Last Sunday at Mass, we heard Jesus make a bold claim in the Gospel reading. He said, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). The Sunday before, we heard Jesus say, “I am the gate. Whoever enters through me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture” (John 10:9). In a world with many different religions, it can be tough to make sense of such teachings of Jesus. Does that mean that non-Christians have no hope of eternal life?

Back in the 1960s, the bishops of the Catholic Church addressed this important question at the Second Vatican Council. The Catechism of the Catholic Church sums up what the Church believes on this topic.

Here are five things every Catholic should know about our need for salvation.

1. We all need to be saved from sin.

Most of us don’t need much convincing to see that the world around us is profoundly broken, filled with pain, suffering, injustice, and death. Both the Bible and the Catechism of the Catholic Church reveal that humanity’s sin is the ultimate cause of this brokenness. “Original sin” – the decision of the first human beings to follow their own will instead of God’s – affects every single one of us. In our fallen state, each of us is often turned toward things that are evil and turned away from God, who is the ultimate source of our happiness. No matter how hard we try, we will never be able to free ourselves from the power of sin and death. St. Paul says succinctly, “all have sinned and are deprived of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). Left in our own brokenness, we would have no reason to hope for eternal life.

2. Jesus is the only Savior.

Despite our sin, God desperately loves us. He has not abandoned us to sin and death, but became one of us to save us. Jesus lived among us, proclaiming the kingdom of God, he offered his life on the Cross to make up for our sins, then he rose again so that we might have eternal life. He longs for every human person to live with him forever in heaven.

Here’s the countercultural point that Scripture makes clear: The salvation that he offers is not just one path to God among many, but is the one and only way to communion with God and eternal life. St. Peter proclaims, for example, “There is no salvation through anyone else, nor is there any other name under heaven given to the human race by which we are to be saved” (Acts 4:12). Jesus himself said, “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved; whoever does not believe will be condemned” (Mark 16:16).

3. Jesus gives his salvation through the Church.

Jesus does not offer us his salvation as individuals, but has established a Church as a necessary gathering of all of his disciples. The early Christians had a provocative saying: Extra ecclesiam nulla salus, i.e., “Outside the Church there is no salvation.” What does this challenging phrase mean? The Catechism, quoting the Second Vatican Council, explains:

846 How are we to understand this affirmation, often repeated by the Church Fathers? Re-formulated positively, it means that all salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is his Body:

Basing itself on Scripture and Tradition, the [Second Vatican] Council teaches that the Church, a pilgrim now on earth, is necessary for salvation: the one Christ is the mediator and the way of salvation; he is present to us in his body which is the Church. He himself explicitly asserted the necessity of faith and Baptism, and thereby affirmed at the same time the necessity of the Church which men enter through Baptism as through a door. Hence they could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse either to enter it or to remain in it.

In other words, it’s not enough for us to just believe in Jesus in isolation. Jesus wants us all to be an active part of his Church, through which we are nourished with the Word of God, the sacraments, the guidance of the Magisterium, and the fellowship of other believers. If we turn our backs on the Church that Christ established, we are turning our backs on his plan for our salvation.

The Catholic Church has often been called “the barque (or ship) of Peter.” If our fallen world is a tumultuous ocean, the Church is the seaworthy vessel that Jesus himself has provided to help us sail to eternal life. As Noah built an ark to save his family and the animals from the flood, Christ established the Church to keep us safe from sin. It would be foolish to try to survive the stormy seas of life outside of it.

4. God is at work outside the Church.

Even though all salvation comes from Christ through his Church, Catholic teaching is clear that God is at work outside the visible boundaries of the Catholic Church. The Catechism, quoting Vatican II, continues:

847 This affirmation is not aimed at those who, through no fault of their own, do not know Christ and his Church:

Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience – those too may achieve eternal salvation.

If God is all-good, then this is exactly how we’d expect him to respond to those who, through no fault of their own, do not know Christ’s Gospel or his Church. There have been billions and billions of humans throughout human history, and only a small fraction of them have heard of and believed in Jesus. Would we really expect God to simply condemn them? No, I think most of us assume that God is merciful to anyone who sincerely seeks him, regardless of background. As St. Peter said, “In truth, I see that God shows no partiality. Rather, in every nation whoever fears him and acts uprightly is acceptable to him” (Acts 10:34-35).

If Jesus is the one and only Savior, however, even this work outside the visible boundaries of Church is the work of Jesus. Any grace that is at work in the world today has been won for us by the death and Resurrection of Christ. Pope St. John Paul II said succinctly, “No one, therefore, can enter into communion with God except through Christ, by the working of the Holy Spirit” (Redemptoris Missio 5).

5. Catholics have an obligation to evangelize.

For the past fifty years or so in the Church, there has been a renewed emphasis in the Church on the need for all Catholics, including the laity, to evangelize, i.e., to spread the Gospel. At the same time, though, there has often been an increased emphasis on the truth that God is at work outside the visible boundaries of the Church. If God can save people without us sharing the Catholic faith, then why should we bother to do so? There’s a tension between the two messages, and many Catholics have fallen for the lie that sharing the Gospel is no longer necessary.

Let’s consider our analogy of the Church as the barque of Peter, the ship headed toward eternal life. Imagine that you are in a large, sturdy ocean liner in the middle of a stormy sea, but you see others who are fighting the waves in other much more questionable vessels: There is a family in a rowboat, a group of fishermen in a small, dilapidated fishing boat, and another individual in a kayak. Would it be best to simply watch them struggle in the storm or invite them into the boat that has been made to weather such conditions? Those in less reliable vessels may reach the shore safely, but only the ship that Christ has provided is guaranteed to provide refuge. If we believe that Jesus himself has given us his Gospel and his Church for our salvation, then charity demands that we invite others to the Catholic faith.

Pope St. Paul VI offers this challenge:

God can accomplish this salvation in whomsoever He wishes by ways which He alone knows. And yet, if His Son came, it was precisely in order to reveal to us, by His word and by His life, the ordinary paths of salvation. And He has commanded us to transmit this revelation to others with His own authority. It would be useful if every Christian and every evangelizer were to pray about the following thought: men can gain salvation also in other ways, by God's mercy, even though we do not preach the Gospel to them; but as for us, can we gain salvation if through negligence or fear or shame – what St. Paul called “blushing for the Gospel” [cf. Romans 1:16] – or as a result of false ideas we fail to preach it? For that would be to betray the call of God, who wishes the seed to bear fruit through the voice of the ministers of the Gospel; and it will depend on us whether this grows into trees and produces its full fruit (Evangelii Nuntiandi 80, emphasis added).