Vatican Reaffirms that Protestants and Jews Will Go to Hell
September 6, 2000
A new Vatican decree issued yesterday declares that people can obtain salvation from sin only through the Catholic Church. According the pronouncement, other religions, including Protestant and Orthodox Christian, have placed their followers in a "gravely deficient situation." The new declaration explicitly reaffirms centuries-old claims of Catholic supremacy. The purpose of the new pronouncement, according to the Vatican, is to combat the "so-called theology of religious pluralism," which suggests that Catholics are equal in God's eyes with Protestants and Jews.
Catholic doctrine maintains that papal authority comes directly from God. The new Vatican pronouncement describes other religions as inherently inferior, because they depend on "superstitions or other errors" that "constitute an obstacle to salvation." It also reminds Catholics that their duty is to evangelize adherents of other religions during any dialogue.
The new edict was presented at a news conference by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the principal Vatican body charged with defining Catholic doctrine. Ratzinger has long been regarded as a theological reactionary, but his boss, Pope John Paul II, has embraced decisions from the Second Vatican Council of the mid-1960s that favored ecumenism. During a visit to the Middle East last March, John Paul called for "more mature understanding and ever more practical cooperation" between Christians and the (now apparently hell-bound) Jews.
Yesterday's Vatican pronouncement that non-Catholics will go to hell caused dismay among religious groups with whom Pope John Paul II has sought to establish a dialog. Valdo Benecchi, president of the Methodist Evangelical Churches of Italy, declared: "It's a jump backwards in terms of ecumenism and with dialogues with other religions. There is nothing new about this, but we had hoped they had taken another road. This is a return to the past....The salvation through Christ is not deposited in one religion only. This puts not only the Catholic Church at the center, but especially the Catholic hierarchy." Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, de facto head of the Church of England, said "the idea that Anglican and other churches are not 'proper churches' seems to question the considerable gains we have made." The liberal World Council of Churches said it would be a "tragedy" if Christian cooperation were obscured by disputes about "relative authority and status."
The Vatican claim of papal supremacy came in the wake of last week's UN interfaith summit in New York. Representatives of the Vatican, the World Muslim League, and the Dalai Lama spoke at the summit. The Catholic speaker did not take the opportunity to tell the other representatives that they were going to hell because the Vatican position on this issue was not released until this week. But sports and media mogul Ted Turner, whose Better World Fund underwrote much of the summit's expenses, used the opportunity to call for greater religious ecumenism. Turner, whose sole qualification for speaking at the conference was that he funded it, said that he was born into a Christian family. But, he said, "the thing that disturbed me is that my religious sect was very intolerant -- not of religious freedom for other people, but we thought we were the only ones going to heaven." This belief "confused the devil out of me," he said. Apparently Turner was not Catholic, because as Turner put it, "there weren't that many of us." Maybe this is what Jesus meant when he said "strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it." Or maybe what Turner is really confused about is Jesus' statement that "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God."
Turner, whose ex-wife Jane Fonda has reportedly become a born-again Christian, noted that people of all faiths love nature and put on coats when it gets cold. "So, I said, maybe instead of all these different gods, maybe there is only one God who manifested himself and revealed himself in different ways to different people. Huh? What about that?" It sounds like Turner is calling for a return to the deism of Thomas Jefferson. Turner did not explain how the god who manifested himself to the Muslims and told them to kill the Jews could be the same God who manifested himself to the Jews and told them that they would inherit the land of Israel forever. The Catholic church had no comment on Turner's chances of salvation. |