The foregoing discussion of Catholics and the gospel raises a topic that is to be found at the root of many an animated, not to say shrill, conversation.

Such conversations often follow upon some such a remark as, “I was a Catholic until I was seventeen, and then I got saved.” Or, in a somewhat different rendering, “I was raised Catholic, but when I was eighteen I met Jesus.” In an even more stark form, we may hear, “I was raised Catholic, but when I was in my early twenties I became a Christian.”

Clearly we are in the presence here either of immense confusion or of a distinction so dire that to call it a matter of salvation and damnation is scarcely to exaggerate.

Many of the people volunteering testimonials such as these would, if pressed, venture that it is the latter of our two options that looms. Catholics aren’t saved—or at least I wasn’t saved until I left Catholicism (goes the account). It was all legalism and rote and obligations: I had no idea about the real gospel of salvation—that a person could know himself to be born again and hence a new creature in Christ. No one ever so much as mentioned Jesus Christ as Savior, or in any event not in a fashion that gripped my attention. It was not until my friend took me to the Baptist youth group that I came upon people my age who explicitly (and joyously, I might say) thought of themselves as born-again Christians, and who talked about Jesus as someone not only alive, but alive in their very midst. So, if damnation is the alternative to salvation, then I suppose my own situation actually was a matter of my passing from the former into the latter. Where are we here?

Everyone bustles onto the stage. There is no salvation outside the Church! It is Protestants who aren’t saved! (This from many a zealous Catholic perhaps.) Or: There you have it! See, Catholics aren’t saved! Our young friend here has just demonstrated this melancholy state of affairs! (This from many an earnest Evangelical, perhaps.) Or, Hold! Someone needs to define our terms here! (This from a judicious and benign presence anxious to be a bridge over troubled waters.)

So, the tumult is assuaged momentarily, the fever cools, and we gird our loins for a civil consideration of the matter.

But who will venture into the breach? Five hundred years of strife lie at the root of everything that has been said. The fabric of Christendom was torn with a sundering so violent that there may be no reknitting of it for as long as history lasts. Indeed, the sundering is such that many on either side will not grant that the other “side” is Church at all. It is apostasy. It is schism. It is idolatry. Heaven fend off the day of accommodation: that will be a day of infamy. There can be no concord between Christ and Belial.

Happily, this level of vituperation is heard only fitfully now, and the pyres have long since died down. But we still have our testimonial here from this earnest Christian believer who, looking back on his Catholic upbringing, cannot identify anything in it with salvation. In his own eyes, he was not saved as long as he was Catholic, and when he was saved he ceased being a Catholic. Can light be cast on the matter?

It would seem so. There are at least four aspects to things here that need to be brought into play.

First, all Christians have known from the beginning that to be Christian entails more than just a certain spiritual feeling. That is, one’s whole inner being may be suffused with the sunshine of benevolence and good will: this is a state of affairs most sedulously to be prized; but it does not make one a Christian any more than it makes one a Muslim or a Zoroastrian. Or again, one may exude courtesy, gravity, and high-mindedness, as did early Boston and its stepchildren the Transcendentalists. Such traits are to be extolled: but they do not add up to one’s being Christian. And yet again, one may pursue “spirituality” at a thousand spas and ashrams and monasteries: but one is not thereby necessarily Christian.

To be Christian is to assert that certain events occurred in our mortal history. Believe is actually the word used by Christians in this connection, taking their cue from apostolic preaching and, more to the point, from the Lord himself. He told his nocturnal visitor Nicodemus that a man had to “believe”, but it was belief linked with a link of iron to what one had to believe. There was a popular radio program in the 1940s that offered to the public the voices of noted men and women retailing their most deeply felt convictions under the heading “This I Believe”, intoned with all possible sonority. There was no connection, often, between these testimonials and Christian belief. It is a point worth stressing, since the invitation to Christian faith is at times offered as a matter of one’s opening oneself up to “belief”: one is free to fill in the blank at will after the word belief: Marx; Hermes Trismegistus; Xiang Hsi. But Jesus Christ told Nicodemus that a man had to believe in the Son of God. Peter rehearsed for the throng in Jerusalem what they had done to Jesus Christ in crucifying him, made the connection between that event and the whole scheme of Law and Prophets that they all acknowledged, and then asserted that this Jesus was the Christ and that this fact had been ratified by God’s having raised him from the grave. Repent and believe this gospel, he concluded.

