Please be very careful my friends. Do not let yourselves be sucked into the sin of thinking about who does and does not get into heaven. Only God knows that. As our Holy Father Pope John Paul II said, “Jesus Christ finds ways of using all faiths to save.” The salvation that has come into the world through Jesus Christ is made available to the world by the Church. Because we know that there is not salvation without the Church, the Church has extended her mantle to cover even those who are not physically members. In other words, through her Apostolic authority she concedes that those who have access to any part of the truth held by the Church and who are faithful to it, even though it’s not all of the truth, that one strand of the truth that they may have becomes a means to salvation, for nothing is impossible for God.
In our spiritual lives we must do several things. First, we must pray for the conversion of sinners. Second, we must pray for the grace of humility for ourselves. Third, we must pray that the fullness of truth will become known and embraced by all. Let us avoid the sin of contradiction. To contradict the Church’s desire to save all men and to extend her supernatural life to those outside of her physical body is a sin. The body (Church) only desires what the head (Christ) desires. The body has the authority from the head to forgive and to bind. If she chooses to forgive those who do not believe, but honestly seek God in the little that they have, we must support her act of compassion, lest we separate ourselves.
Those who are separated from the Church because they have not discovered the fullness of truth that subsists in her will not suffer as badly as those of us who knowing the fullness of truth and knowing the Church power and authority concerning that truth, disregard her lead to follow what we believe rather than what she teaches.
It is most important to try to understand the Church and her interpretation of the faith. The Church’s explanations of the faith are going to differ from generation to generation, not because the truth changes, for it does not. Her explanations of truth are going to differ because people change and the words that once made a concept crystal clear no longer work and the concept sounds different from what it was meant to say when it was first spoken. Therefore, we must keep our hearts and minds tuned in to the Church’s explanations of truth so that we may never fall into the sin of presuming to know everything, especially the mind of God.
Fraternally,
Br. JR, OSF
