The World Turned Upside Down

 

You may recall, if you have read all this from the beginning, the biggest problem I had with being Catholic – with being Christian – before I stopped calling myself these things in 2007.

That was the idea of ‘extra Ecclesiam nulla salus’ – that there is no salvation outside the Church. The idea of Hell revulsed me – as it still does. The idea that anyone could be condemned to such a fate, not because of anything they had done, but because of what they had ‘believed’ – what they had professed in thoughts and words to be the nature of reality -  was a thousand times worse. This seemed to me utterly incompatible with my understanding of God – as it still does.

If this were really so, if God had ordained that human beings were to live or die eternally on the basis of whether or not they had explicitly accepted our Lord Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour, then that god would not be God. He would not be the ‘I AM’, the one self-existent being, but a creature, a malignant subcreator playing with a toy universe, and I would fight him with every fibre of my being, in obedience to the unseen and unknown God. Even if that God existed only in my mind.

So then. How have I come to reconcile my rampant universalism with the teaching ‘extra Ecclesiam nulla salus’? What do I understand this teaching to mean?

What it means is this: The Church is indeed the sole instrument by which Christ works the World’s salvation. The Church is the mystical body of Christ, the means through which salvation comes to the World. This salvation is a supernatural work, not limited by space or time, in which the members of the Body of Christ participate. It is something entirely different from enrolling additional members in the Church.

I am not told anywhere that I cannot believe this, so I will go on doing so.

Consider how our Lord behaved during his time on Earth:

• He did not teach at all until he was thirty years old

• He spoke in parables and seemed quite content to be misunderstood by most of his hearers

• He said that he was sent to the lost sheep of the children of Israel, and not to the gentiles

These are not the actions of Someone who requires people to assent intellectually or emotionally to a proposition to avoid eternal torment. These are not the actions of Someone who wants to get that proposition out to as many people as possible as quickly as possible so that they can be saved. These are the actions of Someone who has all the time in the world.

Consider some of our Lord’s teachings about the Kingdom of God:

• It is like salt

• It is like light

• It is like yeast

Salt is not any use without something to make salty; light is not any use without something to illuminate; yeast by itself is not a particularly attractive foodstuff. These things are all important because they act on something else and transform it: they do not make it into salt, or light, or yeast.

Consider what our Lord said about His Church: 

• The gates of Hell will not prevail against it

Gates are not something that comes after you and knock you down; gates are something that you come up to and knock down, God willing. This does not mean (only) that Hell will not overcome the Church; it means that Hell will be overcome. It does not have a chance in itself against the Church.

Consider some of the things we are encouraged to pray:

• The Fatima prayer, in the modern Rosary: “Lead all souls to Heaven, especially those in most need of thy mercy”

• The Chaplet of Divine Mercy: “Have mercy on me, and on the whole world” 

Why would be encouraged to pray that all souls be led to Heaven, unless such a thing were possible? Why would be encouraged to pray that God have mercy on the whole world, unless He desires to do so?

I believe that you do not have to be a member of the Church to be saved. I believe that it a good thing to be a member of the Church, because you have to be a member of the Church to participate in our Lord’s glorious supernatural work of saving others. Your prayer and fasting now can help lead to heaven someone you have never met, who died thousands of years before you were born on the other side of the world. Because Christ is fully God and fully Man; and God is outside of space and time; so the Body of Christ extends outside of time. Phillip K. Dick is right: ‘The Empire never ended.’ Through the Body of Christ, the 1st century martyrs are connected to us, and we are connected to them. Our prayers can help them. It is not crazy to pray for the conversion of St. Augustine. It is not crazy to pray for the salvation of Caligula, or Mao, or Ozymandias. 

That is what I believe is meant by ‘extra Ecclesiam nulla salus’.

So this world, with its armies and navies and harbours and highways and empires and republics that loom so large and important, is really hanging by a thread of prayer and penance. 

This thread is spun by God from a tiny minority of souls in a state of grace, whose participation in the sacrifice of Christ advances the salvation of all the world. The contemplative orders, which seemed so pointless to the younger pragmaticist me, are the most important thing.

From this point of view the suppression of the contemplative orders by Joseph II of Austria – by the Holy Roman Emperor, the highest temporal power in Christendom – was the greatest catastrophe of the modern age. I do not think is a coincidence that this suppression coincides temporally with the unleashing of the demonic forces that are still convulsing the world today. The one man whose primary duty is to watch over Christendom so that the nuns may pray in peace plots to close their convents; and across the ocean, the rebel armies of an infectious individualism that will eventually reduce Christendom to an atomised mist defeat their lawful sovereign. The spirit of revolution infects Europe; Yorktown is followed by Valmy; the map of Europe is redrawn, the Holy Roman Empire is no more, and one generation of insane fads follows another down to our own time, while the bodies of the innocents pile up in the tens and hundreds of millions.

Nothing and nobody is any longer in the right place; men no longer recognize any effective authority in the spiritual order or any legitimate power in the temporal; the profane presumes to discuss what is sacred, and to contest its character and even its existence; the inferior judges the superior, ignorance sets bounds to wisdom, error prevails over truth, the human is substituted for the Divine, earth has priority over heaven, and the individual sets the measure for all things. (René Guenon)

But the gates of Hell will not prevail against the Church of Christ.

And somewhere in the future sentient gila monsters are praying for us on Luyten b.