The universality of salvation : Christianity, Judaism, and other religions in Dante, Nostra Aetate, and the New Catechism

The universality of salvation through Christ Jesus is clearly proclaimed in the Second Testament, but that proclamation has taken various forms. During the first millennium of the church's history the idea that there were vast numbers of people unfamiliar with the gospel hardly penetrated Christian consciousness. In the twelfth century the idea of the baptism of desire was used in a few official church documents, but in the early fourteenth century the poet Dante still understood that most people who never heard the gospel were excluded from paradise. The situation has changed tremendously in the modern period, in ways adumbrated in the Roman Catechism (1566) prepared after the Council of Trent. A high point of the new understanding is the Vatican II text Nostra aetate (1965), which insists that the Catholic Church rejects nothing of what is true and holy in other religions. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992) reflects the most important advances of Nostra aetate, but in a niggardly and reluctant way.