Christians have always insisted upon this. “No creed but Christ” sounds inexpugnable and has at times been attempted by one religious association or another. But the Christian creed (“creed” = credo, I believe) spells things out. The Christ in question is Jesus. He is the Lord. He came down from heaven. He offered his life on the Cross for our sins. His blood washes away our sins. He rose from the grave. He ascended into heaven. He is coming again. If that is what we mean by “Christ”, then “No creed but Christ” might do. But the Church, taking her cue from Jesus Christ himself, and from his apostles and from the whole witness of the New Testament, has not been in the habit of leaving the matter with quite such an vague slogan, neat as it may sound.

So: to be Christian is to assert, or believe, that certain events occurred in our mortal history. On this point Catholics and the Christians who wonder if Catholics are saved concur. Both groups will stand tall and recite the Creed and mean it. The most fiery evangelist will not fault Catholics when it comes to believing that certain things are true. He may not feel fully satisfied if he tries to extract an account of this belief from a man singing and swaying his way home at dawn from a pub, from a peasant woman in a shawl somewhere, or a Mafioso with his Packard car and machine gun. But with a little persistence, he will find that such unlikely types probably do, at bottom, share his creed. (This litmus test might, alas, break down if our fiery friend were to catechize a Catholic whose religious instruction had occurred in the wake of the convulsions that were visited upon the West in the decade or two during and after the Vietnam conflict and the rise of a new culture. Such a Catholic might possibly have been taught that the Catholic Church’s gospel has to do with a generalized outlook known as “caring”, and that one needs to focus on unjust economic systems, United States big business, and the preservation of the saw-whet owl, insofar as one wishes to think of oneself as a modern Christian. The difficulty with this line of catechesis is that, worthy as all of its concerns indeed are, it somehow contrives never to come at the nub where we find that Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. There are to be found some Catholics whose grasp of this nub is tenuous.)

This brings us to the second aspect of things at stake when we speak of what it is to be a Christian believer, Catholic or otherwise. There is, first of all, an assent to, and belief in, the Lord Jesus Christ.

But can one merely believe the story? The devils believe, St. James tells us, and much good it does them. The response, then, that Christians identify by their word “believe” seems to entail a wholeheartedness: authenticity; commitment; obedience. All of this is at stake when Christians, Catholic or otherwise, speak of believing the gospel. The gospel is not flat data, so to speak, that may be assessed and passed over, the way one might pass over statistics about soy bean production in the environs of Oskaloosa. The events call for my response. Indifference leaves me where I was before I heard about these events. But insofar as I hear about them, open myself to them, and receive (or “accept”) them, then I am on the way to becoming what has always been known as a Christian.

A Christian believer reading this account will wish to adjust the vocabulary very slightly. It is only a matter of a pronoun, really. Let us say him rather than it, our reader will suggest. The invitation implicit in the gospel is that we accept him—Jesus Christ. He receives us, at our baptism, as we saw in the previous chapter. At that point, says the Church, we are “incorporated” into the Church, that is, into Christ. (Interestingly enough, to see the rite of baptism as the point at which we mortals are thus incorporated is not really a Catholic / Protestant point of discussion: the Orthodox, the Anglicans, the Lutherans, the Presbyterians, and the Methodists all look on this rite as in some sense marking our passage from “out” to “in”; it would be the Baptist and Anabaptist and free-church sectors of Christendom that wish to limit its significance to a public confession of Christ as Savior and Lord, and no more.)

