The John-Henry Westen Show - How to understand the teaching 'outside the Church there is no salvation'

00:00:00.000 Every good evangelist throughout history knows the only way that somebody will hear the good

00:00:04.040 news, i.e. the gospel of Jesus Christ, is if they know the bad news first. Because why bother with

00:00:08.740 good news if you think everything's hunky-dory already? You need to know the bad news. You need

00:00:12.880 to know the bad news about hell. You need to know the bad news about error in this world. So for

00:00:17.360 example, if you are Muslim, you need to know that Muhammad was a false prophet. You need to know 0.99

00:00:23.680 errors like that. Because only if you know that will you then say, I need to find the good news.

00:00:28.580 And that's when we give them the good news of Jesus Christ.

00:00:33.700 It is an official teaching of the Catholic Church that outside of the Church there is

00:00:38.760 no salvation. That is hugely controversial today. Almost no one talks about it. You probably never

00:00:44.860 ever even heard that from a pulpit. And yet we have a book on it, a brand new book by a great author.

00:00:51.280 It's called Deadly Indifference, and it's all about it. You're going to want to stay tuned.

00:00:58.580 Eric Sammons, welcome to the program. Thanks so much for having me on. This is great. I really

00:01:18.920 appreciate it. Let's begin, as we always do, with the sign of the cross. In the name of the Father,

00:01:23.180 and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. For those of you who don't know him, Eric Sammons

00:01:30.180 is a father of seven children. He's also the editor of one of the last Catholic, actually authentically

00:01:36.840 Catholic, magazines in America called Crisis Magazine. He is an author of several books, and the

00:01:43.040 latest one is called Deadly Indifference. Eric, tell us a little bit about Deadly Indifference and

00:01:49.700 what it is, first of all, and where people can get it. Well, Deadly Indifference is from crisis

00:01:54.460 publications. You can get it to sophiainstitute.com website. Essentially what it is, it evolved out of

00:02:01.780 my own work in evangelization. And then I realized that Catholics don't want to evangelize. And I 1.00

00:02:08.040 realized because most Catholics don't think it matters to be Catholic. They don't think there's

00:02:13.420 anything really that unique about it. I heard over and over again, all my work at the diocesan level,

00:02:17.860 parish level, from Catholics saying, basically, it doesn't matter if you're Muslim, or if you're

00:02:23.280 Protestant, or atheist even, as long as you're a good person, you're going to heaven. And I realized

00:02:28.960 it's not that we don't have the right techniques for evangelization, because I wrote a book about that

00:02:34.140 years ago, but it's more a matter of, we just don't want to, because we don't see why we should. And we

00:02:40.200 see that with the collapse of missionary work over the past 60 years. I mean, think about our great

00:02:46.160 history of missionary work in the Catholic Church. It's just gone. And so this book really explores

00:02:51.460 why that happened.

00:02:52.380 It was a concern of Pope Benedict himself, who pretty well said that as well. But let's get into

00:02:59.580 the heart of this, because it is a hard teaching. What does, it's famously in Latin, we used to

00:03:05.260 remember it from our catechism, extra ecclesiam nulla salus, outside the church, there is no salvation.

00:03:10.160 What exactly does that mean?

00:03:12.440 Well, essentially, it builds upon the fact that the Gospels make clear, the New Testament makes

00:03:17.100 very clear, that only in Christ do we find salvation. It is impossible to be saved without

00:03:22.380 the work of Jesus Christ. But then the question becomes, how does that get applied to the individual

00:03:28.220 person? Okay, so Jesus redeemed the whole world, salvation is now available to mankind, but that

00:03:33.740 doesn't mean we're all automatically just going to heaven then. We have to have that applied to us.

00:03:38.160 And what the church saw very clearly was that there's this intimate bond, this identity really

00:03:44.020 between Jesus Christ and the church. In fact, the famous scene from St. Paul, when he is converted,

00:03:51.660 Jesus says to him, I am Jesus whom you are persecuting. Well, Paul wasn't persecuting Jesus

00:03:57.440 Christ the man. He was already dead and rose from grave and was ascended. He was persecuting the church,

00:04:02.580 but Jesus identified himself with the church. So that's what we have to do. We have to identify

00:04:07.560 ourselves with the body of Christ, the church, which means we become members of the church through

00:04:11.660 baptism. That's the means by which salvation is applied to us. And so the church in developing

00:04:18.660 this finally came up with this great phrase, outside the church there is no salvation, meaning

00:04:22.220 it is the ark of salvation. Think of Noah's ark. If you weren't on Noah's ark, you weren't saved

