Now there is no doubt, that if her catholicity gives the Church a world-wide and comprehensive character, her claim to be the only source of salvation turns her in upon herself and makes her aloof and exclusive. In contrast to her unlimited devotion to all values wherever they may be found, is her equally strong and unlimited assertion of and insistence on her own claims. The one is a necessary counterpoise to the other. Without her rigid and deliberate self-assertion, and without her immense concentration on herself, the catholicity of the Church, in its acceptance of all humanity, of the whole world and its values, would bring her dangerously near to a gradual decomposition of her true supernatural being, and induce a fusion of her essence with alien elements, that is to say syncretism. For the very reason that the Church, with the same vigor and momentum with which she devotes herself to the world, remembers her supernatural origin, her essential connection with Christ, and her exclusive possession of the power of salvation, she maintains the supernatural substance of her gospel and so preserves her capacity to elevate all the natural values which she takes over from the world into supernatural values, to permeate them with Christ and to uplift them to God. If her catholicity is a centrifugal force, then this exclusiveness of hers is a centripetal force. And the secret of her remaining true to herself in her fullness is that these two forces are maintained in exact equipoise, so that she is at once catholic and exclusive.

So there is no doubt about this matter. There is only one answer to the question whether other Christian communions have not also a vocation and a power to save men, and the Church is quite intolerant about it. For the very reason that these communions have set themselves up against the original unity of the brethren in faith and love, they appear to the Catholic consciousness as institutions which have not arisen out of the spirit of Jesus, and therefore as purely human and even anti-Christian creations. The Church cannot but anathematize them and she will continue to do so until the Lord comes.