I didn’t really know about this until I saw it in black and white the other day.
According to Vatican II, salvation is available for all, ‘not just to schismatics, heretics and Jews, but to non-Christians too and even to atheists if they are in good faith’ (Hans Küng, The Church [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Image Books, 1976], p.406). Of course the fullness of salvation is only found in the RC church.
Wow – that seems quite new to me. Though as Stamoolis points out, ‘nice’ though it may be, it still retains the smack of Western individualism so deplored by the Orthodox and their ecclesiology. I.e. it's still just about you and God in the final analysis, not about God and the church.
Interesting... I wonder what counts as an atheist in bad faith. (Isn't atheism the very definition of a 'bad faith'?!)