00:04:27.560 from the flood. Likewise, if you're not inside the church through baptism, then you're not going to be

00:04:33.960 saved. And this is a perennial teaching in the church. I mean, I was thinking about all the

00:04:38.640 different teachings of the church, and there's very few that have been more consistently taught

00:04:44.360 than this one over the centuries. I mean, it's amazing how you could go back all the way to the

00:04:49.220 first century to the 20th century, and you have popes talking about theologians, saints. It just,

00:04:55.600 it's a constant teaching in the church that just can't be denied that we have to believe this as

00:05:00.900 Catholics. Absolutely. Right from the scriptures. It says, if you believe and you are baptized,

00:05:05.900 you should be saved. So, okay, so we have this teaching, but of course, that brings up a very

00:05:11.680 controversial question. Well, what about our, what we call sometimes separated brethren?

00:05:17.960 What about Protestants? They have baptism, but they're not in the Catholic church. How does the 0.95

00:05:23.760 church explain that? Well, essentially what it, first of all, it would say that they are,

00:05:27.660 if they're validly baptized, they are in some way members of the Catholic church. They might not,

00:05:33.100 I mean, I was baptized as a Protestant, and I converted later. So even then, I was a member

00:05:38.160 of the Catholic church. But essentially what happens though, is you need the sacraments to

00:05:43.780 remain in the church. Obviously, if you're baptized as an infant, you're not going to commit actual sin

00:05:48.120 until the age of reason. But that's why at the age of reason, you start going to confession,

00:05:52.360 you start going to communion regularly, because you need those graces to stay in the state of grace.

00:05:57.660 And unfortunately for Protestants, they don't have those sacraments, so they don't have those 0.96

00:06:03.320 graces available to them. Thus, if they commit a mortal sin, for example, they have no means,

00:06:09.500 no real means, sacramental means, to have that forgiven through the sacrament of confession.

00:06:15.500 So really, we know if you're Catholic, if you're living a Catholic life, that you will be saved. It's a

00:06:21.020 promise from our Lord. But for those who are not inside the Catholic church, who are not fully in

00:06:28.260 the Catholic church, I guess you would say, through like Protestants or something like that,

00:06:32.540 we just would urge them to become Catholic. And if they don't, and they die, we hope for their 0.92

00:06:37.420 salvation through some mysterious means of God, which of course, he can use. But we can't presume

00:06:44.060 upon their salvation. That's the real issue here is, we have to assume that they need to become

00:06:49.880 Catholic before they die. And that's why the obligation is really on us, obligation on us to 0.99

00:06:54.720 evangelize them and tell them why, how important it is to become Catholic.

00:06:58.980 It's an amazing thing about your book that because you're laying out the problems, but you're also

00:07:03.900 giving solutions. I think that's a, that's a huge thing. If you can give us a listing of few of the

00:07:08.240 biggest problems that are really impeding the success, if you will, or even the work even of

00:07:14.100 the new evangelization, why it's not working, and then give us a few best solutions to bringing it

00:07:19.920 about. One of the biggest problems of the new evangelization is it, it ignores the bad news.

00:07:26.020 Every good evangelist throughout history knows the only way that somebody will hear the good news,

00:07:30.580 i.e. the gospel of Jesus Christ, is if they know the bad news first, because why bother with good

00:07:35.020 news? If you think everything's hunky-dory already, you need to know the bad news. You need to know the

00:07:39.220 bad news about hell. You need to know the bad news about error in this world. So for example, if you

00:07:44.340 are Muslim, you need to know that, that, uh, Muhammad was a false prophet. You need to know errors like 0.96

00:07:50.520 that because only if you know that will you then say, I need to find the good news. And that's when we

00:07:55.640 give them the good news of Jesus Christ. So I think that's the, probably the biggest flaw of the new

00:08:01.200 evangelization is it, it just ignores the bad news. It just wants to be friendly with everybody. It

00:08:06.620 says, oh, if we just give a positive message, then people will somehow just be like, yeah, that's great.

