"God wouldn't have given us an intellect, if he didn't want us to think straight." Ronald Knox
INTRODUCTION
Ronald Knox was first and last an apologist for the Faith although his techniques varied extensively over the course of a lifetime. His early works are combative, satirical, ruthlessly logical. His later works are characterized more by his charity and humility. Robert Speaight comments on the transition: "He had used the weapon of laughter in addressing himself to people who could no longer laugh, and the weapon of reason in talking to people who could no longer think and the weapon of knowledge in informing people who were indifferent to fact."
THE CHURCH ON EARTH: The Nature and Authority of the Catholic Church and the Place of the Pope Within It (1929) is a defense of the hierarchical structure of the Church, Her infallibility, Her teaching authority, etc. It very clearly explains the radical difference between Protestant concepts of an assembly of people and the visible church instituted by Christ.
CALIBAN IN GRUB STREET
(1930) is Knox's response to literary contemporaries who participated in various newspaper symposia - My Religion, If I Were A Preacher, God in These Times, to name a few. Literary giants of the day, such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mr Arnold Bennett, Mr Phillips Oppenheim, Miss Rachael West, Mr de Vere Stacpoole and others, are taken to task for their modernist and irrational views of religion. Arnold Bennett seems to come in for more than his fair share of self-imposed ridicule - he contradicts himself on such basic beliefs as the immortality of the soul - and Knox's arrows are sharp: "Is it too much to ask that Mr Bennett should keep his religious convictions filed somewhere on a card-index, so that his secretary may have easy access to them when occasion arises?" Still, one gets the impression that this is really shooting ducks in a barrel for Knox. "...religion, to the moderns, is no longer an attitude of mind towards a Person, but a mere attitude of mind." Professor Irwin Edman states that "God becomes the metaphor for the humanitarian intention; Heaven the metaphor for the humanitarian ideal". "Precisely", replies Knox, "it is convenient to have a metaphor like God for the humanitarian intention; it saves you the trouble of trying to explain what exactly the humanitarian intention may be."IN SOFT GARMENTS (1942) "When the Holy See gave a general permission for Catholics to matriculate at Oxford and Cambridge, the stipulation was made that lectures should be provided for them, to safeguard their faith against the influence of an uncongenial atmosphere. During the years between 1926 and 1938, when I was chaplain at Oxford, I delivered a good many of these myself; and I have collected some of them in this book, in the hope that they may suggest useful lines of thought to a wider (though I hope not much more learned) audience....It will be seen, from a glance at the title-page, that this book does not represent a complete course in any branch of apologetics. But I have tried to deal, unprofessionally, with some of the hesitations that most naturally occur to us Catholics, when we compare our intellectual commitments with the current thought of the present day...."(from the preface)
OFF THE RECORD (1954) "It is good for us to know that other people have difficulties; good for us, even, to know that they are not the same as ours; what if they should cancel out? And if [this book] is read by others, to whom clear faith has been granted, may it inspire them to be more patient with those who are less fortunate than themselves, to pray for them oftener and more urgently. Here, under a mask of anonymity, you have a glimpse of thirty or fourty human souls that asked advice from a stranger. How many others are there, too shy, too proud, too dilatory to invoke any human counsellor in their bewilderment? We jostle them day by day without knowing it; joke with them, weary them, perhaps disedify them. Something is lacking in our prayers if we forget the secret maladies of men's hearts." (from the introduction)
THE ESSENTIALS OF SPIRITUAL UNITY : PREFACE
I began to be anxious about my position as an Anglican, I felt that I had no right to plunge into Catholicism (although I then held most of its doctrines) without going back over old ground and satisfying myself that I had not unduly neglected the claims of other denominations to a hearing.
Among other experiments in this direction, I began to write down some account of what I meant by "a Church." A Church I was determined to have, but it seemed to me it might clear my mind if I started with the bare idea and definition of a Church and followed out the implications of that idea, wherever (as Plato says) the argument should lead.
