“God chose you from the beginning to be saved, through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth. To this he called you through our gospel.” (2 Thessalonians 2:13-14)
“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” (John 3:5)
“Outside the Church there is no salvation.” Let’s fill out this picture a bit more. Let’s ask ourselves, how is the Catholic Church the communion of the saved? How is it that the Church is Christ’s Body, His Bride, the Temple of His Spirit? How is it that we, the members of the Catholic Church, are united to Christ, and through Him, are true children of God the Father? In other words, what are the means by which God brings us into communion with Himself? How have we come to possess salvation?
Three Means of Salvation
Based on the Catechism, paragraph 830, we’ll identify three means of our salvation: Faith, Fellowship, and Sacraments.[1]
The First Means: Faith in Christ through the Gospel. We are saved because we have faith in the Divine Word of God, especially in the Gospel.
Jesus said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes has eternal life.”[2] The Church, following the command of the Lord Jesus, has preached the Gospel, and we have heard this preaching, and believed.
This “belief” is a living faith: in other words, it is an acting (or “doing”) faith. It is a belief that expresses itself in deeds — in love and obedience to God, love of neighbor, and repentance when we fail to do so. This faith is the core of our relationship with God. It is the core of our commitment as disciples of Jesus Christ, as partakers of the covenant with God through Jesus. Through faith, we have the communion with Jesus that simply IS salvation.
The Second Means: The Bond of Fellowship. We are saved because we have communion with the rest of the faithful, and with the authentic leadership that Jesus has commissioned to serve us.
When Jesus calls us to communion with God through faith, it is not for ourselves alone — it is not a “me and Jesus” faith. As partakers of His covenant, we are part of the covenant people. We love one another, have fellowship with one another, and worship God together — reading and meditating on the Word of God at Holy Mass.
The “authentic leadership” are men appointed by God as successors of the Apostles, through the Sacrament of Holy Orders and through communion with the Successor to Saint Peter, the Pope.
Our salvation is tied to communion with authentic leadership because they alone have been given the “keys to the kingdom of heaven” and the power of “binding and loosing.” Through them, God provides His people with the guarantee that they are part of the same community that Christ promised “the gates of hell will not prevail against it.” Jesus established the Bishops as servants of the unity of the Church — so that we can distinguish the one Church of Christ from various factions and split-offs.
The Third Means: The Sacraments. We are saved because we encounter Christ in the Sacraments of the Church, and sanctified — made holy — from within. Christ instituted the Seven Sacraments as “Sacraments of Faith.” By them, we can encounter Jesus and receive His grace in powerful ways.
By Baptism, we “enter into the Church as through a door.” Speaking of the Sacrament of Baptism, Our Lord solemnly declared, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.”[3]
At Holy Mass, we encounter Jesus in the Eucharist. There, the Church worships God in Christ; there, she is most fully herself. Speaking of the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, Jesus said solemnly, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.”[4] The Eucharist draws us deeper into the Body of Christ, into our salvation.
The other sacraments also incorporate us into the mystery of salvation:
Speaking of the Sacrament of Penance, Jesus said, “If [my Apostles] forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven.” Through confession of sins to a priest, we receive forgiveness as from the mouth of Jesus Himself.
Speaking of the Sacrament of Anointing, James the Apostle wrote, “The prayer of faith will save the sick man, and the Lord will raise him up; and if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven.” Through this anointing, we are conformed to the image of the suffering Christ, and purified of sin.
Speaking of the Sacrament of Confirmation, Luke the Evangelist said, “[The Apostles] laid their hands on them and they received the Holy Spirit.” Through this sacrament, we are strengthened in the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and are empowered to bear witness to Christ.
Speaking of the Sacrament of Holy Orders, Saint Paul wrote to the Bishop Timothy, “Do not neglect the gift you have … for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers.” By this sacrament, men are consecrated as bishops, priests, and deacons, are conformed to Christ, and given sacred power by which to serve the Church in Jesus’ Name.
Speaking of the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony, Saint Paul wrote, “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her…. This is a great mystery.” By this sacrament, men and women are conformed to the mystery of Christ and the Church, and strengthened to carry out their duties as Christian spouses.
Summary
Let’s recap: We’re considering what role the Church has in our salvation. So far, we’ve explained that there is no salvation outside the Church, and how it is that the Church brings salvation to its members, through the various “means of salvation” she’s been given.
The Second Vatican Council’s Decree on Ecumenism explains:
For it is only through Christ’s Catholic Church, which is “the all-embracing means of salvation,” that they can benefit fully from the means of salvation. We believe that Our Lord entrusted all the blessings of the New Covenant to the apostolic college alone, of which Peter is the head, in order to establish the one Body of Christ on earth to which all should be fully incorporated who belong in any way to the people of God.[5]
The next question that we want to ask is, “What if someone is part of a group that has split off of the Church, and so has some of these ‘means of salvation,’ but not all of them?” In other words, “Do these ‘means of salvation’ lose their power when separated from the others?” This is the question of non-Catholic Christians, and we’ll address it in the next lesson.
One more thing. Before we end this lesson, let’s make one additional point about how God saves us:
Most fundamentally — we are saved by the will of God. We have access to the means of salvation — Faith in the Gospel, Fellowship with other believers and the authentic leadership, and the Sacraments — because God has freely chosen to give us this gift. The Lord Jesus said, “You did not choose me, but I chose you.”[6] In the mysterious plan and providence of God, we’ve been chosen to be Catholic Christians; so that by all these means of grace that He entrusted to the Catholic Church, we might be saved.
Remember this, because we will come back to it again later.
[1] These three means of salvation are also “bonds of unity” in the one Church. CCC 815.
[2] John 6:47.
[3] John 3:5.
[4] John 6:53-54.
[6] Jn 15:16.