00:08:11.640 But really what it does, it causes people to say, well, that's good for you, but what I'm doing is

00:08:16.460 good for me. And that's not evangelization. And so what we need to do is we need to really bring back

00:08:22.040 a lot of, uh, preaching about the bad news. I know it gets a bad rap as, you know, hell, hellfire and

00:08:27.300 brimstone, things like that. But there's a reason that's the way Catholics preach for 2000 years. 0.98

00:08:33.720 I mean, if you look at St. Peter's first sermon on Pentecost day, the first papal homily,

00:08:38.840 what does he do? He gives a story of salvation, but he also tells his hearers, you crucified the

00:08:44.180 Lord. He tells them the bad news. And when they ask him, what must we do to be saved? He doesn't

00:08:49.760 say, oh, just be a good person. He doesn't just even say, be baptized. He says, repent and be

00:08:54.580 baptized. Well, if nothing's wrong, there's no need to repent. So we really need to, I think,

00:08:59.440 bring back more of the bad news in order to really make the good news clear to people that this is

00:09:05.000 what you have, this is the way you have to live. Let me stop you there because I know that people

00:09:09.640 are going to be thinking, bring back the bad news. We are living bad news every day. What, what? It's

00:09:14.940 a tsunami of bad news. This is insane. But what bad news specifically, I know you mentioned hell,

00:09:20.420 and this is the thing I think that, you know, again, Pope Benedict himself said, and publicly

00:09:26.520 so, that we're not talking about hell anymore. And that bad news of the four last things, maybe if

00:09:34.180 you can go into that a little bit to explain more of what you mean by the bad news.

00:09:38.120 The bad news is, is that original sin exists and that each one of us, every individual is impacted

00:09:44.120 by, and everybody in history, other than our Lord and our lady, are impacted by original sin.

00:09:48.740 What that means is we desire our own desire, our own will rather than God's will. And so what we're

00:09:56.080 basically doing is we're living in a way that we're rejecting God if we allow, if we don't have the

00:10:00.480 graces of God given to us through the sacraments. And so that's the real fundamental bad news, which

00:10:06.420 means you are on a path to eternal damnation, separate, eternal separation from God. And I mean,

00:10:12.860 when I say you, I mean all of us, if not for the grace of God through baptism, through the sacraments,

00:10:17.580 we're all on that path. That's fundamentally the bad news. And so what happens is, is we don't talk

00:10:23.900 about that anymore. And I think that's the reason we have so much bad news in the church

00:10:28.480 is because then what happens is bishops and priests start, start preaching this, this,

00:10:34.440 this worldly gospel of, okay, let's make this world better through working on climate change

00:10:39.720 or immigration reform or something like that. But the real bad news of hell is ignored completely.

00:10:46.900 And so these eternal destination, the four last things, as you say, of judgment, of heaven and

00:10:52.780 hell. I mean, that's really what we need to be talking about. What our preachers, our bishops and

00:10:58.080 priests need to be talking about, not about, okay, let's, let's be nice to our neighbor. Let's work

00:11:02.220 together with, with Muslims on this, or let's affect climate change or whatever the case may be.

00:11:06.960 Yeah. It is an incredible thing that the one main struggle, the whole reason, if you will,

00:11:14.680 for our life on earth, that bad news that everybody knows and feels, but they must think,

00:11:19.800 oh, I must be really weird because I'm the only one who's inclined towards sin. I want to do these

00:11:24.000 horrible things. And I do end up doing them sometimes because I give into it, but that's not

00:11:29.560 the focus seemingly of the church anymore. It's ridiculous because that's the whole point.

00:11:33.740 You have also in, in your work, the solutions, give us the top three solutions that the church

00:11:39.820 needs us to focus on right now in order to get back to where she should be. 0.96

00:11:44.460 First of all, we need to preach the truth of outside the church is no salvation. We have to 0.99

00:11:49.520 be unapologetic about that. We're, we, we diminish that so much that people end up thinking that any

00:11:56.220 religion is okay. We're all religious pluralists. Ultimately we become that. And so we need to really

00:12:01.820 preach that first of all. Secondly, we need to take seriously our faith. And what I mean by that is

00:12:06.440 when you walk into your typical St. Suburbia Catholic church, what you find is a very unserious

00:12:12.340 practice of the faith. It's a, it's a, from the architecture to the preaching to the community,

00:12:17.940 everything is about, it's a social club. It's not really taking seriously. Like this is really what

00:12:23.440 we need to do. Uh, we really need to believe in order to be saved. It's more just like, okay,

00:12:29.140 this is a nice community center that we're doing. So take, take the faith very seriously at the parish

00:12:34.460 level in, in particular is where we need to do that. And then thirdly, I would just say that we

00:12:40.080 do need to really tell Catholics that you need to tell other people about your faith. Once you know

00:12:46.460 the bad news and in the good news that solves it, and you take your faith seriously, well, now you have

00:12:51.560 to go out. Now you have to go out and tell people about it and tell them so that, that they can be safe

00:12:56.480 too. They can be part of this great treasure we have in the Catholic faith. And that's one thing

00:13:00.680 I want to mention is because we don't talk about the bad news, we don't talk about the really good

00:13:06.540 news. We, that's why it stays on this very surface level of just be nice and then you'll be happy or