But all would agree that the gospel holds out to us mortals the challenge to assent to the narrative about Jesus Christ and the invitation to receive him, in the sense of acknowledging him to be my Savior and my Lord. No Christian profession at all would wish to skirt this minimum. (Onlookers sometimes charge that Catholics think you are saved magically, simply by the rite of baptism. Not so. To be sure, grace is truly operative there, says the Church, and God accounts the baptized child as his own—“in Christ”, that is. But if faith and obedience never arise to ratify what was done for me at my baptism, then it is the last folly for me to frolic through life counting on the external rite to get me “in”. That is to turn the sacrament of baptism into a rabbit’s foot, which it is not.)

So on these first two aspects of our original question of whether Catholics are saved, we find that all parties to the discussion concur: the Christian gospel calls for belief in something (upon which we all agree: Who will wish to edit Peter’s sermon at Pentecost?); and it calls upon us to “accept”, or receive, or commit ourselves to the Lord revealed in that gospel.

On this point I may introduce a somewhat fanciful vignette that has often presented itself to my imagination as exhibiting the difficulty arising when Catholic and non-Catholic Christians stumble into a discussion of who is “saved”.

At the time when I was received into the Catholic Church, I came to know an old woman named Sarah who came to daily Mass. At that same time, my octogenarian mother was living at our house. My mother, being a Protestant Evangelical who spent many hours with her Bible open in her lap, might have wondered about the sense in which it could be urged that Sarah was saved, not that my mother would have doubted Sarah’s humility and sincerity (the two women never met: I am only fancying the following vignette). But Sarah would have done poorly with a certain set of questions my mother might have put to her. “Are you saved?” Blank. “Well—are you born again?” Confusion. “Right. Have you accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal Savior?” Consternation.

Just as my mother is concluding that her long-held fears about Catholics seem indeed to be well-grounded, I interfere. I lead the two ladies over to a crucifix on the wall, and in my mother’s hearing, I ask Sarah who that is. Jesus. Who is he? The Son of God. What is he doing? Suffering death. Why? For our sins.

And suddenly my mother has heard Sarah make a confession that qualifies Sarah for the category “saved”. Sarah has believed all of this all along, and her trust is in this gospel, just as is my mother’s. But left to themselves, the two ladies might have gone off deeply perplexed about each other’s Christian credentials.

This brings us to the third aspect of the question arising from our young friend’s claim that he became a Christian, or was saved, only after he had left the Catholic Church, since he had never, if we will credit his own account of his experience, been challenged by the Christian gospel in any sense that arrested him and called for a response from him. Indeed, he might well insist, I never heard the gospel at all. I never had the smallest notion of what the Mass was about. And the religious instruction in my parish never once spelled out for us just what this matter of “knowing Jesus” might be, of which our Lord and the apostles spoke so urgently.

What is at stake here (besides the melancholy possibility that our friend’s account is too true and that he has, in fact, been allowed to grope in darkness) is what might be called a matter of style.

To introduce such a word into such weighty topics will seem at once to be frivolous. Style? Come: we are speaking of substance here, not style. Christian belief, and the matter of one’s salvation, can scarcely be treated as a question of style.

D’accord. The question itself is as weighty and substantial as the earth. But the way we apprehend it may be said to entail this apparently trivial category of style.

To illustrate this, we may turn to what non-Catholic Christians are referring to, often, when they ask whether I am saved or not. Among millions of non-Catholic believers the question of one’s being saved attaches to an explicit, conscious, volitional experience. That is, one is trundling along through life when all of a sudden he hears Billy Graham preach, finds himself deeply affected by the message (which is, let us keep recalling, “Jesus died for you”), and “accepts Christ as his personal Savior”. He believes himself to be, at that very point, saved. “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved”, said St. Paul to the frantic jailer. Millions of Christians will point to precisely this moment of personal decision as the point at which they were saved.

There are, of course, a thousand variations on the theme. In Southern Baptist circles, and all across the world in Evangelical circles, the setting may have been one’s own local church where, having grown up under the sound of the gospel, one finds oneself particularly flagged down one day at the age of ten (or fourteen, or twenty) and “accepts Jesus”. Or again, thousands of high-school and university young people have encountered this gospel at the hands of Christian groups on their campus and will date their conversion to a specific point, perhaps in private prayer, at which they gave themselves to Christ. All of those, including many Catholics for whom the moment has turned out to be a genuine watershed, will urge that indeed this moment of decision was coterminous with their being saved.

