Abridged version, by Dave Armstrong, of "The Church Necessary for Salvation," chapter 10, pp.169-186 of The Spirit of Catholicism, by Karl Adam (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image, 1924, translated by Dom Justin McCann).
This book (in the editor's opinion, anyway) is one of the very best expositions of Catholicism ever written: very eloquent, biblical, imaginative, appealing, and orthodox.
In it is found the following excellent treatment of the complex and multi-faceted question of how non-Catholic Christians are regarded by the Catholic Church historically.
[p.169]
"And if he will not hear the Church, let him be to thee as the heathen and publican" (Matthew 18:17).
The Catholic Church as the Body of Christ, as the realization in the world of the Kingdom of God, is the Church of Humanity...the exclusive institution wherein all men shall attain salvation.....
The Church would belie her own deepest essence and her most outstanding quality, namely her inexhaustible fullness and that which guarantees and supports this fullness, her vocation to be the Body of Christ, if she were ever to recognize some collateral and antagonistic Christian church as her sister and as possessing equal rights with herself. She can recognize the historical importance of such churches, She can even designate them as Christian communions, yes, even as Christian churches, but never as the Church of Christ. One [p.170] God, one Christ, one Baptism, one Church. There can never be a second Christ, and in the same way there cannot be a second Body of Christ...
The Catholic Church can and will appraise generously, and will countenance, all the communities of non-Catholic Christendom...But she cannot recognize other Christian communions as churches of like order and rights with herself. To do so would be infidelity to her own nature, and would be the worst disloyalty to herself. In her own eyes the Catholic Church is nothing at all if she be not the Church, the Body of Christ, the Kingdom of God. This exclusiveness is rooted in the exclusiveness of Christ, in His claim to be the bringer of the new life, to be the way, the truth and the life........
There is "no other name under heaven given to men, whereby they must be saved" (Acts 4:12). But we can grasp Christ only through His Church. It is true that He might, had He so willed, have imparted Himself and His grace to all men directly, in personal experience. But the question is not what might have been, but what Christ in fact willed to do. And in fact He willed to give Himself to men through men, that is by the way of a community life and not by the way of isolation and
Individualism [p.171]....
It was not His will to sanctify a countless multitude of solitary souls, but a corporate kingdom of saints, a Kingdom of God....
From the very beginning, as St. Matthew testifies (Matthew 18:17) the necessity for salvation of belonging to the one fellowship was established on the basis of an express saying of our Lord's:… St. Cyprian [d.258] afterwards expressed this conviction of primitive Christianity..: "To have the one God for your father, you must have the Church for your mother" (Ep. 74,7). "No man can be saved except in the Church" (Ep. 4,4). "Outside the Church there is no salvation" (Ep. 73,21).
Thus was formulated that sentence which puts the Church's claim to be the only source of salvation in the most concise form: "Outside the Church no salvation" [p.172] (Extra ecclesiam nulla salus). the Fourth Lateran Council (A.D. 1215) adopted this formula verbatim...
[p.174] ......But, we may ask, does that mean that all heretics and non-Catholics are destined to hell?...
To begin with, it is certain that the declaration that there is no salvation outside the Church is not aimed at individual non-Catholics, at any persons as persons, but at non-Catholic churches and communions, in so far as they are non-Catholic communions. Its purpose is to formulate positively the truth that there is but one Body of Christ and therefore but one Church which possesses and imparts the grace of Christ in its fullness...So that the spiritual unfruitfulness which is predicated in the doctrine is not to be affirmed of the individual non-Catholic, but primarily of non-Catholic communions as such.........
[p.176]...The Jansenists in the seventeenth century...advocated the...principle that "outside the Church there is no grace" (extra ecclesiam nulla conceditur gratia).
[p.179]......The Church rightly maintains and continually reiterates, in decisive and uncompromising fashion, her claim to be the sole true Body of Christ;
[p.180] From the purely theological standpoint,..the only possible conclusion regarding all heretics and schismatics, Jews and pagans, is that judgment of condemnation which the Council of Florence [1438-1445] pronounced upon them.…
[p.181]...It is thus, from this purely theological standpoint, that we are to understand the sharp anathemas pronounced by the Church against all heretics and schismatics...In these pronouncements the Church is not deciding the good or bad faith of the individual heretic. Still less is she sitting in judgment on his ultimate fate. The immediate purport of her condemnation is that these heretics represent and proclaim ideas antagonistic to the Church. When ideas are in conflict, when truth is fighting against error, and revelation against human ingenuity, then there can be no compromise and no indulgence....Dogmatic intolerance is therefore a moral duty, a duty to the infinite truth and to truthfulness.
But so soon as it is a question, not of the conflict between idea and idea, but of living men, of our judgment on this or that non-Catholic, then the theologian becomes a psychologist, the dogmatist a pastor of souls. He draws attention to the fact that the living man is very rarely the embodiment of an idea, that the conceptual world and mentality of the individual are so multifarious and complicated, that he cannot be reduced to a single formula. In other words the heretic, the Jew and the pagan seldom exist [p.182] in a pure state........Therefore the Church expressly distinguishes between "formal" and "material" heretics. A "formal" heretic rejects the Church and its teaching absolutely and with full deliberation; a "material" heretic rejects the Church from lack of knowledge, being influenced by false prejudice or by an anti-Catholic upbringing. St. Augustine [354-430] forbids us to blame a man for being a heretic because he was born of heretical parents, provided that he does not with obstinate self-assurance shut out all better knowledge, but seeks the truth simply and loyally (Ep. 43,1,1). Whenever the Church has such honest enquirers before her, she remembers that our Lord condemned Pharisaism but not the individual Pharisee, that He held deep and loving intercourse with Nicodemus, and allowed Himself to be invited by Simon......
It is true that heretics were tried and burnt in the Middle Ages.