00:13:13.340 something like that. No, we are destined. St. Athanasius said that God became man so that man might become

00:13:20.520 God. That sounds heretical on its face, but it's a Catholic teaching because what Jesus is by

00:13:26.240 nature, we can become by grace, meaning we are united for eternity with God in heaven. I mean,

00:13:32.840 my goodness, there's nothing better than that. But if you're not thinking about the eternal part

00:13:38.920 of salvation or damnation, you don't have either side of it. We're missing, we're in this like kind

00:13:44.920 of mushy middle where we don't talk about hell, but we don't really talk about the greatness that is

00:13:48.660 heaven either. And so we lose on both ends. One interesting aspect of this, and I think we'll close on

00:13:55.340 this point. You've got yourself seven children. It's always incumbent upon parents to bring their

00:14:01.940 children first and foremost to the faith. And yet you're basically talking about going like door to

00:14:07.020 door or evangelizing outside the family as well. How do you fit those together when you, as a father

00:14:12.660 of seven children, how would you even think to go outside the family when, uh, you know, I, I'm not

00:14:18.300 sure that you're complete on evangelizing inside the family. Really what you do is you evangelize in your

00:14:22.820 sphere of influence. I don't want to diminish going door to door. I've done that in the past

00:14:26.060 myself. I think it could be a great thing to do, but really every single person has a, what I call

00:14:31.080 a sphere of influence people that you have an impact on their closest fear will be your immediate

00:14:35.920 family. So my seven kids are either biggest impact on and my wife and my wife of course has it on me as

00:14:41.100 well, but then also, uh, family members like your parents, your siblings, people, cousins, things like

00:14:46.160 that. You might have, you have influence of them, your neighbors, your coworkers, all those people,

00:14:51.600 you can evangelize. And it doesn't necessarily mean door to door. You're not going to door and tell

00:14:55.560 them about Jesus, like maybe a Mormon would or something like that. But what it means is your

00:14:59.620 coworker brings up some topic about the faith or related to it. Maybe something about Joe Biden or

00:15:04.580 about abortion. There's your opportunity. You can talk about, about the importance and you can talk

00:15:10.180 about these things. Maybe, I mean, I know, like, for example, I was just talking to somebody who said

00:15:14.040 that her friend was with her Muslim neighbor and said, oh yeah, our Catholic friend said, oh yeah,

00:15:19.380 our religions are basically the same. Well, there's an opportunity to say, well, no, there's

00:15:23.760 actually some really big differences and they really matter for, for both on this world, but

00:15:28.500 also for eternal salvation. Those are those opportunities. I mean, so we all evangelize

00:15:33.740 in our own sphere of influence. It doesn't even mean you have to go to another country or anything

00:15:38.360 like that, or even door to door. Now, the fact is, if we do really, the church really preaches outside

00:15:43.880 the church and no salvation. What will happen is many people will hear the calling to go to other

00:15:48.300 nations to do that really serious missionary work that we've been doing for 2000 years until about

00:15:53.640 50 or 60 years ago. So it's all part of a whole. So we all, in fact, there's a, I was doing research

00:15:59.800 for the book. There was a Catholic newspaper, like diocesan newspaper from like the 1920s. It was

00:16:05.820 talking about the week of Christian unity. And it was saying, what can you do mean lay people? And

00:16:09.660 one of them was tell your separate, your non-Catholic neighbors that they need to become Catholic or

00:16:14.780 something to that effect. I mean, can you imagine reading that in a diocesan newspaper today?

00:16:18.580 But that's the kind of stuff we should, we should really be doing.

00:16:21.580 Amen. We certainly need to. One thing most people don't know about you, you wrote a book

00:16:25.920 on Bitcoin. Can you give us 20 seconds on a Catholic perspective on Bitcoin?

00:16:32.400 Essentially what I would say is Bitcoin is money that's free from government interference,

00:16:36.860 because I would say as a Catholic, we'd have a real, we should have a real problem with the 0.99

00:16:41.200 government controlling our money supply. Because what that does, it hurts the poor more than anybody

00:16:45.660 through inflation and things like that. Bitcoin can help overcome that so that the poor don't

00:16:50.760 have their money basically taken from them by the government printing more money.

00:16:55.120 Eric Sammons, very, very interesting. Your book is Deadly Indifference, can be got it.

00:17:00.480 Sophia Press, God bless you. And thank you for coming on the John Henry Weston Show.

00:17:04.120 Thanks for having me.

00:17:05.200 And God bless all of you. We'll see you next time.

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The John-Henry Westen Show - July 28, 2021

How to understand the teaching 'outside the Church there is no salvation'

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