It is one thing to hold or reject Catholicism
for what it is,
but quite another for what it is not.

On the Uniqueness of
Catholicism and the
Diversity of Religions

By James V. Schall

NOTE: This article first appeared in the January 1997 issue of HPR

Now, the man who finds many unjust deeds in his life often even wakes from his sleep in fright as children do, and lives in anticipation of evil. To the man who is conscious in himself of no unjust deed, sweet and good hope is ever beside him—a nurse in his old age, as Pindar puts it.
—Cephalus in Book I of Plato’s Republic, #331a.

This new life in the radicalness of the Gospel also involves certain breaks from the customs and culture of whatever people in the world, because the Gospel is never an internal product of a particular country but always comes “from outside”, from on high.
—John Paul II, Apostolic Exhortation, “Ecclesia in Africa,” 1995, #74.1

■ On my morning stroll through Georgetown, I walk down “N” Street to 27th Street, then over to Dumbarton Street and back to the campus, perhaps a mile and a half walk. On the way down, I pass the Georgetown Baptist Church at 31st Street, then the Kesher Hebrew Congregation’s synagogue at 28th; just before turning the corner at 27th Street, I go by the Alexander Memorial Baptist Church. At the corner of 27th and Dumbarton, is the First Baptist Church, then, half a block away on Dumbarton, the Epiphany Catholic parish, that doubles on Sunday as la Paroisse de St. Louis de France. Farther on, half a block off Dumbarton, on 29th, is the Mt. Zion United Methodist Church; at 30th and “P,” you can see Christ Episcopal Church, and just before Wisconsin is Dumbarton Avenue Methodist Church. Crossing Wisconsin on “O” Street at Potomac, is St. John’s Protestant Episcopal Church. Back to 36th Street on “O,” I walk by the Rectory of Trinity Catholic Church, and into the campus through the central tower of the Healy Building, I come to the courtyard, where stands Dalghren Chapel that now sometimes serves as an ecumenical building.

If I walk another block or two, I can find a number of other churches, including the Church of the Two Worlds on “P” Street, Christ the King on “O” that uses the 1928 Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, and the Jerusalem Baptist Church at 26th and “P.” And when I cross Key Bridge to Fort Meyer Drive, I can look back across the River to see at the highest hill in the District, the National Cathedral, and, ahead, is an Amoco gas station, on top of which is the Arlington Temple, a United Methodist church. Sometimes in the distance I can see the Washington Monument in Alexandria with its Masonic symbolism. A mosque and a Greek Orthodox church can be found along Massachusetts. Every local at one time or another has seen the Mormon temple on the 495 Beltway North and probably the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception at Catholic University.

In this particular walk, I come across none of the flourishing evangelical, Pentecostal, Adventist, or Christian Science churches, but I do not have to go too far to find them, nor the ethnic Korean or Vietnamese congregations. I once walked into an Ethiopian Protestant Service at a church near George Washington University. And so far, I am only talking about churches, mosques, and synagogues. In addition to religions, we can find philosophies, ethical societies, and other ways of life that claim some unique truth or explanation of reality. The universities are full of conflicting and contradictory claims to truth or to its impossibility. The universities are often bastions of sundry relativisms or politically correct doubts that are likewise ways of life and readily claim for themselves a superiority by distinguishing themselves from religions of whatever variety. If we extend our vision to a national or international scale, we will find ourselves confronted with a vast and extraordinary array of religions and philosophies, now at peace, now at war, with one another.

Though we do not often advert to it, this closing twentieth century has probably seen more martyrs for the faith than any previous century, perhaps more than the rest of the centuries put together. At Georgetown we have had a Sudanese archbishop recuperating in our community. He recounts the hundreds of thousands of Christians killed in his country in the past quartercentury in what can only be called religious persecution, a persecution that does not exactly fill the pages of our prestige journals, or even of our Catholic press. Indeed, Mona Charon, who is Jewish, did a recent, and to her, perplexing column about the strange lethargy and silence of Christians about the persecution of their fellow Christians at various places in the world, almost as if they did not want to bother about the plight of their fellow Christians (Washington Times, December 11, 1995).

The Holy Father has, in fact, proposed, in this august age of progress, liberalism, and political freedom, that we update the famous Roman Martyrology to include these more recent martyrs for the faith, including the non–Catholic ones. Moreover, no one knows what to call those human beings who have been systematically killed by our various public policies of abortion and euthanasia throughout the world, but surely they, like the original Holy Innocents, must be somehow included as martyrs within the human race and will themselves achieve full salvation.

