father had his children baptized — something that is not “easy” for a nonbeliever — God is “proud” of him and therefore would not “leave him far from himself.” This can only mean that Emanuele’s father is not in Hell, which is eternal separation from God, or even Purgatory, where souls must undergo a purifying fire before they may enter the presence of God. That leaves Heaven, where the righteous spend eternity close to God — i.e., not “far” from Him — in His presence.
Francis said, rather oddly, that Emanuele’s father had a “good heart” because he raised children who cry easily, as if this were some great virtue, a demonstration of courage. But this too militates against Scripture: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it?” (Jer. 17:9). Moreover, doing good things for our children is no automatic ticket to eternal bliss; even “evil” men do this. “What man of you,” Jesus asked (Mt. 7:11), “if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent?… You then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children….”
Whatever it was that Emanuele’s father wanted to give his children when he had them baptized, he did not want for himself. He seems to have wanted them to have a chance at salvation, and he seemed to realize that the surest way was through the Catholic Church. If this was indeed the case, then he was correct, for the Church “is necessary for salvation,” as the Catechism teaches (no. 846; quoting Lumen Gentium, no. 14). Yet he himself did not seek communion with the Church, which means he denied himself the very chance at salvation he sought for his children. This casts into further doubt Francis’s claim that Emanuele’s father is not “far” from God, for the Catechism continues, “They could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse either to enter it, or to remain in it.”
But Francis has provided himself an out. Though he seems to want to canonize Emanuele’s father, if only for the sake of the boy’s feelings, he holds back, saying that only God can say who goes to Heaven. Nobody, therefore, can accuse Francis of saying definitively that an atheist is in Heaven. As Aaron D. Wolf has written, Francis “seems to rely on his ability to be misquoted and misunderstood” (Chronicles, May). He seems to relish his ability to obfuscate. You see, God isn’t the only one who can say who is in Heaven. Francis himself has the same ability. And he has exercised his power to declare who is in Heaven on 16 separate occasions, canonizing 884 saints, people who demonstrated heroic virtue in this life and are right now face to face with God in Heaven, sharing in His divine nature.
You might think we’re making a mountain out of a molehill, that we shouldn’t read too deeply into the Pope’s comments because he merely wanted to comfort a heartsick boy. Perhaps. But — and here’s that but that always rears its head — this isn’t the first time this Pope has suggested that nonbelieving atheists are in Heaven. A mere two months into his papacy, during a homily in May 2013, Francis said, “The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone. ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone!” If he wasn’t clear enough, Francis continued, “We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.” Here again Francis suggests that atheists need only “do good” to obtain eternal life.
The Catechism calls atheism “one of the most serious problems of our time” (no. 2123; quoting Gaudium et Spes, no. 19). The Catechism further calls it “a sin against the virtue of religion” (no. 2125) and cites Romans 1:18 for support. This is where St. Paul says, “The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness.” Evidently, Francis doesn’t see atheism as a problem that warrants divine wrath, but as a blessing that can possibly earn divine favor.
Is this what the Pope really believes? Who knows? But this is not the Gospel of Jesus Christ; it is a strange doctrine indeed, a mashup of several heresies: universalism (the belief that all people will be saved), Pelagianism (the belief that we can earn salvation by our own merits), and moralistic therapeutic deism (a concept popularized by sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton in their 2005 book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers; the fifth of its five tenets says that all good people go to Heaven when they die).
Ultimately, the answer to little Emanuele’s question about the eternal destination of his father is: We don’t know. The Church does not consign him to Hell, but neither can she admit him to Heaven. What Emanuele needs more than comfort is encouragement: encouragement to pray for his father without ceasing and to work out his own salvation with fear and trembling. If all he has is the comforting lie that his atheist father is on some imaginary wide road to Heaven, what’s to stop Emanuele himself from edging off the true, narrow road, beguiled by the presumption that he can abandon God and His Church and still get to Heaven if only he’s “good”?
“Some reduce to a meaningless formula the necessity of belonging to the true Church in order to gain eternal salvation.” — Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis (no. 27)
The present article by the Editors, "Are There Atheists in Heaven," (New Oxford Review, June, 2018), pp. 16-18, is reproduced here by kind permission of New Oxford Review, 1069 Kains Ave., Berkeley, CA 94706.