My method was not that of Plato, but that of Aristotle, at least in his Ethics. For Plato knows what he thinks beforehand, and his dialogue form is a literary artifice, but Aristotle seems (at any rate) to set out on no other basis than that of generally received ideas--What do we mean by "good"? What do we mean by "deliberate"? and so on--and, by whittling away the rival explanations that will not do, arrives in the end at the definition he wants. This nice slovenly method I adopted.
When I found myself (as usual) "up against" the Catholic system, I exchanged this experimentalist for an a priori method and began asking: If such and such a system of religious organization is the only tolerable kind of Church, how would such a Church (supposing it to exist) be likely to appear in the records of history? How much should we expect historical and geographical accidents to obscure, at first sight, the principles on which it was based?
The first part was begun as early as August 1915, but the work went on slowly and casually, as the mood took me, and the last part was never really finished--the last page or two I actually wrote in September 1917, just before I was received. I have let it stand as I wrote it, except for half a dozen incidental corrections which were suggested to me. I do not pretend that it is the way in which one ought to arrive at the idea of the Catholic Church; it is merely the way in which one soul did.
The Essentials of Spiritual Unity, Ronald Knox, 1918
For the complete text go to: http://www.catholic.com/thisrock/1995/9511clas.asp
AFTER 33 YEARS : PREFACE TO THE 1958 EDITION OF 'A SPIRITUAL AENEID'
(excerpt)
Two questions, evidently, some old comrade-in-arms might ask of me; correlative, indeed, but at least in his mind perfectly distinct. One is, “Are you sorry you left the Church of England when you did?” And the other is, “Did the Church of Rome come up to your expectations?” Well, I might answer in the manner of the Roman authorities, “Negative ad primam, affirmative ad secundam”. But I hope I am not alone in feeling that the questions call for a more elaborate reply.
I must emphasize here, what I think will become plain to anybody who reads the book through, that the coterie to which I belonged when I was an Anglican had a peculiar attitude towards conversion. It was thought of (if I may say so without offense) as a kind of threat, useful for bargaining purposes; almost as a kind of blackmail. Very much as the representative of an Eastern European country will insist on having his own way at some conclave of the United Nations, making it clear that if he does not get his own way he will walk out, we thought and talked of submission to Rome as a useful weapon when we were trying to avert scandals in the Establishment. “You mean to admit Nonconformists, publically and officially, to Communion? Very well then, I shall become a Roman Catholic.” When (to put it crudely) your bluff was called, you would have to decide whether or no you really meant it. Thus we used to account for any defection from our own ranks by the unsympathetic attitude of the Anglican authorities; “He went over in the Brighton row” was a typical epitaph.
Consequently, during those long days of indecision before I was received into the Church, my friends were always “getting me wrong”. They imagined that I disapproved of the existing state of Anglicanism, and was making a gesture of disapproval, like some dissatisfied member of a committee, by offering to resign my membership. And in the goodness of their hearts they strove to comfort me, admitting that the Church of England was in a bad way (we were all agreed about that), but pooh-poohing the idea that things were going from bad to worse; nonsense, we had only struck a bad patch. The influence of the Tractarian movement, at various levels, was growing daily stronger; it was only a matter of time before anomalies were ironed out, and unhealthy elements extruded; then we should be in a position to claim, as by right, corporate reunion with the Roman Catholics. Meanwhile, there was a steady return among English people to the practice of religion; materialism was losing its hold. I should look a fool in twenty years’ time, if owing to a mere excess of discouragement, I left the Church of England now.
I may be constitutionally a pessimist, but neither statistics nor impressions, to my mind, bear out any such forecast. All my life people have been telling me that England was becoming more and more Christian; and year by year it has seemed to me that organized religion (which alone admits of statistical treatment) was losing ground. I would give anything to believe I am wrong; but we are concerned, here, not with facts as they are but with the facts as I see them. If, in the year 1917, it had been my ungenerous intention to desert a sinking ship, I might still be searching vainly for evidence that the leak has been plugged. But if you could justify a more cheerful estimate of the prospects that lie before Anglicanism as a religious body – and it has certainly performed wonderful feats of organization in the last thirty years – I think I should remain unimpressed. My nostalgia, if I had any, for the Church of England would be for something which has irrevocably disappeared.
