The salvation of Emeth sometimes causes consternation for evangelical Protestants who see in it a weakening of the claim to a unique salvation through Christianity. But the vision of Lewis is perhaps closer to that of evangelicals than that of Pope Francis, who caused controversy with his remarks in Singapore last week:

All religions are a path to reach God. They are — I make a comparison — like different languages, different idioms, to get there. But God is God for everyone. And since God is God for everyone, we are all children of God. ‘But my God is more important than yours!’ Is this true? There is only one God, and our religions are languages, paths to reach God. Some are Sikh, some are Muslim, some are Hindu, some are Christian, but they are different paths.

Unsurprisingly, the pope’s remarks have drawn criticism, but what he said is not substantially different from things said by his immediate predecessors. Pope St. John Paul II was often criticized for his participation in interfaith prayer and dialogue. He said at a general audience in 1998 that other religions are “different routes” that attempt to answer the same human desire for communion with God.

“It must first be kept in mind that every quest of the human spirit for truth and goodness, and in the last analysis for God, is inspired by the Holy Spirit,” he said. “The various religions arose precisely from this primordial human openness to God.”

Pope Benedict XVI understood other religions in a similar manner. In Truth and Tolerance, he wrote: “Salvation does not lie in religions as such, but it is connected to them, in as much as, and to the extent that, they lead men toward the one good, toward the search for God, for truth, for love.”

So that’s it, all religions are basically the same. We can all just slap a Coexist bumper sticker on our cars and be done with it. Right? Not quite.

Catholic teaching about other religions is different from that of many Protestants, but that does not mean it is relativistic. The Second Vatican Council taught that “Christ, present to us in his Body, which is the Church, is the one Mediator and the unique way of salvation.” In this, Catholic teaching not only reflects the teaching of Jesus, but also the teaching of the early Church Fathers, particularly St. Cyprian of Carthage, that extra ecclesiam nulla salus (there is no salvation outside of the Church).

Nevertheless, the council also spoke approvingly of most other religions, regarding them as natural developments in the history of human beings seeking union with God. In the document Nostra aetate, the council specifically referenced Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam for the elements of truth within them: “The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men.”

This may seem contradictory on the surface, but only if we think of religion as a kind of institutional branding rather than a natural phenomenon. All religions seek not only the truth of our existence but also relief from the problems of the human condition. They are means of reaching up and out as the human spirit seeks to move beyond itself, and any authentic reaching towards the divine is met by the Holy Spirit, who responds to our prayers — who is, in fact, the catalyst for those prayers in the first place.

Still, while most of the world’s religions reflect an authentic reaching out and seeking of God, in Christianity we encounter the opposite: a movement of God in our direction. Jesus says in John 14:6, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” This is neither him passing judgment on the religions of the world nor his proposing of a new, better religion to replace them. In the Incarnation, God has come to be with us, seeking us out so that he might give himself to us and save us from the results of our narrow-minded, self-destructive attitudes and behaviors. Jesus answers the natural longing of the human heart not with a proposition but with a personal encounter. Jesus is the end of religion, the fulfillment of all that human religion longs for and imperfectly grasps after.

Recognizing that all religions are paths towards God is not the same as saying that all religious teaching is of equal value. Nor does it deny in any way the necessity of Christians to evangelize. On the contrary, this recognition makes the need to share the good news that much more apparent. There is a great deal that we Christians can learn from interfaith dialogue, including — as Pope Francis implies — a different language for describing the common challenges of humanity, new approaches to prayer and contemplation, and even ways of breaking out of the institutional malaise that has crept in across the Christian denominational spectrum. But what we Christians can contribute to that dialogue is continuously to point away from ourselves and to Jesus.

The reason there is no salvation outside of the Church is not because the Church is the best religion, or the one that is the most right, but because the Church is not a religion at all. The Church is the body of Christ, through which the God our hearts long for comes to us and unites himself with us. The Catholic Church is what salvation looks like. Therefore, any sincere expression of the heart’s longing for the divine is in some way a movement in the direction of the Church.

