It is psychologically quite intelligible that the adherents of non-Catholic communions should be grieved by the Church’s dogmatic intolerance and disposed to regard it as the manifestation of a spirit which is foreign and even hostile to the spirit of Jesus, a spirit of uncharitableness and harsh severity. When the critic speaks of the Church’s “fearful exclusiveness and intolerance”[2] he forgets that truth must always be “fearfully exclusive and intolerant.” In the very same book he asserts that “a straight road leads from belief in Jesus regarded as the sole means of salvation to belief in the exclusive claim of the Church,”[3] which means that if we believe that Christ is the only name in heaven and on earth whereby we may be saved, we must believe also that true salvation is to be found only in the one Church which He founded. The one Christ and the one Body of Christ belong indissolubly together. He who rejects the one true Church is all too easily brought, as by an inexorable logic, to go astray also about Christ. As a matter of fact the history of revolt from the Church is at the same time a history of the progressive decomposition of the primitive faith in Christ.

So the truth stands fast, rigid and inexorable in its compact solidity, that there is but one Christ and but one justifying Church of Christ. But, we may ask, does that mean that all heretics and non-Catholics are destined to hell?

If we would interpret correctly the Catholic doctrine that there is no salvation outside the Church, that is to say if we would understand it as the Church would have it understood, we should grasp its history and its connection with the rest of her teaching. For no Catholic doctrine is an isolated mass of thought, but has on the contrary its proper place and meaning in the whole unitary system and cannot be fully appreciated except through this whole system.