T
TMC
Guest
This is certainly how the current teaching would have been viewed two or three hundred years ago. The Church now teaches that atheists may be saved, Muslims may by saved, Jews may be saved, Protestants may be saved. We now understand that the salvation of those outside the Church is spiritually connected to the Church, such that we can say they are saved through and in the Church, but no one would have agreed with that before the modern development. To them, the teaching that atheists and Muslims can be saved without conversion and baptism would have seemed to be an abrupt reversal from past teaching.Would have been, “there is salvation to those outside the Church’.
That is NOT the teaching though. That would have been a 180 and not a development.
In retrospect, we understand that as a development of existing doctrine, but Catholics from the past would absolutely have viewed it as a “180” from their understanding of the doctrine. Which is why I said that developments are often only understandable as such in hindsight, and that without discussion, we can not know how new developments may arise.