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware expresses this in his landmark work The Orthodox Church: “We know where the Church is but we cannot be sure where it is not.” In the sacraments of the Church, Jesus claims us, uniting us to his life, death, and resurrection. This is the sure path. But God’s love for us is great, despite our divisions and self-righteousness. We cannot say that a person who walks a different path that is consonant with the truth of Christ will not eventually come to the same fount of love and truth.

Did Pope Francis have all this in mind? I have no clairvoyance that would tell me. His words resemble those of past popes, but his predecessors were often quick to add the context I have mentioned, whereas Pope Francis seems content to let that be implied. Some people may see that as a fudge, a kind of special pleading on the pope’s behalf, but it is nothing of the sort.

The Catholic way of receiving any kind of teaching, particularly from the pope, is to read it through the lens of the tradition from which it came, not to excise it into a sound bite and then make assumptions about it. And in the case of Pope Francis, it helps that part of that tradition includes his magisterial teaching that has repeatedly asserted the uniqueness of Christ for salvation.

For example, at a general audience in 2021, the pope said:

[Jesus] is the only Redeemer: there are no co-redeemers with Christ. He is the only one. He is the Mediator par excellence. He is the Mediator. Each prayer we raise to God is through Christ, with Christ, and in Christ and it is fulfilled thanks to his intercession. The Holy Spirit extends Christ’s mediation through every time and every place: there is no other name by which we can be saved: Jesus Christ, the only Mediator between God and humanity (see Acts 4:12).

Unless we think the Holy Father has forgotten all that he has said and believed on the subject, it seems logical to assume that these ideas should be understood together.

All who are saved will be saved by Jesus Christ, in and through his Church, but many who practice other religions may not know it. Like Emeth, their faithful following of their religion has been leading them in the direction of the true God all along without them realizing it. But unlike in Lewis’s view, in which this happens almost by accident, despite the evil of other religions, in the Catholic view this happens because the seeds of truth are already there in other religions. A good Hindu, or a good Buddhist, or a good Muslim — they do not need to become Christians because the Christians are right and their religion is wrong, but the ones who hear the good news and become Christians will do so precisely because the good things they found in their religions have compelled them to see that only in Christ is all they have ever longed for fulfilled.

To mark the occasion, I’ve pulled up a couple Covenant classics on the Blessed Virgin for your edification. The first is from Covenant‘s new editor, who is stepping into the role this week.

He has her eyes

The second considers the weird, wild, and wonderful character of embodiment.

Our bodies are magic

In 2015, my wife and I were struggling to raise our two young sons to know Jesus Christ. Our children are autistic, mostly non-verbal, and diagnosed with intellectual disability. One of the big challenges this presents is how to participate in worship. They are not capable of sitting still for a long time, and they make a lot of noise. We tried worshiping at numerous places unsuccessfully.

Then one Sunday, at the suggestion of a friend, we attended a special “Inclusion Mass” at St. John Chrysostom Catholic Church in Wallingford, Pennsylvania. The experience was night-and-day different from other churches we had been to, or those we would visit later. From the moment we walked in the door, everyone we encountered greeted us with warmth and sensitivity. People with various disabilities were involved in the service as lectors, cantors, and ushers. When my kids needed to get up and move, they could do that. When they made noise, no one turned and stared, or shushed them, or shamed us for not controlling them. While this was a special event, the pastor later told me that the parish tries to maintain this level of inclusion at all its Masses. I left wondering why this was not happening in every church.

Armand Léon van Ommen thinks it should be happening in every church, and his book Autism and Worship offers a theological explanation of why. He believes that because autistic people are made in the image and likeness of God, the church should minister to them, and she is impoverished when they are not a part of her life.

The problem, van Ommen believes, is what he alternatively refers to as the tyranny, hegemony, and even cult of normalcy: “It is important to note that normalcy works by the dynamics of the economy of exchange by which we ascribe value to, and buy value from, each other. These dynamics emerge from deeply embodied frameworks that determine what is taken as the ‘good’ for life and for belonging.”