Well, someone might interject here: Do you wish to locate such experiences under the heading of “style”?

No. The faith that was exercised in those decisions grasped a substance more lasting than the very universe itself, which will turn to ashes one fine day, as we know, while faith carries the faithful through the conflagration into the City whose builder and maker is God.

But we may juxtapose with these testimonials another sketch, which will perhaps make clear what we mean by style. In the first years of the apostolic and patristic Church, if I had been a pagan shopkeeper in Smyrna, say, and had been watching you, my Christian neighbor, for some time and had concluded that you Christians had something that I wanted, I might have approached you with, “Um—I’d like to be a Christian.”

If you had been an Evangelical of the school that has arisen in the modern world under the preaching of John Wesley, George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, D. L. Moody, and Billy Graham, you might well have said, “Praise the Lord! Here—here’s John 3:16. See that? Do you believe that? Wonderful. Let’s just bow our heads here, and you can repeat after me: ‘Lord Jesus, I believe that you are the Savior—my Savior—and I want to accept you into my life right here and to confess you as Lord. Forgive my sins, I pray, and make me your own.’ ”

But of course you weren’t a modern Evangelical. You were a Christian in Smyrna. So you would have said in response to my overture, “What? You want to be a Christian? Ah. Well, now—it’s an immense business, really. You’ll have to turn around and head 180 degrees in the opposite direction. But if you’re serious—and you can mull it over for a while if you wish—I’ll take you to Polycarp, our bishop here, and he will no doubt talk to you and then turn you over to some of the elders in our Christian assembly, and they will take you in hand and instruct you and bring you to our weekly liturgy (you’ll have to leave half-way through, though: they won’t let you stay for the Lord’s Supper); and if, over a period of months, everyone, and most especially Polycarp, is satisfied that you are wholehearted in your desire to be a Christian, and that you understand all that it will entail, then Polycarp will baptize you at the liturgy, and you will then be a Christian.”

The distance between these two pictures—the one depicting you and me with John 3:16, and the one from Smyrna—blazons for us all something of the vast breakdown that may mar things when we try to talk about who is saved. Both pictures show us a man grasped by the saving gospel of Christ. In the one, he steps across a line, as it were, just now, in his heart, with perhaps only one witness (or none). It is an interior transaction. It is intelligent, willed, conscious. In the other, it is also intelligent, willed, conscious: but it all appears to be under the auspices of the Church. The notion of a purely private and interior transaction is unthinkable, except, of course, in some extreme case where a jailer finds the walls and bars collapsing about him and cries out in extremis, so to speak. Even our Smyrnean bishop would have said that the Divine Mercy hears and honors such a cry. Of course. But that hasty scenario is not the blueprint for the quotidian life of the Church as she moves along her slow way through history. What you saw us doing here in Smyrna—that is the paradigm. Salvation, while personal, is not private. To be incorporated into Christ is to be incorporated into his Church. You cannot sunder the two: it is not two in any case. It is one thing. There is no such thing as an independent Christian to the extent that the Church is Christ’s Body here on earth. You can’t be “incorporated” into him and not into his Body, and that Body, far from being a loose aggregate of people connected only by the wispy filaments of coordinate belief, may be found here in Smyrna, and in Antioch under their bishop Ignatius, and in Jerusalem under their bishop James.

So: Who is saved? The conscious and interior transaction, punctiliar, that stamps a man with the identity “saved”? The Catholic (and, it may be observed, the Orthodox, the Anglican, and, to a certain extent, the Lutheran and the Calvinist) think of the category as inseparably linked to a man’s being found in the Church, and this identity is stamped upon him at his baptism.

It will have been noticed by everyone by this time that we have omitted perhaps the most numerous category of people who would wish to be a party to any discussion of who is saved. We are speaking, of course, of all the Christians who were baptized as infants and who neither responded for the first time as adults to the preaching of the gospel nor, also as adults, passed through a process of catechesis analogous to our Smyrnean situation.

