FYI - Leonard Feeney was dismissed in 1949 for his beliefs, so this is outside the time frame of the forty years since VII. Strict interpretation of this dogma was never part of Church doctrine and properly understood, it is still a doctrine of the Church.
What does Father Feeney have to do with it? I never said ONE thing about him. Whether you like it our not, “Outside of the Church there is no salvation”,
is a
dogma of the Catholic Church. Today it is ignored by the Church. It follows then that today, Jesus Christ’s teaching is ignored by the Church. You may wish to read the following:
Will all men go to heaven? Will everyone be saved?
Though the sacrifice of Jesus Christ offered once for all on Calvary and made present at each and every valid Mass is more than sufficient to save all men without exception, it does not follow that all men will consequently be saved. It is a fundamental doctrine of St. Paul that salvation can be acquired only by the grace merited by Christ, and St. Peter himself testified before the High Council “neither is there salvation in any other” (Acts 4:12).
Furthermore this is the significance of the dictum “outside the Church there is no salvation.” Outside of Christ there is nothing, for the gods of the Gentiles are demons (Ps. 95:5).
Ignorance, even if invincible, is not in itself an infallible means of salvation. There is the most serious of obligations to seek the truth, incumbent upon all who are not of the household of the Catholic Faith.
The grace of Christ is always given and must not be refused, and Christ established only one Church in which God is worshipped in spirit and in truth.
It is the deliberate and studied ambiguity of recent texts which causes confusion and leads into the path of error, all religions are not equal, all religions are not good. There is no regard for truth, the truth of Christ, in much recent ecclesiastical teaching.
In a recent review of Crossing the Threshold of Hope, an English journalist writes that reports of the pope’s infallibility are somewhat exaggerated. Everything the Holy Father says is not infallibly true, especially in his remarks on other religions. I will quote Noel Malcolm at length:
Code:
He talks [the pope] in relation to other religions —as if spirituality were just an aspect of human experience as such, something which can be found among Hindus, Confucians and ancestor-worshipping aborigines. He even suggests that having the rudiments of spiritual experience connects such people with Christianity and makes them eligible for salvation —a claim which I believe teeters on the edge of heresy (Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph, London, November 6, 1994).
If such a person, who is not Catholic, can understand, why cannot our pope and bishops see the truth that they all professed at one time for most of their lives, but now seek to reinterpret in true revisionist fashion, reminiscent of a supposedly fallen regime. [Article by Fr. Leo Boyle]