It is not my purpose here to give an extensive account of the variety and diversity of religion and philosophy in the modern world. This diversity is paralleled by what we now call a diversity of lifestyle, culture, and civilization, a diversity that often implies a denial of anything like what we must still call natural law, a standard that includes all men and does not allow us to justify whatever it is we might do or think simply on the theoretical basis that we do it or think it.

But what are we to make of all these differing claims to knowing, or not knowing, God’s word and revelation? Surely, their variety tempts us, as it did the ancient philosophers, to skepticism, to doubt that any of these systems, including one’s own, can be true, since there are so many of them and since they often hold contradictory positions. Or we wonder about the apparent inefficiency of Christ’s command at the end of Matthew for us to go forth and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the “Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost”— to use that older baptismal formula that I am sure these must have been the words that, once upon a time, the pastor used for my own infant baptism at a small parish in rural Iowa.

China, India, and Japan, moreover, remain practically untouched by Christianity, though it is there. Official China is totally hostile to religion of any sort. The well–known Japanese novelist, Shusaku Endo, worried that the Japanese are simply impervious to Christianity. The vast Islamic world is experiencing a rebirth, often at the expense of the Christians. Mass remains forbidden in Saudi Arabia. I believe there are now almost as many Muslims in the United States as Jews. I have heard that the famous Jesuit church in Brussels, in Belgium, was recently turned over to Muslims. The rapid decline of birthrates in the traditional European Catholic countries like France, Bavaria, and Italy portend radically differing types of religious makeup in these areas. At least one Muslim writer thinks that this new population from Islam will prove to be the way finally to conquer Europe.

Even within the Christian world, new forms of Protestantism hardly seen before are making vast inroads into both the mainline Protestant religions and into Catholic areas such as Latin America. The latest liberal scare is something called “fundamentalism,” which is said to be the most dangerous social phenomenon around, even when often it just means seriously practicing a faith. The eastern religions and Islam are appearing more and more in the West and making converts there. A mosque is now constructed in Rome amidst the Catholic Italians whose birthrate is now below replacement ratios. In spite of their own very low birthrate, many Jews have recently regained their faith and have sought to live the life that it encourages. Their homeland has survived intact for over half a century and what Maritain called “the mystery of Israel,” of its survival, becomes ever more perplexing.2

Again, what are we to make of all this seemingly overwhelming divergence of religion? Ought it to bother us? Is it against or according to God’s will? If salvation comes through Christ in the Church, where does this leave all the myriads of people who never heard of this revelation?

Linus is seen walking toward Lucy, who is happily jumping rope. Linus is reading from a book. “Here is something I’ll bet you don’t know?” he tells her, obviously glad that he has found something she does not know. As Lucy goes off indifferently still skipping rope, Linus continues, “The Bible contains 3,566,480 letters and 773,893 words!” In the next scene, he looks at her expectantly, waiting for some sort of reaction. But Lucy merely continues jumping rope with a distant look in her eyes as if Linus or his facts didn’t exist. In the final scene, a disgusted Linus yells to a Lucy jumping away, “You’re just not interested in theology, are you?”3

Well, let us suppose that there are, in the history of mankind, a number of different religions and philosophies equivalent to the number of words in the Bible. How do we go about considering this unsettling variety in any intelligible fashion? Are we, like Lucy, just skipping rope or are we able both to maintain that one religion, in our case, Catholicism, is in fact a true description of human destiny and, at the same time, to give a coherent, sympathetic explanation of its relation to the diversity of other religions and systems?

To our great and often unacknowledged astonishment, we live during the time of one of the most important popes in the history of the Church. By himself, he is one of the greatest missionaries the world has ever seen from any religion. He has systematically rethought, represented, and re–proposed every aspect of the faith with a clarity and coherence unknown to any other philosophy or faith. If we do not know this record, it simply means that we have not been reading or listening to him for the past quarter of a century. Many, I know, even those who claim to be Catholics, do not want to hear John Paul II. But that is a different problem, a problem whose origin lies in conditions of will, in contexts of humility and virtue. It is something in part at least that touches the mystery of evil.

No one has given more thought to this diversity of religion and this divergence of philosophy than John Paul II. Astonishingly, he has told us that he has been planning for the coming Third Millennium since he first became pope. He quite literally sees it as an occasion to present the religions and philosophies of the world with the precise truth of Catholicism. But this exposition is to be in a manner that is no longer polemical or combative, but is to be offered simply and calmly as if it were possible for human beings to listen to what the Pope has to say as he obviously listens to what other religions and philosophies have to say about themselves. In his book, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, the Holy Father wrote carefully about the difference between Buddhism, Islam, or Hinduism and Christianity at fundamental points.4 For each of the next four years (19972000), in any case, John Paul II has planned a careful and systematic presentation of what God is, what revelation says about the divinity and man’s relation to God. Each year is to be devoted to one Person of the Trinity, ending with the year 2000 to be devoted to the Trinity itself, the great Christian revelation about the inner life of God.