Are they saved?

The two poles between which the answer to that question finds itself stretched would be, on the one hand, the view that baptism is an external rite that actually effects nothing. It is strictly, and only, an ordinance we observe because the Lord commands it. It plays no actual role in determining our spiritual state. For that determination, we consult faith alone. At the other pole will be the view that baptism by itself does the whole trick: if I am baptized, I am safe forever. This latter pole, it will be immediately observed, is the frivolous misstating of the Church’s view that baptism is a sacrament and that here, as with all sacraments, we come upon a real nexus between the superficial (the visible; the physical; the immediate) and the substantial (the unseen; the spiritual; the eternal). We really do see the principle ex opere operato at work: from the act itself the thing is effected. That is, the water of baptism does wash away the stain of sin with which we, as children of Adam, are stained. The soul is, at this point, “regenerate”.

Those are the two poles. There is no topic at all, in heaven and earth, that has stirred up more zeal, not to say tumult. It is appropriate in the context of this present study only to point out that all the churches, including the Roman Catholic, the Orthodox, the Anglican, the Lutheran, and the Calvinist, that attach some actual, “covenantal” weight to the rite of baptism (not all of these, by any means, will allow that ex opere operato is at work) will insist, along with all Baptists and free-churchmen, that baptism is not magic. A soul’s destiny is not sealed irrevocably with the water. What has occurred in the rite is both a present seal and a harbinger, so to speak, of the faith and obedience that must spring up sooner or later in this soul and ratify the rite.

So, in this third aspect of the question between our two interlocutors of who is saved—the aspect, that is, of “style”, or how we visualize the entry into faith—we find that despite such enormous differences in practice and vocabulary, no Christian has any hesitation about who the Savior might be. That is Jesus Christ. They have all heard the angel tell Joseph, “Thou shalt call his name Jesus, for he shall save his people from their sins.” To be Catholic is to rely wholly on this Savior.

There is one further aspect of things, a fourth and, in this case minor, point, to be sure, that marks this question of one’s being “saved”. To a Protestant Evangelical, to be saved is ordinarily to have taken on vigorously forthcoming habits of speech about the faith. One is, characteristically, ready at a moment’s notice to testify in keeping with St. Peter’s injunction that we be ready always to give an answer to every man that asks us a reason for the hope that is in us (1 Pet 3:15). Evangelical believers take that at its face value: it constitutes the warrant for the loquacity, we might say, that so unnerves Catholics, Orthodox, and even Lutheran and Calvinist Christians, none of whom, ordinarily, incline to quite this chattiness when it comes to speaking of matters religious. Hence evangelical Christians are often stumped when they encounter the muteness sometimes evinced by Catholics: “You ask them if they’re saved, and all you get is an embarrassed mutter.”

This is very often true. But one or two qualities of the Catholic mind need to be stressed here. For one thing, one’s Catholic identity attaches not so much to a punctiliar experience of accepting Christ as Savior, about which one may or may not wish to speak, as to the entire fabric, we might venture, of Catholic life. The Church, the sacraments, the Magisterium, prayer, the liturgy: it is in these precincts that one’s Catholic (and hence Christian) identity rests. “I am all of that”, a Catholic might volunteer as his contribution to the testimonials flying about. And if it seems, in this connection, that the Catholic Church has muddied the waters of faith, which seem to gush with sparkling clarity from evangelical springs, by introducing such immense machinery into the pure streambed of faith, we may consult our early forerunners in that faith. They had no Scriptures to quote so quickly; and they were conscious of having been incorporated into “the Church of the living God”, with her apostolic authority and her weekly liturgy, prayers, and her moral demands (they had to take on a mode of life starkly to be distinguished from that of their pagan neighbors). “I am a Christian”, they would have replied; and, soon enough, “I am a Catholic”, by way of distinguishing themselves from the eager and febrile quasi-Christian groups springing up all over under the preaching of heretics. To be Catholic was (and is) to be identified with that. With what? With that company of men and women and children gathered in the name of Jesus Christ, under the presidency of the bishop, who himself is in obedient and unqualified unity with the apostles, around the eucharistic banquet instituted by the Lord in Jerusalem.