The answer to the question addressed in the article above, whether atheists are in heaven or even whether non-canonized Catholics are in heaven, is: We don't know. We do know the divinely revealed words in the Gospel, where Jesus says "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father but by me" (Jn 14:6) and "wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many enter through it" (Mt 7:13). And we do know the infallible teaching of the Church that "outside the Church there is no salvation" (extra ecclesiam nulla salus), reiterated throughout her history. In other words, we know that nobody can be saved without Jesus and His Church. These are the means prescribed by God for our salvation.
One anticipates here an immediate and understandable inclination to qualify these statements. What about Old Testament patriarchs like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? What about the mentally retarded? What about innocent children? What about other Christian sectarians who lack the fullness of truth? What about God-fearing Muslims or Jews? What about good Hindus or Buddhists or atheists?
Perhaps no more succinct a summary of the mystery at issue here is that provided by non other than Kallistos Ware, an Eastern Orthodox bishop, who writes (in The Orthodox Church, [Penguin], pp. 147-248):
"Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. All the categorical strength and point of this aphorism lies in its tautology. Outside the Church there is no salvation, because salvation is the Church" (G. Florovsky, "Sobornost: the Catholicity of the Church", in The Church of God, p. 53). Does it therefore follow that anyone who is not visibly within the Church is necessarily damned? Of course not; still less does it follow that everyone who is visibly within the Church is necessarily saved. As Augustine wisely remarked: "How many sheep there are without, how many wolves within!" (Homilies on John, 45, 12) While there is no division between a "visible" and an "invisible Church", yet there may be members of the Church who are not visibly such, but whose membership is known to God alone. If anyone is saved, he must in some sense be a member of the Church; in what sense, we cannot always say.Much has been made in recent years of the possibility of salvation for those formally outside the Church, and much too often without the care expressed here by Ware in cautioning against a division between a "visible" and "invisible Church," and without his care in expressing the hypothetical nature of salvation formally outside the Church. "Yet there may be members of the Church who are not visibly such," he says, "but whose membership is known to God alone."
One thinks here of the recent theological speculations, perhaps with antecedents in the writings of Origen (184-253), about the possibility of an uninhabited hell. An obvious example is Hans Urs von Balthasar's Dare We Hope 'That All May be Saved'? With a Short Discourse on Hell (1979), tr. David Kipp and Lothar Krauth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), the latest edition of which (2nd edition, 2014) contains a Foreword by Fr. Robert Barron, who there and in many places on many occasions has reiterated similar views.
The danger here is that carefully qualified speculations can easily go to seed and sprout in weed-choked fields full of unqualified affirmations that none are lost, that none need fear hell, that everyone goes to heaven. The yield is an environment in which even the most carefully-worded magisterial statements can (and often are) now understood to suggest that there is no longer any real urgent reason for fearing hell for those who are unchurched or ignorant of Christ. But such an understanding conflicts with Sacred Tradition.
Let us examine some of these supposedly more 'generous' and 'universalistic' texts of the magisterium and see how they ought to be read (underscoring my emphasis):
1. Pius IX, in his encyclical Quanto conficiamur moerore (1863), writes:
There are, of course, those who are struggling with invincible ignorance about our most holy religion. Sincerely observing the natural law and its precepts inscribed by God on all hearts and ready to obey God, they live honest lives and are able to attain eternal life by the efficacious virtue of divine light and grace since God who clearly beholds, searches, and knows the minds, souls, thoughts, and habits of all men, because of His great goodness and mercy, will by no means suffer anyone to be punished with eternal torment who has not the guilt of deliberate sin.Notice the qualification here: "who has not the guilt of deliberate sin." Remember the words of Jesus when confronting the crowd of Jews about to stone a woman caught in adultery? He said: "He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone" (Jn 8:7). Most of the paragraph up to that point could easily be read as suggesting that many people actually exist who are actually saved by living honest lives in eager obedience to the precepts of natural law inscribed on their hearts. But on the other hand, who of us is without deliberate sin?