The plain fact is that while England led the world, and the Church of England was effectively the expression of its national life, there was a monumental quality about that partnership which do what you would laid hold of the imagination. Now that the hegemony is in dispute between two other world-powers, one wholly irreligious and the other, seen at its best, a Babel of Christianities, the case is altered; Anglicanism, through no fault of its own, has become sectarian. The plain fact is that while England was an aristocratic country, with squires living on their lands, and well educated, fairly well-to-do parsons helping them to rule the neighbourhood, Anglicanism fitted into the landscape, was part of the body politic. Now that we are ruled by clerks in offices and deafened by the noise of motor-cycles which convey incumbents from church to church, the whole picture is out of proportion. The Anglicanism of my nostalgia (if I had any) would be the Anglicanism of my boyhood, a gracious symbol now lost to the earth.
All this is by way of parenthesis; the step which I took in 1917 is one which I have never had the wish, never even the velleity, to retract. I do not adduce this fact as a piece of startling evidence in favour of the Petrine claims. It is open to anybody to say that I feel like that because I am that kind of person. I am only putting on record the answer of one convert to the question, “Are you sorry you left the Church of England?” It is often said of us converts – a friend of mine heard it said of me, years ago, on the top of an omnibus, “He realizes, now, that he’s made a mistake”. But in fact I have never experienced a mood of discouragement or of hesitation, during these last thirty-three years, that has suggested, even on the horizon of my mind, the possibility of going back where I came from. Faith is a gift, and may be withdrawn; when people whom I know lose (or even seen to lose) the faith, I remind myself that there, but for the grace of God, went I. But on the two or three occasions when converts whom I knew have gone back to the Church of England, I found it quite impossible to follow the workings of their mind. Revealed theology is something which I can only see as an integral whole; only by an abuse of the mind could I abandon one tenet without abandoning the rest.
I have not yet answered the further question, “Did the Church of Rome come up to your expectations?” It would give me great pleasure if I could cut short the discussion by returning a simple “Yes”. But a truer analysis demands the more complicated answer, “No, thank God it didn’t. Because I was expecting the wrong things.”
It is a familiar observation, at least among bicyclists, that when you are coming downhill with an upward slope facing you the eye is somehow cheated, and you see the gradient of that upward slope as much steeper than it really is. Many converts, in their approach to the Church, have an analogous experience. In one way or another, they are in reaction from the world about them, and the Church attracts them, partly at least, because she takes a more intelligible, a more acceptable line. But, commonly enough, they get the perspective wrong, exaggerate the contrast. They are Conservatives, and turn to the Church because she has such firm roots in the past. Or they are internationalists, and turn to the Church as an escape from chauvinism, because she is world-wide. Or they are authoritarians, and turn to the Church because she has such an admirable tradition of discipline. But almost always they exaggerate the extent of her protest, and when they get to know her better, they find her less intransigent than they thought. She has her roots in the past, but she is alive still, and capable of startling initiatives. She transcends national boundaries, yet she has an uncanny knack of letting people realize their own national genius. She is authoritarian, but her own authority is hedged about with precedent, and she will not lose sight of human liberty. Must we say, then, that she does not come up to the expectations of such converts as these? No, because when you become a Catholic you do not stand still; your own character is moulded and mellowed by new influences. The Church is better than your expectations, because she puts your ideas right about what you ought to expect.
