“No Salvation outside the Church”: Understanding the Doctrine with St. Thomas Aquinas and Charles Journet1

1 An earlier version of this essay was presented on 29 April 2011, at the Spring 2011 “Thomistic Circles” Conference on “Theo-Centric Ecclesiology” at the Dominican House of Studies, Washington, D.C. 2 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile or On Education, vol. 13 of The Collected Writings of Rousseau, trans. and ed. Christopher Kelly and Allan Bloom (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2010). 517 The Thomist 75 (2011): 517-36 “NO SALVATION OUTSIDE THE CHURCH”: UNDERSTANDING THE DOCTRINE WITH ST. THOMAS AQUINAS AND CHARLES JOURNET1 CHARLES MOREROD, O.P. Bishop of Lausanne, Geneva, and Fribourg E XTRA ECCLESIAM NULLA SALUS—“outside the Church no salvation”—is one of the least understood or accepted theological formulas in the contemporary world. This difficulty comes in part from the possible meanings of salus, in part from the meaning of the word ecclesia. In this essay, I will present the essential objection to the formula and propose an answer with the help of St. Thomas Aquinas and Charles Cardinal Journet. I. THE OBJECTION The narrow exclusivity of extra ecclesiam nulla salus was one of the Enlightenment’s main arguments against a revealed religion. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s vicaire savoyard summarizes a common objection of the time.2 “Two-thirds of mankind are neither Jews nor Mohammedans nor Christians,” he observes. Moreover, in spite of the efforts of missionaries to evangelize the world, it cannot be denied that many people die without ever hearing “the gospel.” Indeed, even if “there were only a single CHARLES MOREROD, O.P. 518 3 Ibid., 470. 4 Ibid., 471. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., 472. 8 Ibid., 473. man in the whole universe who had never been preached to about Jesus Christ,” Rousseau doubts that Christianity could adequately explain “what we are going to do with that person?”3 Does such a person eternally perish simply because he never heard the gospel? Rousseau presses the objection further and suggests, “even if the ministers of the gospel have made themselves heard by distant peoples, what have they told them which could reasonably be accepted on their word and which did not demand the most exact verification?”4 The articles of the faith are too incredible to be taken seriously. “You proclaim to me a God born and dead two thousand years ago at the other end of the world in some little town, and you tell me that whoever has not believed in this mystery will be damned.”5 If the inhabitants of Jerusalem during the life of Jesus failed to recognize his divinity and “treated God like a thief,” Rousseau wonders, “what shall I do then, I who have never even heard him mentioned except by you?”6 Arguing against a reliance on religious faith or testimony in any form, he asserts that “no one is exempt from the first duty of man; no one has a right to rely on the judgment of others.”7 Indeed, “there is one [book] open to all eyes: it is the book of nature. It is from this great and sublime book that I learn to serve and worship its divine author. No one can be excused for not reading it, because it speaks to all men a language that is intelligible to all minds.”8 The Enlightenment perspective on the question of salvation is fundamentally anthropocentric. What matters is the human being, and what might be said about God himself is not really important. In this view what matters above all is the present life. The afterlife is interesting only insofar as it has an impact on the hic et nunc. Because natural religion is common to all, it is considered to be “NO SALVATION OUTSIDE THE CHURCH” 519 9 In the view of the Enlightenment, religion is merely a human work. Traces of this sentiment are observable in Immanuel Kant’s objections to the Trinity and the Incarnation: “Of the teaching on the Trinity, taken literally, one can do nothing at the practical level, even if one would believe that he understands it, and even less when one realizes that it surpasses all our concepts. . . . If this God-man is not represented as the idea eternally present in...