Over the past couple of days, we’ve been talking a bit about Hell and damnation. For Catholics, that very quickly brings us to the Church’s teaching “Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus”: Outside the Church there is no salvation. This slightly refined (and made even more difficult) by the dogmas define in the High Middle Ages in the papal bull Unam Sanctam.
Unam Sanctam is the sort of document that gives our Protestant brothers and sisters a real jolt, primarily because it looks at first blush as though it teaches that Catholics cannot have Protestant brothers and sisters. Written by Pope Boniface VIII in 1302, this papal bull concludes with this shocking dogmatic definition:
“We declare, say, define and pronounce, that it is absolutely necessary for the salvation of every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff.”
The average modern reader concludes these words mean: “We know exactly where the Church both is and is not. It’s in the visible Catholic communion and only members of the visible Catholic Church go to Heaven.” After this basic assumption has been made, most people go on to assume it is simply a matter of deciding what you think about that proposition. Generally, people fall into one of the following groups:
1. Those nice people who say hopefully, “That statement was not dogma, but just Boniface’s opinion.”
2. Those Progressive Dissenting Catholics who say, “That statement used to be narrow-minded Catholic dogma but Vatican II thankfully contradicts all that. How the Church has grown!”
3. Those anti-Catholics say derisively, “That statement used to be unbiblical Catholic dogma but Vatican II reversed all that. How the supposedly infallible Church has flatly contradicted the Bible and itself!”
4. Those Reactionary Dissenting Catholics who say, “That statement used to be glorious Catholic dogma but Vatican II betrayed all that. How the Second Vatican Council has corrupted the One True Faith!”
5. Those orthodox Catholics who say, “Unam Sanctam‘s definition is still dogma and the teaching of the Second Vatican Council does not contradict it or the Bible. Rather, the Council develops the Faith of the Church infallibly taught since the apostles, a faith which has never demanded we believe that “The Church is found solely in the visible Catholic communion, nor that only members of the visible Catholic Church can go to Heaven.”
Let’s look at these five views of Unam Sanctam.
First things first, I must disappoint Group #1 by making clear that the Faith does not allow us the easy out of denying the dogmatic nature of Unam Sanctam any more than it allowed Arius to fudge the difficult and seemingly contradictory proposition that God is One, yet Three. As John Hardon, S.J. points out in his Catholic Catechism, the passage cited above was “solemnly defined and represents traditional Catholic dogma on the Church’s necessity for salvation.” When a Pope declares, pronounces and defines, he is using the formula to make crystal clear that he is delivering, not his personal opinion, but the dogmatic teaching of the Catholic Church. The fact is then, Pope Boniface VIII committed the Church to this proposition for the rest of her history. We cannot dodge this with a convenient “that was then, this is now.” If it was dogma once, it still is.
However, neither can we dodge another fact of Catholic history: the Second Vatican Council. At that Council, the Church formulated Lumen Gentium in which, 660 years after Unam Sanctam, she declared, “The Church knows that she is joined in many ways to the baptized who are honored by the name of Christian, but do not profess the Catholic faith in its entirety or have not preserved unity or communion under the successor of Peter.”
To Groups 2, 3, and 4, this sounds like a flat contradiction. For all these folk make the fatal error of placing one or other of the Church’s teachings in opposition to (and superiority over) the other. Thus, Progressive Dissenting Catholics, Anti-Catholics, and Reactionary Dissenting Catholics all assume that Unam Sanctam was simply vetoed by a newly-coined doctrine in Lumen Gentium which essentially declared that our relationship to the successor of Peter doesn’t matter one iota. If we agree about this, all that remains for us to do is to decide whether to cheer along with Progressive Dissenters (for the Church’s “deepened maturity”) to gloat along with anti-Catholics (over the alleged collapse of the Church’s infallibility) or to grumble along with Reactionary Dissenters (about those damned modernists who hijacked the Church at Vatican II).
The problem with this assumption is simply this: it’s not true. First, the Church, centuries before Vatican II, regarded Orthodox sacraments as valid, which is awfully hard to do if you don’t think Christ can be found anywhere but in the Catholic Church. Similarly, it has always regarded the Baptism of non-Catholics as valid–and a valid Baptism means you are, in some sense, in union with Christ. Still more recently and most plainly, (but still well before the Council) Fr. Leonard Feeney was excommunicated for insisting that only people in visible communion with the Catholic Church could be saved. So this simplistic “We’re in, you’re out” reading of Unam Sanctam (and the corollary that Lumen Gentium “cancelled” it) doesn’t fly.
So is there a more balanced picture that reverences both Unam Sanctam and Lumen Gentium as authentic magisterial teaching? Yes.
Of which more tomorrow.
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