Under Rachel Held Evans’ post, Did Anne Frank go to hell?, Tara Meghan says the following:
“I am Catholic, and while I’m still learning the ins-and-outs of Catholic doctrine, I’m pretty comfortable with what I understand to be our beliefs about departed souls. As I understand, only real, out-and-out saints are actually prepared for what is called Heaven. The rest of us are still unfortunately (whether by weakness or ignorance) in need of some cleaning up, so to speak. Thus, the Purgatory. And it’s true, Catholics are asked to pray for all the dead! And (again, this is my understanding) we’re actually encouraged to pray that *nobody, anywhere, ever* is damned to Hell, because all of our souls, no matter what we make of them in this life, are precious. And, most emphatically, people cannot be damned to Hell over something they never knew. A Jewish person in the 40′s may have *heard* of Jesus, but that doesn’t mean that they knew the whole story or understood the message. Paul to the Romans is what I would imagine would be most quoted to support the idea of non-Christians being doomed, but he also made it clear that ignorance is, in fact, a legitimate excuse.
“The God of the prodigal son, and of the 11th hour workers who received the same wage as those who came in the morning, and of the adulteress who no one threw a stone at, and of the Cross, is not a God to turn around and condemn the souls of decent people to an eternity away from Him, just because they didn’t get the memo! To me, *that’s* the hope of the Gospel, and *that’s* the hope of Christ. And that’s why I’m a Christian. Because Jesus rules.”
This is what my Mom and her husband learned in their Catholic classes when they were converting to Catholicism (or, more accurately, my Mom was converting, since her husband was already a Catholic). At Hebrew Union College, there was a Catholic woman who told me that Catholicism holds that moral people go to heaven, regardless of their religion.
At my Latin mass, however, and in the works of Dante and St. Thomas Aquinas, I encounter another view: the saved (Christians) go to heaven, or they go to purgatory, if they need further cleansing. And non-Christians go to hell. Moreover, my understanding is that mortal sins can damn a Christian to hell, if he does not take the necessary steps to repent of them. Venial sins don’t damn Christians to hell, however, but they do damn non-Christians, who lack the grace of Christ.
In the Catholic catechism, I read inclusivist language. I once received an ad for a James White debate with Bill Rutland over the following passages in the Catholic catechism:
”841 The Church’s relationship with the Muslims. The plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place amongst whom are the Muslims; these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind’s judge on the last day.”
“1260 Since Christ died for all, and since all men are in fact called to one and the same destiny, which is divine, we must hold that the Holy Spirit offers to all the possibility of being made partakers, in a way known to God, of the Paschal mystery. Every man who is ignorant of the Gospel of Christ and of his Church, but seeks the truth and does the will of God in accordance with his understanding of it, can be saved. It may be supposed that such persons would have desired Baptism explicitly if they had known its necessity.”
But I also read in 1033 that to “die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God’s merciful love means remaining separated from him for ever by our own free choice”, and 1032-1033 affirm that purgatory is for the elect, those “who die in God’s grace and friendship, but [are] still imperfectly purified…”
But the question is this: Who has God’s grace and friendship? Is it only those who have an explicit faith in Jesus Christ? Or is it also people who are trying to follow whatever light they have? And how much light is enough for a person to be judged a non-believer? Indeed, there are people who have never heard the Gospel, but there are also plenty who have heard it, yet they choose to follow their own religions or ideas. Maybe they are still in the category of “ignorant” because they don’t fully understand the love of God through Jesus Christ. Perhaps intellectually understanding God’s love and rejecting it is not enough to get a person damned, for one has to taste God’s love and spurn it before God judges that person as hopeless. I don’t know.