Are all religions equal? Pope Francis created a stir with some off-the-cuff comments to an interreligious group of young people in Singapore, during his recent trip to Asia. “All religions are paths to God,” he said. “I will use an analogy, they are like different languages that express the divine.”
As so often happens, a snippet from some impromptu remarks made it onto social media and many read it in a negative light, as though the pope were saying that all religions are equally true (which would seem absurd, since all religions, in some respects, contradict one another). But the pope’s point was that all religions are ways of communicating with God, not that they are all “the same.”
Some commentators have interpreted the pope’s comments more charitably, and this is a good opportunity to offer some clarity on what the church does teach about other religions, and the Catholic faith’s relationship to them.
One of the best-known statements on this issue was made by Pope Boniface VIII in his papal bull “Unam Sanctam,” in 1302: “Outside the church, there is no salvation.” This had long been understood by many Catholics (and many Protestants) as an assertion that those who are not baptized and in communion with the Catholic Church are going to hell.
We are told, however, in “Lumen Gentium,” one of the principal documents of the Second Vatican Council, that non-Catholics “who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience—those too may achieve eternal salvation.” The door of salvation, the church affirms, is open to all (“Gaudium et Spes,” No.22).
The church also affirms in “Ad Gentes” that the “seeds of the Word” are found in every great faith. These “seeds” are referred to multiple times in conciliar documents and encyclicals, and refer to those elements identified in other faiths and cultures that contain rays of the same truth we find in the Gospel.
This is no recent innovation. The idea comes from one of the church’s first great theologians, St. Justin Martyr, who wrote that “the teachings of Christ are not alien to Plato.” Dante also portrayed heaven as containing good pagans. And popes like Alexander VIII and Clement XI would later condemn as heretical the proposition that Christ’s grace does not operate within those of other faiths (see Errors of the Jansenists and the encyclical “Unigenitus,” from 1713, statements wherein the popes condemned the heretical Jansenist movement within the church, whose theology, in some respects, more resembled Calvinism than Catholic doctrine).
St. John Paul II, in his encyclical “Redemptoris Missio,”affirmed that the Holy Spirit is active in every human heart in the world (Nos. 6, 29), and that the many religions reflect a ray of the one truth (No. 56). This pope, who made great strides in interfaith dialogue, also wrote in his book Crossing the Threshold of Hope:
[T]he Council [Vatican II] says that the Holy Spirit works effectively even outside the visible structure of the Church, making use of…the common soteriological [salvation-related] root present in all religions. Christ came into the world for all these peoples. He redeemed them all and has His own ways of reaching each of them in the present eschatological phase of salvation history.
Does all this mean that the church, as we know it, is no longer important? That it is indifferent to whether or not someone is Catholic? That all religions are equally true? No.
We can say at the same time that God operates always and everywhere graciously with all the human family, that the great faith traditions all serve as true pursuits of God and contain a ray of the same truth, and that we believe Christ established one, holy, Catholic and apostolic church, that he gave sacraments that communicate grace, and that the faith contains the fullness of grace and truth.
The church believes that it is both true that everyone on earth is offered salvation in their own way and that salvation only comes through the body of Christ. It teaches that Christ desires “that all might be one” and that human beings are under unceasing obligation to seek the truth in good faith. But it also teaches that God punishes no one who, honestly seeking the true and the good, nonetheless remains outside the visible bounds of the church because of circumstance, culture, history or lack of knowledge.
Together with the church, we can, without fear of compromising the truth of our faith, look boldly and with curiosity for “whatever is true and holy” in other faiths. We may, then, look at the poems of the Sufis, the classical odes of Chinese tradition or Indigenous traditions and find beautiful things to learn there which resonate with the same universal logos at the heart of our faith. We can see our Muslim or Confucian or Sikh brethren as fellow seekers of God, and find companionship in that, even while holding truly to the fullness of the church.
This allows us to adopt the attitude of John Paul II, evangelizing in a manner that welcomes the good to be found in other faiths while holding at the same time to the conviction that the Catholic Church “is the universal sacrament of salvation” (“Redemptoris Missio,” No. 9). We can then operate not out of fear or a desire to crush other traditions, but out of a desire to share the fullness of the joy of the Gospel. It is this joy, in the end, which makes friendship with Christ attractive, and, as G.K. Chesterton said, the “key that opens all doors.”
[From 2019: “Pope Francis: Don’t be afraid that God has allowed different religions in the world”]
