Elizabeth writes: Dear Father, Some time ago I was upset when a priest told me that it says in the Catechism that if you don’t pray you won’t be saved Was he right in this? Fr Bernard McGuckian replies.
Strange as it may seem, he was pretty accurate in what he said. He probably had in mind a quotation from the Catechism of the Catholic Church, published during the lifetime of Pope John Paul II and attributed to Saint Alphonsus Liguori, founder of the Redemptorists. The exact quotation in the English version is: ‘Those who pray are certainly saved; those who do not pray are certainly dammed’ (CCC 2744).
I first heard this statement as a thirteen-year-old boarder in the chapel at St. Malachy’s College, Belfast during a school retreat. It certainly made me sit up when I first heard it. To make sure that we had heard exactly what he had said, the Retreat Director repeated it and told us to take out our pens and write it on the fly-leaf of our missals. He assured us that none of us would get into trouble for defacing our prayer-books. It was only years later that I discovered that the quotation was from the Founder of his own Congregation and a Doctor of the Church.
If this startling assertion is true, then the big question arises: What is prayer? It has to be something other than taking part in Church services or reciting the Our Father or the Hail Mary. The vast majority of human beings have never even seen a church building, not to speak of learning off any prayers by heart. Given this, it would be unfair if their eternal salvation depended on such things.
Prayer has to be something as basic to human existence as breathing, the first thing all of us do on coming into this world, without ever having been taught how. In breathing, the newborn child is effectively saying ‘Yes’ to life. Those who breathe, live; those who don’t, die.
One image of salvation that runs through the Bible from Genesis to the Apocalypse is the offer of marriage by the Bridegroom. He is hoping for a positive response from the Bride who is free to accept or reject the offer. If she accepts the offer she will certainly be married. However, if she rejects it, she will certainly not be married. Without her ‘Yes’ there can be no marriage. Just as no Bride can be married against her will so none of us can be saved against our will.
In this understanding of the Scriptures, God is the Tremendous Lover who is continually ‘popping the question’. All through life each of us is faced with the choice of
accepting or rejecting this offer of Himself. The moment of full truth finally comes at the end of life when the time of ‘courtship’, the time for ‘maybe’ is over.
In the thinking of St. Paul, it is never too soon to indicate our acceptance of this offer God is continually making to us. We don’t have to wait until death to confirm it. ‘Do you think… that I have in my mind Yes, yes at the same time as No, no. As surely as God is trustworthy what we say to you is not both Yes and No. The Son of God, Jesus Christ who was proclaimed to you by us… was never Yes-and-No; his nature is all Yes. For in him is found the Yes to all God’s promises’ (2 Cor 19-20).
Prayer, in essence, is a ‘Yes’ to God’s offer of salvation. Each of us has to utter our own personal ‘Yes’ of acceptance during our time in this world. This is surely one of those mysterious things described by St. Paul as ‘hidden with Christ in God’ (Col.3:3). No one else can do this for us. How, when or where this takes place varies from person to person. However, it is something that has to be done in this life while there is time. After death, for us, there is no more time. It was this belief that prompted the great saints to make of every act of their whole lives a prayerful ‘Yes’ to God.
To describe those countless human beings of good will who have never even heard the name of Jesus, the late Karl Rahner (1904-1984), the Jesuit theologian, is credited with using the term Anonymous Christians. He was trying to come to terms with the truth that, ‘God wants all men and women to be saved’ (1 Tim 2:4), and the obvious fact that countless millions have never been baptized nor even heard of Jesus whose name mean literally God saves.
Perhaps if we realize that the word Christian simply means anointed, it is not too difficult to think of them as the ‘anonymously anointed’. They too, like all of us, have been anointed, touched by the Eternal Word, ‘the real light that gives light to everyone’ (Jn 1:9). But they too, are called to prayer, to say their ‘Yes’ to their Creator’s offer according to the light they have received. St. Augustine’s reflection applies to them as well as to us: ‘God made us without us. He will not save us without us.’
Those of us who have been given the light of Christian faith in Baptism and initiated into all its wonderful and consoling practices since childhood, have got off to a flying start. This should be reflected in the way we run the race. It only seems fair that from those to whom much has been given much will be expected. Noblesse oblige.
This article first appeared in The Messenger (October 2008), a publication of the Irish Jesuits.