Communities determine what is normal as a way of regulating what it means to be a part of the community. This is often done in unnoticed and unofficial ways. No one, for instance, has ever approached me in a church and said that my son’s rocking back and forth is inappropriate, or that he should be operating at a certain intellectual capacity to stay in the room because otherwise things like the sermon and the reading of Scripture really are not meant for him. Nevertheless, we hear the message loud and clear from the reactions people offer to his presence, or even from the space, which is not conducive to the needs of people with special sensitivities to light, sound, and touch, as is true for many autistic people.

Van Ommen believes this tyranny of normalcy operates in the background of church life because “The assumption is that whatever is normal is good and whatever deviates too much from it is bad. … Human beings will always hope to belong and therefore try to fit themselves within the boundaries of what is deemed normal. In this way, the hegemony of normalcy becomes oppressive; it becomes tyrannical.” When churches perceive autistic people as needing to be either corrected or simply tolerated, their dignity is diminished.

The whole experience of worship can be brutalizing for autistic people. They may become overwhelmed by too many people interacting with them, not being able to follow a confusing or illogical order of service, or not being able to pick up on subtle social clues about acceptable behavior, in addition to their sensitivities. These things are not mere preferences, but part of the way autistic people process information and experience the world.

Van Ommen thinks what is needed is a ministry of presence in which autistic people are encountered and valued for who they are. “The autistic people in our churches are present,” he says, “and they require non-autistic people to be present to them. Presence is not an act of charity but a relationship of belonging to each other, by which we are changed and through which ‘we become more than we were before.’”

Van Ommen gives us a working picture of what that might look like with an extended description of the Chapel of Christ Our Hope. Founded in Singapore in 2012, the chapel is an Anglican parish that exists for the express purpose of being a community of welcome and belonging for autistic people and their families. Everything about the chapel is geared toward including autistic people, from the room’s simple design, to the lighting and sound choices, to the weekly lunch that provides for community-building.

Many of the parishioners felt like they could never participate in weekly worship until they found the chapel. Yet remarkably, the liturgy is not significantly different from what might be found in other Anglican parishes. This mirrors the experience my family had at St. John Chrysostom, where the liturgy was the same as in any Catholic church. “The answer to the question of how the lens of autism might reframe liturgical theology and the practice of worship apparently lies not at the level of the ordo of the liturgy, nor in liturgical or ritual actions,” Van Ommen writes. “This finding is worth highlighting in itself: it does not take a different liturgy to worship as autistic and non-autistic people together.”

Autism and Worship introduces an important topic, but there are some deficiencies in van Ommen’s approach, some of which he freely admits. First of all, though he is co-director of the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen, he is not autistic. Van Ommen tries to make up for this by including a large number of autistic voices in his research, telling their stories as best he can, while acknowledging that he is an imperfect spokesman.

Yet not all autistic people are capable of telling their own stories. Van Ommen spends more than half of the book exploring the thorny topic of what autism is and how it relates to the concept of “disability” in general. Van Ommen offers a sensitive portrayal of this discussion’s history, including how autistic people differ over whether to be referred to as autistic or having autism, disabled or simply not neurotypical.

Ultimately, van Ommen comes down on the side of those who advocate for “neurodiversity,” arguing that the language of disability is not appropriate, that autism represents a different way of seeing the world and not a problem to be overcome, and that the primary lens through which we should see autism should not be medical.

I do not disagree with him on this. Autistic people have a great deal to contribute to the world, and their voices need to be heard. Except my boys’ story does not get told if I do not tell it. They cannot tell it themselves. My children are routinely forgotten, not just by the wider society but also by those involved in autism advocacy. Van Ommen notes, for instance, that surveys documenting the preferences of autistic people “often can (or do) include only certain people within the autism community—that is, those who are able to read and write. This excludes a significant portion of those in the autism community.” Yet van Ommen believes that these surveys should still be normative, and that “more research that is participatory is needed.”