The Pope is deadly serious here. He too has taken a look at what passes for religion and philosophy. He has reemphasized in Redemptoris Missio that Catholicism remains essentially missionary, that is, remains directed to explain what it is even while bearing the greatest respect and understanding for other positions. The Pope has concluded that it is time to stop everything and decide with much more clarity just what we do hold, this whether we be Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, or members of any philosophic sect. The Pope is not so naïve as to believe that everyone will welcome this endeavor. What is clear is that the initiative is coming from Catholicism to the world, to each of the organized religions and philosophies that are capable coherently of defining themselves and willing to consider, with mutual consideration, their own truth in the light of common principles and the propositions of revelation.

The occasion for these particular remarks was an article in the Fall of 1995 in the Washington Post reporting several editorials that appeared in La Civiltà Cattolica, entitled “Christianity and the Other Religions.”5As this latter journal is known to be read by the Vatican and is often seen as an indication of its thinking, the article naturally drew a good deal of attention. Actually, the articles are generally in line with what John Paul II has been writing about in his letter on the “Third Millennium” and in his encyclicals Redemptoris Missio and Ut Unum Sint. Likewise, the Document from the Congregations of Evangelization and Interreligious Dialogue (Arinze and Tomko) entitled, “Dialogue and Proclamation” is also most instructive.6What these Italian articles seem to ask is whether we can properly speak about a way to “salvation” found in the rites and religious practices of the other religions. Thus, these reflections are not merely about other Christian churches but about other religions, particularly the Oriental ones.

What is at issue here? Does the disunity within Christianity itself and with Judaism, together with the multiplicity of other religions and philosophies, portend the untruth of Catholicism or the impossibility of its claims as the essential way to salvation? Or does the coherence of Catholicism as an explanation of man’s final destiny incorporate in a coherent whole the other sects, religions, philosophies, and ways of life such that this diversity has itself a purpose or at least a reason within the unity of Catholicism’s claim to the locus of revealed truth?

Is Catholicism right to maintain that there are elements in other religions that do and other elements that do not support the ultimate attainment of salvation and the proper understanding of the whole truth about God and man? A specific characteristic of Catholicism in its conception of itself is that it takes intelligence seriously and considers it incumbent on it to understand honestly and precisely what is held by any other religion, sect, or philosophy.7 And, I might add, it expects others to understand what it teaches and holds about itself as a matter of intellectual and spiritual honesty. It is one thing to hold or reject Catholicism for what it is, but quite another for what it is not. Today, there is no longer any excuse, in the media, in the universities, in normal human discourse, for a prejudiced, inaccurate, or wrong statement of what Catholicism holds about itself.

From the side of Catholicism under John Paul II two things can definitely be observed. First, in a very careful, systematic manner, this Pope has undertaken the vast and conscious effort to state clearly and profoundly the Church’s understanding of itself in the light of what is revealed to it about the inner life of God, about God’s will to communicate this life to us, and about the terms of our response to this divine initiative. Secondly, the Pope has undertaken organized efforts to enter into dialogue, respectful and tolerant, with every Christian church, with Judaism, with other religions and philosophies, to discuss together just what each holds, to seek as far as possible an honest and frank discussion about divisions and misunderstandings. He further maintains that such discussions can and should lead somewhere, to unity, to agreement about truth.

The ultimate divisions of mankind are those of the spirit, of understanding what our life is about. The most important question that we must ask of one another, as Socrates again said, is “how we live” (#352d). The very worst thing that can happen to us is that we have a lie in our souls about reality itself. In a profound passage, Socrates concluded that, “. . . no one, surely, voluntarily wishes to lie about the most sovereign things to what is most sovereign in himself. Rather he fears holding a lie there more than anything” (#382a). No one wishes to be deceived in that ultimate source of his own being. There is a correspondence between our minds and reality that we want to be related, to be true. Indeed, this correspondence is what truth really is.

