Salvation Outside the Church?

If the Church were a business it would look like it needed to hire a new advertisement specialist.  At first glance it would seem that there is a grave and disastrous error in the internal logic of Catholic teaching concerning the Salvation of the soul.  On the one hand the Church claims that it alone is the path towards eternal life, summed so well in the mantra “no salvation outside the Church!”  On the other hand, each individual’s internal memory of the foundational principles of the moral law is taught to be paramount, that we all have the decided responsibility to follow our own conscience and to will the good that our conscience obliges us to move towards.  It would seem that the Church simultaneously calls for everyone to both adhere to the formal teachings and practices of the Faith while also requiring them to on the most foundational level from the inner movements of their heart see that the Catholic Faith is the correct Faith.  As I am fond of saying, you cannot legislate someone be a good person, only that they do good things.  How does the Church reconcile this?  The work of the Holy Spirit within the Church.

The Holy Spirit’s primary interaction with man is at the very level of man’s personhood: a beckoning and whispering to him, reminding him of that which is already in his heart and which is the very defining point of man’s personhood: the dictates of conscience to observe the precepts of the natural law.  On the very basic level this is articulated as “do good and avoid evil”.  The Holy Spirit’s workings within the world is to convince the world of its sin; He does this by constantly beckoning in the recesses of man’s heart so that even someone who does not hear the Gospel might still desire that relationship with Him.  It has been speculated that for these “anonymous Christians”, the Holy Spirit may even allow them an explicit chance for assent to the truths of the Trinity and the work of Salvation at the very point of their death, but an examination of this is beyond the scope of this paper.

Christ is the new Adam, and just as the world inherited the effects of Original Sin (without inheriting the sin itself), the world likewise inherited the effects of the Salvation on the cross, though without necessarily partaking specifically in that Salvation as of yet.  This would be an inheritance at the level of the conscience, an orientation and inclination towards accepting the work of Salvation and not merely worship of God as it was in the Old Testament.  In this we can see that there is no internal contradiction in the teaching of the Church: Christ came so that the whole world might be saved; the world is saved by the workings of the Holy Spirit who speaks to the very heart of man and convinces him of his sin and thereby he may repent of it.  The Salvation of man was orchestrated within the context of and is preserved, made ever present in the now by the workings of the Church through the administration of the Sacraments.  The invincibly ignorant within the world, by either never having heard the Gospel or by hearing the Gospel in such a way that it would be itself unreasonable to believe it participate in the salvation offered through the Church by being a “law unto themselves”, by acting in accord to the working of the Holy Spirit in their own mind and cultivating that memory of the Good which is upon their hearts.