Likewise, van Ommen dismisses the use of language about “autism spectrum disorder,” and particularly terms like “high functioning” and “low functioning” because “such a scale from ‘low’ to ‘high’ might have the connotation that people on the ‘high’ end are ‘almost normal’—that is, non-autistic.” This is a fair point, yet it also renders it impossible to describe the situation of my children in any meaningful way.Simply saying that they are autistic is not enough to express the profound nature of their challenges. In fact, it has the opposite effect, folding them into a classification in which what is “normal” is a different expression of autism that — for lack of any better language to describe it — is often called “high functioning.”

Elsewhere, van Ommen admits that “there remains a question as to what extent the neurodiversity movement can speak conclusively for those with high support needs,” but he immediately qualifies this question away by saying “a generous view of the neurodiversity movement has played an important part in highlighting the needs and the gifts of that group too.” He notes that a tension has emerged between some adults within the autism community who champion neurodiversity and parents of autistic children, but he does not recognize that one of the primary causes of that tension is precisely this inability to distinguish between different experiences of autism.

There is a famous saying in the autism community: if you have met one autistic person, you have met one autistic person. The experience of autism is very broad, and each individual’s needs and abilities are unique. Some autistic people are capable of doing incredible things in science, medicine, art, politics, and even in theology and ministry. There are also people like my sons who need help with basic tasks like going to the bathroom and brushing their teeth.

All of these are people made in God’s image and deserve dignity and respect. Until a new way of talking about the differences is found, though, autistic people who are like my sons are at a high risk of being erased from the conversation. The Church has a responsibility to address the needs of all autistic people, no matter how autism manifests in their lives. Van Ommen’s book runs the risk of unintentionally reinforcing the tyranny of normalcy in a different way by not recognizing the importance of these distinctions.

Still, even with the book’s limitations, it is an important and necessary step in the right direction. The church has failed autistic people in many ways, particularly when it comes to worship. The body of Christ needs all its members to be fully integrated, and for most churches that means that a new way of thinking must emerge. Autistic people should not have to fight for a special opportunity to belong within the church. It is incumbent upon all Christians, but especially those of us who are not autistic, to open our eyes and see those in our midst whom we have not previously recognized because of the gauze of normalcy that has blinded us.

I have always found that to be a good line. But is it true? After all, whether he’s aligned with a party or not, it is not exactly hard to figure out which end of the political spectrum West comes from. It is also not hard to find other Christian leaders whose attempts to be faithful have led them to embrace the opposite form of politics.

My friend Bishop Dan Martins recently wrote about his reticence at seeing the General Convention of the Episcopal Church take up explicitly political matters, even when such things are framed as an inevitable outgrowth of the gospel’s call for justice. He says, “The missing component, it seems to me, the absence of which keeps these arguments from being airtight, is a failure to delineate between private behavior, which is voluntary, and public behavior, which, under any form of government, including democracy, is coercive.” Spending money and resources to aid the poor is a Christian imperative, but we live in a pluralistic society. It is not fair to ask atheists or followers of some other religion to give their tax dollars for the sake of meeting a Christian moral commitment.

I appreciate the point the bishop is making, but I think his reflection leads us to consider a more fundamental problem. The great divide is not between Christians who think we should help the poor and Christians who do not, nor is it between “traditional” and “progressive” understandings of Christian values. The real division lies in our understanding of what a government is.

John Locke saw government as a compromise, existing to secure health and property for its citizens but not capable of much more. Edmund Burke, on the other hand, believed that government existed for the sake of leading people to a more virtuous life. His 20th-century disciple, the conservative thinker Russell Kirk, put it this way: “Real progress consists in the movement of mankind toward the understanding of norms, and toward conformity to norms. Real decadence consists in the movement of mankind away from the understanding of norms, and away from obedience to norms.” Living as we do in a moment in which norms are constantly under fire or on fire, it is hard to imagine a view of government more antithetical to modern American sentiment.

