“Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus” . Outside the Church there’s no salvation. This is a Roman Catholic doctrine, and perhaps a Protestant one too, but understood very differently. One version is that if you do not formally part of the Church Visible, you are damned. Another version is that if you are not part of the Church Invisible, you are damned. This second version is the more Protestant one, and is pretty much tautological and not worth discussing. All of the meaning and controversy is over the first version, and its individual words.
Let’s start with the basics. Core Christian doctrine is that all men are sinners and deserve damnation. That is the doctrine of Original Sin. A second core doctrine is that Jesus’s death on the cross was necessary and sufficient for some men to be saved from damnation, but not all men are saved. It is just after this point that Catholics and Protestants start to diverge. They diverge in the roles the individual and the Church play in working out the effect of the Cross.
Protestants say that God induces some people to love God and that those are the people who are saved. They will naturally try to sin less because they are grateful and wish to please God, but they will still sin, need mercy, get mercy, and go to Heaven. The Church Visible, consisting of various local churches, sometimes gathered into denominations and always imperfect and error-ridden, plays a key role in helping Christians show their gratitude to God through worship and in helping them sin less than they would without the Church.
Catholics also say that God induces some people to love God, and those are the people who are saved. To be ready for Heaven, however, these people must stop sinning. Some of them do before they die, and they are called “saints”. Most of them do not, but can work out their sin in Purgatory and after some years get to Heaven. The Church Visible is absolutely crucial in this. The ordinary way to Heaven is for someone to be baptized (to eliminate Original Sin), to participate in eating the bread in Communion, and to accept the entire doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. Anybody who rejects this is damned. On the other hand, there are limited exceptions, exceptions which modern Catholics play up and emphasize. The exceptions are under the doctrine of “Invincible Ignorance”, which would be better named, “Unconquerable Ignorance” or “Unavoidable Ignorance”. The standard example is someone who is living in rural India and has never heard of Jesus, the Pope, or Christianity. This person will of course not be baptized or receive Communion. God could, however, reach out to his heart, just like anybody else’s, and impart grace and faith. If He does, then this person would *want* to be baptized immediately on hearing the Gospel, would *want* to take Communion, and would humbly accept the Church’s teaching, not out of fear of Hell but out of love of God. Not everybody in his remote village will be saved, and maybe nobody will, but his remoteness does not make salvation impossible, even though it makes incorporation into the Church Visible impossible.
What Catholics do NOT like to admit, even to themselves, is that while the Indian Villager is important as a matter of theory and theological logic, nobody really cares about him.
The big issues are these:
1. Are smart and well-informed but nice people damned if they hold the wrong beliefs? Is Pope Francis, fully educated in Protestant doctrine, damned for his rejection of it? Is Pastor John MacArthur, fully educated in Catholic doctrine, damned for his rejection of it?
2. Are unsophisticated and ill-taught people– but people who could full well educate themselves if they took the trouble— damned for their wrong beliefs? Is Donald Trump, ignorant of both Catholic and Protestant doctrine and surely incorrect in much or most of what he believes about doctrine, damned? Is the nice old lady down the street, equally ignorant and incorrect, despite having a less lurid past, damned? Note that for both Protestants and Catholics, President Trump and the nice old lady are really in the same boat. Protestants would say they sin about equally, despite the surface rulekeeping of the old lady; Catholics would say that Trump has sinned a lot more but that must means an extra 1,000 years in Purgatory unless his sins are “mortal”.
I will continue this later.
The Council of Trent said:
CANON IV.-If any one saith, that the sacraments of the New Law are not necessary unto salvation, but superfluous; and that, without them, or without the desire thereof, men obtain of God, through faith alone, the grace of justification;-though all (the sacraments) are not ineed necessary for every individual; let him be anathema.
“Anathema” means you deserve to be excommunicated. That does not mean you are damned, but it’s pretty close. It means you are not part of the Church Invisible. You are still obligated to come to church services, but as an observer, like a Hindu or Protestant. And if you die still excommunicated, then you definitely are damned. Some canon (source?) requires Catholics to do the following: “Most firmly hold and in no way doubt that every heretic or schismatic is to have part with the Devil and his angels in the flames of eternal fire, unless before the end of his life he be incorporated with, and restored to the Catholic Church.” This is pretty conventional, not just Catholic, despite huge disagreement as to which side are the schismatics and heretics. I would not quite call it catholic doctrine, as opposed to Catholic, because is the same idea as that someone who at the end of his life has not repented of gross sin generally (e.g., murder, adultery, blasphemy) is certainly damned, and this is in tension with the idea that the entire Christian life is one of repentance and that repentance is incomplete even at death, but God is merciful. But it is clear that someone being a heretic at one’s death should be as awful as being an unrepentant murderer.
Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution Lumen gentium, 14: “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.”
Feeneyism is a crude mild heresy that says only those in the visible Catholic Church can be saved. I don’t know if Pastor Feeney actually believed, and I would guess not and that it’s slander from his enemies in the Church since it is so crude and, as I said above, distracts from the real issue of whether informed Protestants can be saved. At any rate, Feeney’s enemies wrote the following, in the 1940’s, I think:
That is why no one will be saved if, knowing that the Church is of divine institution by Christ, he nevertheless refuses to submit to her or separates himself from the obedience of the Roman Pontiff, Christ’s Vicar on earth. …
for a person to obtain his salvation, it is not always required that he be de facto incorporated into the Church as a member, but he must at least be united to the Church through desire or hope….
However, it is not always necessary that this hope be explicit as in the case of catechumens. When one is in a state of invincible ignorance, God accepts an implicit desire, thus called because it is implicit in the soul’s good disposition, whereby it desires to conform its will to the will of God.
Again, note that this is the *inclusive* wing of the Roman Catholic church writing, not the ultra-montane hyper-Roman wing. Both wings agreed that if someone actively rejected Rome, he was damned. And that is still the official position of Rome, isn’t it? We don’t really need to look, since certainly a fundamental doctrineo f the Roman Catholic Church is that the Church Visible has never been wrong in its official pronouncements, the only issue being what “official” means.