In my own case, there can be little doubt what the special attraction of the Church was. I write from memory, but I think a perusal of the Spiritual Aeneid will bear me out (scripture, as it were, reinforcing tradition). Partly, no doubt, because I was that kind of person, but partly because of the controversies which exercised the religious world at the time, I was intensely preoccupied with the subject of Modernism. Tyrrell was but a few years in his grave, and it seemed as if the attitude of the Church towards liberal interpretations, whether of Scripture or of history, had been once for all defined; an attitude of uncompromising rejection. And , where Rome was marble, Lambeth was wax; in the Church of England you could say what you like, and nobody took action – the merest suggestion of a heresy-hunt was enough to bring out public opinion in arms. I came into the Church, it seems to me, in a white heat of orthodoxy, Manning’s disciple rather than Newman’s; and when I took the anti-modernist oath, it was something of a disappointment that the Vicar-General was not there to witness the fervour I put into it – he had gone out to order tea.
Since then, the tide of liberalism has receded, and the attitude of Catholic authorities towards the findings of modern scholarship, though it is still one of caution, is no longer one of anxious suspicion. I choose my metaphor deliberately; ebb and flow there will always be in such matters. But the tide has receded, leaving me, you would suppose, high and dry. The Church of Rome, evidently, has not come up to my expectations. So you would think, but you have made no allowance for the principle I laid down just now – that the Church does not just leave us where we were; she moulds and mellows us. Or is it merely the effect of old age? Anyhow, I do not find myself high and dry, but comfortably afloat in a fair depth of water. And that is, I think, no uncommon experience among converts who look back over a length of years. You have the curious feeling that the person who came into the Church was not you, but somebody slightly different.
What loss or gain there may be in the process is another matter. Only in the early stages do you set store by the conscious glow of enthusiasm that follows upon a hard spiritual decision. On a longer view, more serious questions arise, about fidelity to grace, about the use made of opportunities. But those questions are not for public discussion; the world’s praise and blame are beside the point. For the world’s benefit, there is nothing to add to what Maurice Baring wrote in The Puppet-Show of Memory: “On the eve of Candlemas 1909, I was received into the Catholic Church by Father Sebastian Bowden at the Brompton Oratory; the only action in my life which I am quite certain I have never regretted”.
THE UNCONSCIOUS CATHOLIC
Every Sunday, more or less, you are told how fortunate you are to be Catholics. And it is almost impossible for us, in listening to such expositions, not to be held up occasionally by a distracting thought: “That’s all very well, and it seems full of consolations for us; but after all, what about the other people? Most of us here are going about all day with people who aren’t Catholics and aren’t, as far as we can see, even on the way to becoming Catholics. They are nice people, good-living people many of them; nearly all, if you come to look beneath the surface, have excellent qualities tucked away; where exactly do they get off? Is there no chance for them in eternity? And if there is, how much of a chance is it, and how does it come to them? If we are going to accept the doctrine as apparently we must accept it, Extra ecclesiam nulla salus, isn’t it going to make us feel rather unhappy about our non-Catholic friends?” So I thought I would devote some time to a consideration of that question. It is all familiar ground, I hope, to most of you; and it is pretty dull going. But it is important, I think, to have an answer to such difficulties as these, ready for those occasions when our Protestant friends say, “Of a course, you think I’m going to hell; you have to.” Let’s just make certain that we don’t lay ourselves open to the charge of stuffiness on the one side, or land ourselves in theological misstatements on the other.
The gateway of all sacramental grace, as we know, is baptism. First of all, then, what is the position of the unbaptized? After all, for innumerable centuries before Christ the human race had to get on without the sacrament of baptism, and even now there are plenty of people in the world who have never had the chance of being baptized. If it comes to that, there are probably a good many of our friends who have never been baptized; the Jews and the Quakers for example, and the people whose parents didn’t hold with going to church at all. Well, when you are considering people like that, it is a very important to keep two principles in mind. One is, that baptism is not necessarily baptism by water; there is such a thing as baptism of desire. It is quite certain, I mean, that a person who at the time of his death was anxious to be baptized, but could find nobody to do it for him or no water to do it with, would nevertheless become a member of Christ’s Mystical Body through his desire of baptism. And we can’t, evidently, be certain how far that principle may not extend; it’s certain that the Holy Patriarchs who died in the hope of a Messiah were saved through that hope, and it isn’t for us to say how many of the heathen may have been saved through some distant inkling of the same truth; may not be saved in that way even now, provided that the chance of embracing the Christian religion has never effectively come in their way.