The view of government held by Burke and Kirk is more common historically, though. In most places and times, government has not been understood primarily as a means of securing the health and wealth of its citizens so that they may do whatever they please. America, however, is a liberal society, in the philosophical sense. Regardless of where a modern American stands on the left/right political spectrum, just about everyone is a Lockean at heart. Government has no role in making us better people — in fact, to suggest such a thing is almost a kind of blasphemy — but it has every responsibility to make our lives better. Whether that means libertarianism for the sake of maximizing individual liberty and autonomy, or collectivism that creates social and economic equality through an expanding list of government projects, the understanding of government’s purpose remains the same.

There is a long history of Christian thought on all of this, particularly from Augustine onward, but it is beyond the scope of this short article and my meager knowledge to try to summarize it all. Nevertheless, even a cursory reading of Scripture reveals certain points. First, God is the ultimate source of government. Whether it be the judges and kings of Israel, or even foreign conquerors like Cyrus the Persian or Rome, “there is no authority except that which God has established” (Romans 13:1).

Second, despite the previous point, not all government is good. When rulers push for things that are contrary to the Word of God, Christians must resist because “we must obey God rather than man” (Acts 5:29).

Third, though government is established by God, it is not synonymous with the kingdom of God. Jesus refuses all efforts to draw him into a struggle for power because his kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36).

Finally, Scripture talks repeatedly about the function of government being for the good of the governed. This includes things like punishing the wicked and praising the good (see, for example, 1 Pet. 2:13-17).

When it comes to whether churches today ought to wade into political matters, this last point is the most salient. The Bible does not outline for us the perfect political system, but it insists that government has a noble purpose: to promote and protect what Catholic social teaching refers to as the common good. Those who govern have a responsibility to see to it not merely that the citizens are fed, but that the citizens understand that feeding their neighbors is a good thing, while withholding food you could give to them is a bad thing. This responsibility is no less important when the government is pagan as when it is Christian. It is discovered in the natural law as apparently as in revelation.

I am not concerned about the state asking me or even my fellow citizens who are not Christian to do something that is for the common good. If that is coercive, so be it. I am, however, deeply concerned about the Church becoming just another agent of partisan politics, accepting from the state the grounds upon which the common good is to be established rather than allowing the gospel to set the terms.

The idea of a liberal state in which the Church is only one voice among many that may influence public policy is not going to change anytime soon. It is incumbent upon the Church, therefore, to act as a kind of conscience for the state, reminding secular leaders of their responsibility to lead people to what is right and good, regardless of whether it is popular. This is a tall order in contemporary American life, not only because our trust in government institutions is at an all-time low, but because Christians are themselves deeply divided about what constitutes the common good.

While Christian leaders should speak in a moral register that is above the fray of partisan politics, far too often the tail wags the dog. The problem is not that a particular church seems to favor the moral convictions of one party over the other, but that the origination point of those convictions is the secular culture that we live in rather than the calling of our Lord. Far too often, statements by American church bodies that are meant to “speak truth to power” read like they were written by the political parties themselves, with some religious language added as a varnish after the fact.

If as Christians we want to influence the state to act in positive ways — and I believe we should — then we must recover our moral credibility. While this will sometimes mean taking tough, unpopular stands and taking our lumps as a result, it primarily means that we must live out our faith consistently and humbly, while seeking to end the scandal of ecclesial division that plagues us. If we are to be the conscience of our nation, we need to ensure that we are well-formed, allowing the voice of God to speak through us clearly and without hindrance. We need to rid ourselves of the language of secular politics and build from the ground up a gospel-oriented politics. This will not be an easy task, but our duty as Christians demands it.

Infertility is a heavy burden for couples to bear, and any discussion of this subject ought to recognize that struggle. Not being able to have children can be devastating. But Governor Abbott is wrong about IVF being a way of giving life to more babies. Roughly half of IVF treatments fail, resulting in the deaths of the implanted embryos. Even when there is a success, it often comes at the price of several embryos being implanted at the same time, with the less promising prospects being either miscarried or aborted. And of course, most of the embryos are not implanted at all but frozen and eventually destroyed. IVF kills far more babies than it brings to term.

