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Recent Roman Catholic Statements on the Relationship of the Church to
Other Religions: Analysis in the Light of extra ecclesiam nulla salus.
Brad Harper, Ph.D. Multnomah Bible College
Copyright © 2002, by Brad Harper
During the thirteen years that I pastored in St. Louis, Missouri, a city with a strong
Roman Catholic history, it was not uncommon for an attendee of our church to tell me that her
parents or grandparents were deeply concerned that she had left the true Church and was in
danger of eternal punishment. Yet this vestige of pre-Vatican II Catholicism was virtually never
present in the minds of younger Catholics whose parish instruction seemed to lack any strong
sense that members of other churches or religions were lost. Similarly, in a recent conversation
with me, a Roman Catholic theologian reflected on his own experience. "I remember growing
up giving money for missions to save pagan babies. But the Catholic mind no longer tends to
see the world in categories of saved and lost."
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The first obvious question in response to this
trend is, what happened? The obvious answer is, Vatican II. But a proper investigation of the
position of the Roman Catholic Church (from here on RCC) regarding other religions must ask at
least two more questions. First, how can one reconcile recent Catholic statements with a history
so unambiguously hostile to the idea of salvation outside its ranks? And second, since Vatican II
is four decades old, how has Catholic theology developed this issue since then? The purpose of
this paper is to analyze the most recent Roman Catholic documents which address the
relationship of the Catholic Church to other religions (including other Christian traditions),
considering their relationship to the history of Catholic theology and their progress since
Vatican II. Following the analysis is an evaluation from an Evangelical perspective.
As a result of the RCCs unique affirmation of the basic irreformability of its official
dogma/doctrine, more than most Christian theological traditions, it engages in theological
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Interview with Dr. Michael Cameron, Professor of Theology, University of Portland. October 8, 2002.