2. “Letter of the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office” (1949)
“... no one will be saved who, knowing the Church to have been divinely established by Christ, nevertheless refuses to submit to the Church or withholds obedience from the Roman Pontiff, the Vicar of Christ on earth.... [Yet] that one may obtain eternal salvation, it is not always required that he be incorporated into the Church actually as a member, but it is necessary that at least he be united to her by desire and longing.... However, this desire need not always be explicit, as it is in catechumens; but when a person is involved in invincible ignorance God accepts also an implicit desire .... But it must not be thought that any kind of desire of entering the Church suffices that one may be saved. It is necessary that the desire by which one is related to the Church be animated by perfect charity. Nor can an implicit desire produce its effect, unless a person has supernatural faith ....”Here, again, after asserting the necessity of the Church for those who know it to be divinely established, the Holy Office seems at first to suggest that some could actually exist who are nevertheless saved outside of the Church by being united to her, even only implicitly, by "longing and desire." However, notice the key qualification that is so easily overlooked here: this saving "desire" can't be just any kind of desire, but must be "animated by perfect charity" in a person having "supernatural faith" and "united to her [the Church]" by this "desire and longing."
I am reminded here of the conditions required for obtaining a plenary indulgence. Making a sacramental confession, receiving the Holy Eucharist, and praying for the intentions of the Supreme Pontiff are not especially hard. But what about having an interior disposition of complete detachment from sin, even venial sin? If this condition of acquiring this interior disposition is exceedingly difficult for any Catholic, think how much more difficult (if not impossible) it would be to discern whether a non-Catholic is united to the Church by a desire and longing animated by perfect charity and generated by supernatural faith. And that is the key: discerning whether some other non-Catholic person has such a disposition.
The problem here is epistemological. It is not a theological problem residing in any limitation of God's omnipotent power to save human beings in any way He chooses, whether by those means He has prescribed for their salvation, or some other means. It is a problem of our inability to know what lies beyond our means of knowing. To the question: "Do such people exist?" our answer must ever be: We don't know. God alone knows.
3. Vatican II:
- Unitatis Redintegratio (1964)
"...though we believe [non-Catholic separated brethren] to be deficient in some respects, [they] have been by no means deprived of significance and importance in the mystery of salvation. For the Spirit of Christ has not refrained from using them as means of salvation which derive their efficacy from the very fullness of grace and truth entrusted to the Church.... ... some and even very many of the significant elements and endowments which together go to build up and give life to the Church itself, can exist outside the visible boundaries of the Catholic Church: the written word of God; the life of grace; faith, hope and charity, with the other interior gifts of the Holy Spirit, and visible elements too. All of these, which come from Christ and lead back to Christ, belong by right to the one Church of Christ."
- Lumen Gentium (1964)
"... those also can attain to salvation who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church, yet sincerely seek God and moved by grace strive by their deeds to do His will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience. Nor does Divine Providence deny the helps necessary for salvation to those who, without blame on their part, have not yet arrived at an explicit knowledge of God and with His grace strive to live a good life."
“God has bound salvation to the sacrament of Baptism, but he himself is not bound by his sacraments.”(1257)
"Outside the Church there is no salvation"
846 How are we to understand this affirmation, often repeated by the Church Fathers? [335 Cf. Cyprian, Ep. 73.21:PL 3,1169; De unit.:PL 4,509-536.] Re-formulated positively, it means that all salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is his Body:
Basing itself on Scripture and Tradition, the Council teaches that the Church, a pilgrim now on earth, is necessary for salvation: the one Christ is the mediator and the way of salvation; he is present to us in his body which is the Church. He himself explicitly asserted the necessity of faith and Baptism, and thereby affirmed at the same time the necessity of the Church which men enter through Baptism as through a door. Hence they could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse either to enter it or to remain in it.[336 LG 14; cf. Mk 16:16; Jn 3:5.]847 This affirmation is not aimed at those who, through no fault of their own, do not know Christ and his Church:
Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience - those too may achieve eternal salvation.[337 LG 16; cf. DS 3866-3872.]
848 "Although in ways known to himself God can lead those who, through no fault of their own, are ignorant of the Gospel, to that faith without which it is impossible to please him, the Church still has the obligation and also the sacred right to evangelize all men." [338 AG 7; cf. Heb 11:6; 1 Cor 9:16.]
7. Declaration of the CDF Dominus Iesus, 2000
"… for those who are not formally and visibly members of the Church, salvation in Christ is accessible by virtue of a grace which, while having a mysterious relationship to the Church, does not make them formally part of the Church, but enlightens them in a way which is accommodated to their spiritual and material situation."
8. Interview with Archbishop Joseph Augustine DiNoia, O.P. by Br. André Marie in the National Catholic Register (July 2, 2012): "The Council did say there are elements of grace in other religions, and I don’t think that should be retracted. I’ve seen them, I know them — I’ve met Lutherans and Anglicans who are saints."
posted by Pertinacious Papist at 1:52 PM
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