The Catholic Church has consistently condemned IVF as immoral, both because of the loss of life and because of the way in which it disconnects the creation of children from intimacy between a husband and wife. In the 1987 document Donum vitae, the then Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said, “From the moment of conception, the life of every human being is to be respected in an absolute way.” IVF fails at this because it “deprives human procreation of the dignity which is proper and connatural to it.” Speaking this past November about IVF and the twin issue of surrogacy, Pope Francis said, “We are living in a time of experimentation with life. But a bad experiment. Making children rather than accepting them as a gift, as I said. Playing with life. Be careful, because this is a sin against the Creator: against God the creator, who created things this way.”

Of course, many people, including many Christians, do not believe that the magisterium of the Catholic Church carries any special weight. Yet all people, and especially all who claim to be followers of Jesus Christ, have a responsibility to the poor. And children created in a laboratory for IVF, especially those abandoned to the limbo of cryopreservation, are among the poorest of the poor.

There is a certain irony in this, considering that IVF is usually only available to the wealthy. A single IVF treatment can cost anywhere between $10,000 and $30,000, a steep price to pay given the low success rate. If it were true that IVF is about promoting human life, then presumably self-proclaimed pro-life advocates of IVF like Governor Abbott would be working tirelessly to make the procedure available to poor families. As things stand, it seems that our society is only interested in seeing more babies born if their parents are rich.

The frozen embryos in facilities around the world today are usually the children of affluent people, yet they are the poorest of the poor because they have been denied not only the comforts of modern life but the basics of human dignity. Their growth has been artificially suspended, rendering them helpless and perpetually dependent. They are victims of a grave injustice.

Jesus read from the prophet Isaiah in the synagogue and said, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:16-21). He said that this promise is fulfilled in him, and he calls us as his followers to be agents of that good news. “Truly I tell you,” Jesus says in Matthew 25, “just as you did it to one of the least of these who is my family you did it to me,” and likewise “just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.” These smallest and most helpless of children are part of the Lord’s family, and we will be judged on how we treat them.

The only way as Christians we can avoid our responsibility to these children is to proclaim that they are not children at all, that an embryo does not yet meet the threshold of personhood at which it would receive basic human rights. This is not a logic available to anyone claiming to be pro-life, however, as it is inseparable from the argument made in favor of abortion.

Ever since the Enlightenment, philosophers have been scrambling to find a way of securing the unique preciousness of human life without reference to God. There must be some reason why it is okay to kill a plant or an animal but not a human being, and so our society has at various moments pointed to our rationality, our consciousness, or our sentience as reasons why we might still need to protect human life even in a godless world. But while all of these things are markers of the special nature of humanity as a whole, they do not work as criteria for evaluating the value of an individual person. Things like addiction, dementia, or mental illness may impair our rationality but do not rob us of our humanity. We lose consciousness each night when we fall asleep, but it does not follow that it would be permissible to kill us during that time. And sentience is simply impossible to prove to anyone but yourself, as only you live in your head and know how much your actions are determined by instinct. Pope St. John Paul II labeled this the problem of a “society excessively concerned with efficiency.” Our humanity, and therefore our right to exist, is predicated upon our output, our ability to do something or contribute something, rather than upon anything intrinsic about us.

By stark contrast, the Bible tells us that our value as persons is not found in anything we do, but in who we are as beings made in the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:26-27). In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus does not say blessed are the conscious, the rational, and the sentient, but blessed are the meek, the poor in spirit, those who mourn, and those who are persecuted (Matt. 5:1-12). He teaches us that holiness is not found in efficiency but in humility, not in what we do but in who we are. This is not only the starting point for Christian morality; it is the basis for any kind of notion of human rights. As soon as our value as persons is located in anything other than our being made in God’s image, we will find ways of dismissing one group of people or another from the human family. History is soaked in the blood of such reasoning.

It is impossible to recognize the dignity of human persons and subject them to the kind of cruel fate that is required to make IVF viable. What we face now is a choice. Will we stand with the poorest of the poor, or will we allow them to be exploited? The way we answer that question as Christians, in the face of enormous counter-pressure in our culture, will be a test of our fidelity to the gospel.