Catholic Info
Traditional Catholic Faith => Catholic Living in the Modern World => Topic started by: SanskritCrayon on February 08, 2026, 05:55:30 PM
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MODERATED
No double-posting!
You made this post in another sub-forum already.
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(...)They said that “only the religion found in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Burma, and Siam (Thailand) deserve to be identified with the original order founded by Buddha, and number at most 30 million souls.” Which is to say, at the very most, only 30 million souls today have the chance of being saved, and it is practically certain that not all of those would be saved.(...)
Regardless of the imaginary merits of Buddhism, no one can be saved without baptism and faith in Our Lord. According to traditional Christian doctrine, human beings are sinners separated from a holy God on account of both original sin and personal sins. Since no one can possibly attain Heaven by his mere efforts unaided by grace, God decided to rescue mankind from its fallen predicament. Taking the initiative, he became a human being and lived among us in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. In the inspired words of St. Peter, God "has made this Jesus whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah" (Acts 2:36). In God’s eternal plan, faith in Christ is the means by which people are redeemed from their sins, ushered into the kingdom of God, and turned into candidates for heaven. In the economy of salvation nothing can replace this faith: neither the good deeds people perform during their lifetime; nor the general and vague belief they hold about God’s existence and providence; nor the good and positive attitude that some display in the course of their existence. St. Augustine expressed this view in a poignant passage:
Every man is separated from God, except those who are reconciled to God through Christ the Mediator. No one can be separated from God, except by sins, which alone cause separation. There is, therefore, no reconciliation except by the remission of sins, through the one grace of the most merciful Savior, through the one sacrifice of the most venerable Priest. None, who are born of the woman, that trusted the serpent and so was corrupted through desire, are delivered from the body of this death, except by the Son of the virgin who believed the angel and so conceived without desire. (De peccatorum meritis et remissione, I, 28, 56.)
This doctrine raises the question of the eschatological destiny of people who lived before Christ's time, as well as of those who lived after His time but never had the chance of hearing the gospel preached; will they be excluded from the population of Heaven? Likewise, will the virtuous and good pagans be saved from eternal damnation? Before the insidious development of the idea of implicit faith that found its logical conclusion in Vatican II and Rahner's "anonymous Christian", the traditional Catholic answer to these questions has always been that anyone who died without an explicit faith in Jesus Christ and the precious aid of the sacraments of Holy Mother Church was lost.
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This is a duplicate topic. The OP posted this same topic starter in another sub-forum.
I'm locking this thread.
https://www.cathinfo.com/members-only/what-have-traditional-catholic-writers-said-about-buddhist-philosophy/