For reasons harking back to such a matrix, Roman Catholics do not appear so sprightly as their evangelical brothers when it comes to speaking up about the faith. Furthermore, if a Catholic has been well instructed—but alas: here we must admit that the “if” is a very loud subordinate conjunction: the world is full of Catholics who, like the men of Nineveh, scarcely know their right hand from their left; only the Divine Mercy can assess what, lurking in the mixture of piety, ignorance, and even superstition, may be taken as true faith, and we may be very sure that this Mercy is infinitely merciful and will account any smallest hint of response in the human soul as the faith spoken of in Scripture as saving us.

But if a Catholic has been well instructed, he holds the ancient faith as a fabric into which his whole life has been woven seamlessly. Tags and phrases and Scripture texts do not festoon that fabric ordinarily. He is, in all likelihood, not quoting to himself, “Cast all your care upon him for he careth for you”, or “In everything by prayer and supplication let your requests be made known unto God”, or “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on thee”, as he goes about his daily tasks. Because his is a sacramental piety, there is no stark frontier between the physical and the immaterial worlds. He is accustomed, that is, to a world in which water is pressed into the service of eternity (baptism), and in which bread and wine are transubstantiated. Hence his entire grasp of his identity as a man of faith (he would perhaps scarcely recognize such a phrase) may rarely come to the point of articulateness, we might say. He has been assumed, so to speak, into the immense Catholic fabric, and things do not stand or fall with his ability to be explicit. Hence the characteristic Catholic’s shaky performance under the drill of evangelical inquiries about his faith.

And we may also recall in this connection that there are almost one billion Roman Catholics in the world. What percentage of this billion is literate, much less trained in the muscular discourse so characteristic of northern Europe and its Reformation, would be difficult to track down. How the Divine Mercy assesses the faith at work in our muttering Sicilian crone, relative to the faith of a Mt. Holyoke undergraduate leading a crackling Bible study in her dormitory, is a piquant question. Since the whole point of faith is that we mortals be drawn ever more into configuration to Charity (“the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ”, St. Paul calls it), we find ourselves obliged to leave on one side all tests of how articulate, or scripturally adept, a given soul is and to address ourselves, rather, to the far more daunting question of how we are all doing in the school of Charity.

This is a sword that cuts both ways, of course. The world’s most biblically adroit Evangelical, for his part, may have to stop in his busy tracks and ask what, exactly, he is about; and the local Catholic, fiercely loyal to his ethnic and cultural religion, may need to inquire about what, exactly, he is about. There is only one agenda for all of us Christians, namely, our growing into conformity to Jesus Christ, that is to say, our being made perfect in Charity. We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, and at that tribunal there is not one test for Protestants and another for Catholics. All of us have arrived there by grace, and all of us are “washed in the Blood of the Lamb”, and all of us are to have been configured to Christ. Juste judex ultionis, Donum fac remissionis, we will all want to call out: O righteous Judge, grant us remission of our sins. And, Recordare, Jesu pie, quod sum causa tuae viae: Remember, kind Jesus, that I am the reason for your coming to earth. The crone and the Mt. Holyoke woman will both want to plead thus.

Are Catholics saved? If they are, it is on the basis of God’s grace in Christ the Savior, as it is for the Evangelicals. Again, for his part, the Evangelical may need to ask whether he has taken this “so great salvation” and pocketed it like a laminated card, expecting that the door of heaven will buzz open when he arrives. “Oh, I’m saved: I accepted Jesus as my Savior on March 10, 1984.” Yes: but is your lamp trimmed? How have you been doing in the “inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these” sweepstakes? Have you forgiven your brother as I have forgiven you? Remember, that decision of yours on March 10 was the opening sentence in the story. Where has that story gone now? And, for his part, the Catholic will need to ask whether all of his faithful obedience to the commandments of the Church—Mass, holy days of obligation, confession—whether all of that has been the fruit of faith in him or whether he has supposed that it has all been a matter of accruing as much merit as he can stockpile for his account at the Judgment, hoping that it will add up to an acquittal.