And that’s where the other principle comes in; it’s quite certain that nobody ever has gone to hell or ever will go to hell except through his own fault. It’s not the legacy of original sin, it’s one’s own actual sins, that bring the sentence of eternal reprobation. And if it’s true that all men sin, it is equally true that contrition is open to all men as the remedy for sin. Therefore we’ve no right to assume that anybody has been eternally lost because there is no record in his life that he ever had or desired baptism. I should certainly be very much surprised if I found myself in a heaven which didn’t contain Socrates and Plato and Virgil and plenty of other people who, at first sight, would have no right to be there. How is it that such souls come to be saved we don’t know. Some have thought that at the very moment of death, and perhaps even after the moment at which a doctor would give a certificate of medical death, an illumination is given to them which, if they accept it, will achieve the baptism of desire. Others prefer to think that the desire of baptism can be implicitly contained in an act of love towards God, even an act that is confused, even an act that is inarticulate. We don’t know; all we do know is, that it is theologically indefensible to say of any man, Nero, for example, or Mahomet, “That man went to hell”; we’ve no right, even in the extreme case, to despair of God’s infinite mercies.
All that, as you see, is only a kind of Christian agnosticism. But when we come on to the case of people who have been baptized but don’t ever become Catholics, our ground is much more certain. Every child that is baptized becomes, ipso facto, not only a Christian but a Catholic. A child that dies unbaptized, having done nothing to deserve eternal punishment, will enjoy, according to the more common opinion, a state of natural happiness in eternity which falls short, indeed, of the supernatural happiness reserved for Christ’s elect, but is nevertheless adequate to its human aspirations. A child which dies after baptism cannot be supposed to achieve the brightness of glory which belongs to those who have striven, and merited, and obtained. But it belongs to the Mystical Body of Christ, and wins its heaven.
Now, supposing that the child lives, how long does it go on being a Catholic? Until it reaches the age of reason; it is quite certain that there are no Protestants in the world under the age of five. You cease to be a Catholic only when, with the full use of your reason, you consent, at least externally, to embrace the beliefs of some other religion; or when you begin to hold, with the full use of your reason, philosophical beliefs opposed to the doctrines of the Church. If you could imagine a child that was baptized and then grew up without giving a single thought to religion for better or worse – that child has become, in strict theory, a very slack Catholic; not a Protestant. And in strict theory, if such a person wanted to join this congregation at the age of nineteen, say, he ought to be given conditional baptism in case his baptism in childhood was for some reason invalid; but he oughtn’t to be received into the Church with the official form for the reception of converts. Because that form is essentially a renunciation of errors; and the person in question, ex hypothesi, has never held any.
What normally happens, of course, is that the child grows up to be seven or eight, and then he is packed off to Sunday school and starts learning to be a Protestant. Whether you say that he does so willingly is, of course, a matter of definition; probably he kicks a good deal at first, especially if it means putting on a clean collar. But the fact remains that he goes; in doing so, does he commit a sin of schism? Materially he does, formally he does not. Let us get those two terms right, because the common instinct of English speech is to use them the wrong way round. If you eat, on a Friday, out of a jar which is labeled POTTED SHRIMP but which really contains the remains of a cab-horse, you are committing a material sin by eating meat on Friday, but you are not committing a formal sin, because you had no way of knowing that the cab-horse was there. And, of course, although you may mention it in confession if you find out about it afterwards, you are not bound to confess it, nor will it be brought up against you at the day of judgment; a sin does not lie upon your conscience unless you are conscious of committing it, and it is by your conscience that you will be judged. Similarly, the ordinary Englishman who has been validly baptized proceeds, later in life, to join in worship which is, as matter of fact, heretical and schismatical; but he is not blamed for it in the sight of God, because he has not, then at least, any means of finding out that he is doing so. The sin is merely a material one. Mark you, we no longer describe him as a Catholic; because we have to judge whether a person is or is not a Catholic by his outward actions. But has he ceased to be a member of the Mystical Body of Christ? No; not at least while he makes faithful use of the opportunities he has of worshipping God, according to the light given him. That means that there are quantities and quantities of people who, as far as we can determine, are already members of the Mystical Body of Christ without knowing it.