What is the problem that seems to be uppermost in the minds of many Christians after two thousand years? It is of course about the truth of the faith in relation to all mankind. St. Paul said that God wishes all mankind to come to a knowledge of the truth (1 Timothy 2:4). The Christian faith has four major points that it affirms about itself in relation to the salvation of all mankind. These are, as the editorial in Civiltà Cattolica stated, “that the salvific will of God extends to everyone; that Jesus is the only and universal Savior of men; that the Church is the universal sacrament of salvation, and that faith in God and in Christ is absolutely necessary for us to be saved.”8The question is how can we reconcile these basic truths with the fact that most of the human beings that have ever lived have either not known or lived up to these basic points? If we look about the differing religions, moreover, we find one or another of these claims in some imperfect form. That we need to be saved from something and that we cannot save ourselves is recognized everywhere but in certain forms of modernity.

The Catholic Church understands itself to be a religion that is quite unlike the other religions, even though we can account for and document certain similarities to other religions on specific points. First of all, in Catholicism, there is a specific doctrine of God which separates him from the world without denying that the world depends on him. Indeed, God has a plan for the reordering or salvation of the world. The Christian understanding of God did not originate from men, but from God. What is revealed has two specific teachings about God, teachings that respond perfectly to certain specifically unanswered questions posed by good philosophers themselves about reality.

The first teaching is that there is only one God, with an inner life of three divine Persons. God in this sense is not an inherently lonely God that needed the world, but a God who created the world out of nothing, out of some other motive than that he needed it because of his own lack. Secondly, one of the Persons of the Trinity, the Second Person, the Word, became flesh and dwelt amongst us at a certain time and at a certain place. This Man–God in the Person of Christ has become himself part of the world while remaining the Word. His coming into the world was prepared for all along through the activity of the Spirit and will come to a completion again through the Spirit acting in the world to carry out the Father’s plan. The world, in other words, is not a chaos, but an order, an order the outlines of which have been revealed to us by God himself. This plan is mysterious, yet addressed to understanding, our understanding.

In a famous question in the Summa Theologiae, moreover, Thomas Aquinas asked “Whether Christ Was the Head of All Mankind” (III, 8, 3)? In this question, “all mankind” is to be taken literally, that is, all those ever belonging to the human race in this world. The import of this question for our problem here was pointed out by the noted philosopher Eric Voegelin. Aquinas knew that “if Christ was to be the head of all mankind,” Voegelin wrote,

He had to be more than head of the members of a Christian church. Hence, Thomas formulated clearly that Christ was indeed head of all men from the creation of the world to its end. He was, one might say, a true humanist who knew that Christ had come to every man, not only to Christians, or perhaps only to theologians. Thomas’ insight of course raises problems that, so far as I know, no Christian thinker has ever dared to touch: how can Christ be concretely the head, say, of Babylonians or of the Greeks of the citystate period, and how does the pneumatic presence of his logos express itself in the experience and symbolization of Babylonians and Egyptians?9

These precise questions are currently being asked.

Looking forward, God’s plan for the world seems to have a missionary purpose with regard to all mankind. They are to be informed about what is revealed about God and the ways to achieve what he has offered to the free creature as his proper destiny. Looking backward, we wonder about the fate or status not merely of those who positively reject salvation when properly understood, the problem of hell, but of those who had confused notions of God or of the good but who strove to do the best they could.

Of these latter, as Vatican II established, the Church teaches that those who do what they can, who strive to live an honorable life as best they can, will not be denied the salvation that God has prepared for all mankind. Just how this salvation reaches each person is something of a mystery, but it has long been understood that the Holy Spirit can and does operate outside the confines of the visible Church. St. Thomas put it succinctly, “those who lack the faith, although in act they are not members of the Church, are nevertheless potentially members of the Church. This potency is founded on two principles: first and mainly by the power of Christ which is sufficient to save the whole human race, and secondly in free will” (III, 8, 3, ad 1). Since the Lord is a Lord of History, moreover, it seems appropriate that a long sequence of time and events within it would be necessary properly to reflect the salvific plan of God for the free creatures. Divine providence, thus, will include what is to us the mystery of those who do not know God’s plan either innocently or who deliberately reject it.

What we note in the work of John Paul II, as we did in Paul VI’s Evangelii Nuntiandi (1975), is a certain urgency that mankind recognize the seriousness of its relationship to God and his plan for us.10 In Redemptoris Missio, Ut Unum Sint, and Tertio Millennio Adveniente, a strong missionary emphasis is set side by side with great efforts to understand and sympathize with other religions. The Pope is aware that these issues cannot be resolved politically or even culturally. What revelation has to teach each nation and culture comes from outside that culture or nation, even though it respects and understands what is true, wherever found. But it has to reach the heart of individuals. The public status of religion, in one sense, from the viewpoint of Catholicism is to insist upon the constitutional right for it to be able to present itself, offer the sacraments, and preach, in every existing civil society, something that it cannot universally do. But it sees this constitutional basis to be a minimum on which it can pursue its missionary task according to criteria of dialogue and truth that exist at a level deeper than politics.

