The notions that the council somehow contravened long-standing concepts of the need for salvation, the requirements for salvation or the authority of the Church and its hierarchy — all said to follow from the “spirit of Vatican II,” if not directly from its documents — in fact contradict the clear language of those documents, he said.
“We need to be about understanding this spirit, so-called, versus what the council actually taught,” Bishop Sample told the approximately 400 people attending the Call to Holiness conference, held this year at Immaculate Conception Ukrainian School in Warren.
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The bishop, whose diocese includes all of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, relied primarily on the Vatican II document “Lumen Gentium” (“Light of the Nations”).
Noting that “Lumen Gentium” is subtitled “The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church.” Bishop Sample said the document did not intend to define new dogma, nor change the doctrines of the Church, but rather
was about “reiterating existing doctrine.”
So, it wasn’t a case of the Church teaching something new, he said, though there was an effort to restate what the Church had always been taught with modern audiences in mind and with increased emphasis on certain aspects that had become of greater interest or concern.
Bishop Sample characterized each of the misconceptions as “false spirits,” and began by addressing the notion “that is doesn’t really matter if you’re Catholic or not in order to be saved.”
He said the misconception cannot be deduced from council documents and had led to the spread of indifferentism when it came to the validity of contending religious beliefs. But “Lumen Gentium,” Bishop Sample pointed out, says that the “sole Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church.”
But he said each of the misconceptions contains “a grain of truth,” and in this case it was the document’s statement that “many elements of sanctification and of truth are found outside its visible structure.”
Nevertheless, the bishop continued, this acknowledgement that some other religions or Christian ecclesial communities hold some beliefs that are true — and, therefore, have some things in common with the Catholic Church — in no way undermines what the document also says about the Church being in full possession of the truth.
And while there is mention of the possibility that might allow for the salvation of a person who had never accepted the Gospel, the document also spells out the fairly narrow scope of those conditions. For example, the person’s failure to have embraced Christ and His Church must have come about through no fault of that person’s own, the bishop said.
Furthermore, there is no question, Bishop Sample continued, that — even under such conditions — it is only through Christ that any person is saved.
In similar fashion, Bishop Sample went on to refute such other “false spirits” — a lessening of the authority of the pope and bishops, the effacing of the meaning of clerical status, the possibility of a “cafeteria Catholicism,” or a downplaying of devotion to the Blessed Mother — by a similar process of looking at the actual text of the council’s documents.
That the Second Vatican Council was intended as a continuation of, not a departure from, long-established Church teaching is shown by referring to the footnotes, which constantly reference the Council of Trent and the First Vatican Council, he said.
“There is a need to get back to what the council taught, what it actually taught,” Bishop Sample said.