And now, how is it possible for such a person to lose that unconscious membership of Christ’s Church? He can, of course, suspend the operation of grace, just as we Catholics can, if he commits mortal sin. On the other hand, he regains his lost state of grace if he makes an act of perfect contrition, just as a Catholic does. Only, whereas the Catholic is bound to make his sin known in confession, even though by God’s grace it may already have been forgiven him, a Protestant is not so bound, because he either knows nothing about confession, or thinks that he can satisfy his obligation by confessing his sins to an Anglican clergyman, or to his friends in the groups. But there’s another way in which he can lose his membership of the Mystical Body. He does so when the claims of the Catholic Church are fully proposed to him, and he sees that they are justified, but does not become a Catholic in spite of his knowledge. Pride, or indolence, or the hope of worldly advantage prevents him from taking the step which his conscience knows to be right. Then, in that hour, he becomes a heretic and a schismatic, formally as well as materially; he has refused grace.
Are there many people in that position? I don’t know; my own impression is that there are very few Protestants who are Protestants in bad faith. They are in good faith, so long as they remain outside the Church through invincible ignorance. That’s a phrase of ours that worries people frightfully; when we tell them they are the victims of invincible ignorance, they always look as if we had said something rude. But if you are arguing with a friend, and are driven to tell him in the last resort that invincible ignorance is what he is suffering from, don’t let him go away with the impression that you are being rude, and that invincible ignorance means a sort of cretinous stupidity. If you’ve got a tutorial at six, and your watch tells you it’s half-past five, and you’re pretty sure your watch is wrong, and there’s a clock in the next room you know to be right – then that ignorance of the time which makes you half an hour or so late for your tutorial is not invincible ignorance. It is vincible ignorance; you could have overcome it if you had taken the trouble to look at the clock in the next room. So your friend’s ignorance would be vincible, if he already had a pretty shrewd idea that the Catholic position was right, but refused to read the Catholic Truth Society tracts you offered him because he jolly well knew he was going to lose a legacy if he became a Catholic. But that’s not his position; a hundred accidents of parentage, education, misconception, sentimental prejudice and so on make him so far from the Church that his conversion would seem a kind of miracle; he really knows nothing about Catholics except that you are one, which may or may not be an inducement – very well, his ignorance is invincible. It is the kind of ignorance he could not get rid of by taking any steps which he could normally be expected to take. So he’s all right.
By now, as I well know, you are all bursting with an objection. It always crops up in these discussions. If (you say) this rosy picture of yours is true about the dispositions of Protestants and their chances of eternal salvation, what exactly is the use of being a Catholic? Aren’t Catholics, by your account of the matter, rather in the position of men who laboriously climb up the rugged slopes of a mountain, to find when they got to the top that their Protestant friends have got ahead of them by means of a funicular railway whose existence they themselves had never been taught to suspect? Here am I (you complain) tied down by all sorts of restrictions and regulations which interfere seriously with my enjoyment of the present life; and here are these Protestants, invincibly ignorant of all these rules and regulations, and therefore having all the fun which I miss, and no worse off when it comes to a future life than myself? Your attitude, in fact, is very much that of the laborers in the vineyard whom we read about in the Gospel, who complained that they had borne all the burden of the day and the heats, and at the end of it found themselves on exactly the same footing as the casual laborers who had been raked in from the marketplace at the last moment.