In conclusion, what is important is the concerted endeavor of Catholicism to see that its mission to the world goes on, that it seeks to incorporate itself in each culture but only while recognizing both universal truths and what is good, wherever found. This universality includes Catholicism’s position that what is found in its revelation is true and intended for all men. The fact that this revelation is either rejected or prevented or not widely known is not apart from the divine plan. God has his own ways, but these ways include the mandate to go forth to teach all nations, teach both by clear expositions of what is true and teach them by examples of lives worthy of living according to the distinct standards of moral virtue as found in the Gospels.

That God wishes all men to be saved, that all must choose to be saved, that there is no other way but Christ, these are truths that can be reconciled. The Church is in a position now to think of its mission on a world scale, no longer merely in terms of Europe or the West but the whole world. Scholarship has provided us with a thorough understanding of what the various religions and philosophies hold about themselves.11

The uniqueness of Catholicism and the diversity of religions, then, are both included in the divine plan. The “missionary” nature of Catholicism is rooted at the heart of the Trinity itself. Those made in the image of God are to return to the source of their being and beatitude, but they are to do so after the manner of human beings, that is, after the manner of their understanding and choice. On the one side, every effort is made to understand and accept what is true. On the other, we find the need to recognize that mankind is not the origin of its own salvation, that something has come “from outside” that alone can reconcile the perplexities of belief and unbelief and their relation to reason.

What seems to be unique about the present time is a certain revitalization coming from the heart of Catholicism itself about its meaning in the world, not merely its own understanding of itself but its insistence that it be correctly heard and considered by those who do not accept its own positions and ways of life. An urgency born of faith itself puts a new, even ominous, light on widespread contemporary unbelief, in an age that has seen the faith suddenly clarify and manifest its own coherence more clearly than perhaps at any time in any other era of human history.

The lack of unity within Christendom and the diversity of religions in the world are unexpectedly confronted at the beginning of the Third Millennium by a calm insistence that God’s plan is addressed with its own clarity to every man willing to listen. It is also addressed to those who, in their own hearts, are unwilling, I use the word deliberately, to listen. The plan of God is addressed to the human intellect, to those who seek to know the mystery of reality, including the reality of their own sins, disbelief, and honest confusion about what God is like. ■

NOTES
1John Paul II, “Ecclesia in Africa,” 14 September, 1995, L’Osservatore Romano, English, 20 September, 1995, p. 8.

2 See James V. Schall, “The Mystery of ‘the Mystery of Israel,’” in Jacques Maritain and the Jews, edited by Robert Royal (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), pp. 5171.

3 Charles M. Schulz, And the Beagles and the Bunnies Shall Lie Down Together (New York: Holt, 1984).

4 John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope (New York: Knopf, 1994), pp. 80100.

5 “Il Cristianesimo e le Altre Religioni: la ‘Specificitá del Cristianesimo” La Civiltà Cattolica, Rome, #3486 III, 1995; “La Teleologia Cristiana delle Religioni” #3487, IV, 1995, 316; “Si Puó Parlare di ‘Rivelazione’ nelle Altre Religioni?” #3488, IV, 1995, 10719.

6“Dialogue and Proclamation,” (May 19, 1991), The Pope Speaks, 36 #6, 1991), 34775.

7 See James V. Schall, Does Catholicism Still Exist? (New York: Alba House, 1994).

8 Ibid. #3487, p. 9.

9 Eric Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), p. 110.

10 See James V. Schall, “On the Content of Evangelization,” The Church, the State and Society in the Thought of John Paul II (Chicago: Franciscan Herald, 1982), pp. 18196.

11 See Joseph Owens, Human Destiny (Washington: The Catholic University Press, 1985); Jean Danielou, The Salvation of the Nations (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1950); E. Mascall, The Christian Universe (London: Darton, Longman, & Todd, 1966); Peter Kreeft, C. S. Lewis and the Third Millennium (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994); Josef Pieper, On Hope (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986); Henri de Lubac, A Brief Catechism on Nature and Grace (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1984).

Reverend James V. Schall, S.J., is now teaching at Georgetown University after having taught at the University of San Francisco and the Gregorian University in Rome for twelve years. A prolific writer, he is the author of many books and hundreds of articles. A frequent contributor to HPR, Fr. Schall is also a regular columnist in Crisis magazine. His last article in HPR appeared in March 1996.