To be Catholic is to rest one’s case in the pierced hands of Christ Jesus the Savior, as the apostles taught our first forerunners in the faith to do. If the saving grace that was vouchsafed to me at my baptism has indeed fructified in my life, and if faith and obedience have sprung up from that heavenly seed, then, when I am asked whether I am “saved”, I may say Yes.

My Catholic “Yes” will have, however, a ring to it that is somewhat different from the ring heard in my evangelical brother’s Yes. For him it refers to a fixed status: I am saved. My status as saved was fixed at the point when I accepted Christ as my Savior. Of one thing I am certain: I will get into heaven. That, really, is the thrust of my assertion that I am saved. I will get into heaven. Nothing I do, or fail to do, will in the least qualify that certitude. My eternal safety is as sure as God himself, resting as it does on his promise and “the finished work of Christ”.

This way of looking on the topic of one’s own salvation derives from the teaching of Martin Luther, with his emphasis on God’s unfailing grace vouchsafed to us in Christ, and on Christ’s “finished” work at the Cross, grasped solely by faith on my part. It also has elements in it of John Calvin’s teaching on “the perseverance of the saints”, by which he meant that the elect will, all hell to the contrary notwithstanding, persevere to the end. Their souls’ safety may not for one moment be called into question. The modern derivative, among the Evangelicals, of Calvin’s teaching on this point is ordinarily called “assurance of salvation”, or “eternal security”. It is this that rings in the heartiness of an Evangelical’s Yes! upon being asked if he is saved.

The Catholic Church speaks rather of the blessed hope. Hope, not certitude, is the note struck all the way through the New Testament, the Church would urge. It is not the forlorn hope of a modestly endowed child wondering if there is any remote chance that he will be picked for the team or promoted to the next grade. It is the “hope which is laid up for you in heaven” of which St. Paul speaks to the Colossians. It is “the hope of his calling” of which he speaks to the Ephesians. It is the hope by which we are saved of which he speaks to the Romans. It is the helmet of salvation of which he speaks to the Thessalonians. It is the hope we have as an anchor of the soul of which the letter to the Hebrews speaks. It is the lively hope of which St. Peter speaks. It is the hope that makes us purify ourselves of which St. John speaks.

The Roman Catholic Church has always drawn her teaching about our salvation from this theme lacing the pages of the New Testament. Its vocabulary is one of hope. It is keenly aware of the dire thrust of the warnings, iterated so remorselessly by the Savior himself, against those who, looking upon themselves as safely among the righteous, will be startled one fine day to hear “Depart from me” read out after their name—not, it may be ventured here, for perpetrating murder and licentiousness, but for having failed to see Jesus Christ in the filthy outcast in the gutter.

The note struck in the Catholic Church on this question of one’s being saved is also profoundly influenced by her whole understanding of what salvation is, when we are speaking of the individual Christian soul. One was saved by God’s grace hidden in the bosom of the Father from all eternity. One was saved when Jesus Christ called out Consummatum est! on the Cross. One was saved when he rose from the grave putting death and sin to flight. One was saved at one’s baptism, that being “born of water and the Spirit” of which our Lord speaks to Nicodemus.

But one is in the Way, as the early Church phrased it. One is being saved, insofar as one is to be found among those who name the Name of Christ, and insofar as one is to be found at his Table, and insofar as one is walking in that obedience which alone is the test of our love for him and is producing the fruit that appears on a branch that is alive, referred to by the Lord in John 15, and has the works to show without which faith is a mockery, as St. James so solemnly teaches. In this sense, one is being saved. One is in the School of Charity, whose tutelage fits us eventually to receive the crown of God’s “Well done” in heaven.

And one will be saved, if one is found among the faithful, at the resurrection, until which time, says St. Paul, our salvation is not complete. It is not until then that one may quite say I am saved, with the ring of utter finality.

To be Catholic is to understand the answer to the question of whether one is saved in terms such as these.