Well, that opens up rather a large subject. You see, it isn’t true that Protestants are exempt from the law of God, from the Ten Commandments for instance; and it isn’t true that Protestants can be invincibly ignorant, to a full extent, of what God’s law requires of them. Their consciences are doubtless confused; but don’t be too ready to believe them when they say they see no harm in doing this or that which you know to be wrong. There’s a great deal of self-deception going about, when people say they “see no harm” in doing something they very much want to; it’s not invincible ignorance when a man puts blinkers on his conscience. We are not to judge our Protestant friends in such cases; judgment lies with Almighty God, to whom each soul is responsible. But you mustn’t think it true for a moment, or allow other people to think it true for a moment, that there is one Divine Law for Catholics and another for Protestants. However, that takes us away from our subject. Let us admit that where the law of the Church is concerned you are bound and your Protestant friends are not. They can do certain things which you can’t do; they can eat a mutton-chop on a Friday, they can be Freemasons, they can get married in a registry office, they can leave directions in their wills to say they want to be cremated, and so on. From all these riotous pleasures you are excluded. And you want to know whether it isn’t bad luck you should be excluded when they aren’t. Or, putting the thing in a rather more altruistic way, why (you ask) should we bother to convert Protestants? Since they are in good faith, wouldn’t it be better to leave them in good faith, and let them get to heaven in their own way, mutton-chops and all?
The immediate answer to that difficulty is this – that although we ought always to hope, for the sake of charity, that this or that Protestant is in good faith, we can’t be sure that he is in good faith, nor, for that matter, can he. Therefore we should always encourage the conversion of a Protestant, if only for safety’s sake. But, you know, even if you could be certain that some friend of yours was in good faith, and was on the whole a clean-living sort of person, so that there was no great reason to worry about him, it isn’t true to say that you and he enjoy exactly the same supernatural advantages. First, you have the certainty of faith; you are spared the anxious uncertainties which often assail him; he’s not certain whether there is a future life, whether his life’s worth living, whether anything you do or say really matters much – from these doubts you are set free. Second, you have access, where he has no access, to sacramental grace; he can win forgiveness for his sins (for example) only by an act of perfect contrition, and who can be certain that he is making an act of perfect contrition? Whereas for you attrition suffices, as long as you make use of the sacrament of penance. Third, you have the merits of the Church at your disposal; you can go out to
As a matter of fact, even if there were no heaven and no hell, it would still be our duty to try and convert heretics, even those who are only in material heresy, for a different reason – that truth is truth, and has a right to be told. Spiritual truth, which is the highest of all, is something we must necessarily want to impart to other people if we possess it ourselves. I don’t mean by that that I want you to go straight back to your College and try and convert the two people you are sitting next to in Hall. Indiscriminate attempts to convert other people mean, at the best, that you give people a dislike for Catholicism; at the worst, that you shake what faith they have in Christianity altogether, so that the last state of them is worse than the first. No, your duty is to defend the faith to the best of your power where you can see it is being misrepresented, and to help your friends when they begin to take an interest in the Catholic religion, by lending them books, by introducing them to a priest, or in some similar way.
There’s one other point. If you are asked, “What is the exact meaning of the maxim, No salvation outside the Catholic Church,” what are you to say about it? The simplest way to put it, I think, is this – there is no other religious body in the world except the Catholic Church which makes a supernatural contribution to a man’s chances of salvation. He may receive natural help from some other source; his conscience may be stirred by the preaching of the Salvation Army, or he may learn a useful habit of mental prayer from the Buchmanites, or his sense of worship may be stimulated by the beauty of the ceremonies which he witnesses at the Church of the Cowley Fathers. But there’s only one religious body whose membership, of itself, tends to procure our salvation, and that is the Catholic Church. If anybody is saved without visible membership of it he is saved, not because he’s an Anglican, not because he’s a Methodist, not because he’s a Quaker, but for one reason only – because he is a Catholic without knowing it.
In Soft Garments Ronald Knox, 1942 Sheed & Ward