It is one of the most instinctive objections raised against Christianity, and one of the most painful when it comes from an anxious heart: if salvation comes through Jesus, what happens to those who have never heard of him? The child who died in an Amazonian village before any missionary arrived, the man of the steppes who lived a thousand years before the Incarnation, the ancestor on a continent the Gospel reached only in the sixteenth century, the contemporary person who has encountered nothing but a caricature of Christ: could their destiny be sealed by the mere accident of birth? A God who condemned someone for ignorance beyond his control would not be just—and, framed this way, the objection is right.
The Church does not evade the question. She rejects two easy answers: the one that automatically damns every non-Christian, and the one that says faith ultimately makes no difference. She holds to a higher and more peaceful truth: God wills everyone to be saved (1 Tim 2:4), he has paths by which he can reach those whom no preacher has reached, and he “does not permit anyone to be punished with eternal torments who is not guilty of voluntary fault”[1]. Yet she also refuses to turn this hope into a mechanical guarantee.
This article approaches the question in its most concrete form—what happens to this particular person?—and leaves the full doctrinal mechanism to other pages. The question whether one can be saved without knowing Jesus is treated in Can Someone Be Saved without Knowing Jesus?; the Church's position on the major religions, in What Does the Church Say about the Salvation of Non-Christians?; and the objection from religious pluralism, in How Should We Answer the Objection from Multiple Religions?. Here we look directly at the person the question truly concerns: the unevangelized person, the one who never had the opportunity to hear.
The Question Behind the Question: Whom Are We Really Talking About?
“Never having heard”: a precise situation
The force of the question lies in its precision. It is not about someone who heard the Gospel and rejected it, a lukewarm baptized person, or even a believer of another religion living in contact with Christianity. It concerns a sharply defined limit case: someone whom the proclamation never reached, or reached only in a form so distorted as to be unrecognizable. The whole Catholic theology of this question rests on that distinction: a person who rejects light is not judged in the same way as one who has never received a ray of it.
Those whom the question truly concerns
In concrete terms, the unevangelized person is not an abstraction. The term includes the countless generations who lived before the coming of Christ, in every part of the world. It includes peoples on continents the Gospel reached only late—the Americas before 1492, remote parts of Oceania, valleys in Central Asia or Africa that went centuries without any proclamation. It still includes a few voluntarily isolated peoples today, as well as the multitude of men and women who, for a thousand social, family, or political reasons, have never encountered anything but a Christianity reduced to a hostile cliché. This is therefore no marginal question: it concerns an immense share of humanity across the ages.
What the question is not asking
We must also say what the question does not ask, lest we answer a different one. It does not ask whether all religions are equal—they are not. It does not ask whether evangelization is dispensable—it is not. Nor does it ask what becomes of children who die without Baptism, a related but distinct case treated in What Happens to a Child Who Dies without Baptism? and What Does the Church Say about Limbo?. It asks one precise question about one precise person: what happens to him at the end of his life?
An Ancient Concern, Not a Modern Invention
The real scandal: would God punish a geographical accident?
This objection is sometimes presented as an invention of modern unbelief. It is not. It troubled theologians from the earliest centuries precisely because it touches on the justice of God. If access to salvation depended solely on the good fortune of being born in the right place, century, and family, salvation would be a lottery and God an arbitrary judge. But the faith affirms exactly the opposite: “God shows no partiality” (Acts 10:34), and he “desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth”[2]. Far from being an attack on faith, the concern springs from a profoundly just intuition that faith itself claims as its own.
The false dilemma: “automatically damned” or “faith does not matter”
The trap is to imagine that only two answers exist. The first, rigorist answer would simply damn everyone who did not receive Baptism and explicit faith: the thesis set aside by the Holy Office (letter Suprema haec sacra, 8 August 1949)[3]. The second, laxist answer would conclude that because such people can be saved, faith and mission ultimately make no difference. The Church rejects both. Her answer is not between them as a weak compromise; it rises above them, holding firmly together the two truths the objection imagines to be contradictory—the necessity of Christ for salvation and God's will to save everyone.
What Scripture Reveals: God Reaches Beyond Visible Boundaries
The law written on the heart
Before reasoning as theologians, we must listen to Scripture. Throughout its pages, God acts beyond the visible boundaries of his people. Saint Paul states it plainly: Gentiles who did not receive the Law of Moses nevertheless bear a law within themselves.
“When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness.” — Saint Paul, Letter to the Romans 2:14–15[4]
In other words, a person who has never heard of Christ is not therefore without light: an upright conscience and the natural law are already a word from God engraved within him, which he can obey or disobey. The salvation of the unevangelized person will first be decided by fidelity to that light.
The just who lived outside the Covenant
The Old Testament is filled with just men who did not belong to the chosen people and had received no explicit revelation: Melchizedek, king and priest of God Most High, whom the Letter to the Hebrews presents as a figure of Christ; Job, the man of Uz, a model of righteousness outside any covenant; and the people of Nineveh, converted by Jonah's preaching. Christian tradition has seen in these “holy pagans” proof that God's grace has never waited for the borders of a people before reaching an upright heart.
“The God whom you worship without knowing”
The New Testament carries this intuition forward. In Athens, before the altar dedicated to an “unknown god,” Saint Paul does not simply condemn the pagans; he recognizes their halting search for the true God.
“What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. […] He made them seek God, in the hope that they might feel after him and find him. Yet he is not far from each one of us.” — Saint Paul at the Areopagus, Acts 17:23–27[5]
A sincere search for God, then—even confused, even lacking the right name—is not ignored by him. It is already the work of hidden grace.
Cornelius: grace precedes the preacher
The story of the centurion Cornelius (Acts 10) is decisive for our question. This pagan Roman officer prayed to God and gave alms before hearing the Gospel. God did not leave him in ignorance: he answered his uprightness by sending Peter to him. Grace was already at work in his heart; the proclamation crowned God's work rather than beginning it. This pattern—grace first, the preacher afterward—would become, as we shall see, the key to theological reflection on the fate of the unevangelized.
Christ Descended to the Dead: The Light of Holy Saturday
“The Gospel was preached even to the dead”
One too-often-forgotten article of Catholic faith directly illuminates our question: between his death and resurrection, Christ descended to the dead. He went not to suffer, but to bring the Good News to all who had preceded him in death. Following Saint Peter, the Catechism states this unambiguously.
“For this is why the Gospel was preached even to the dead, that though judged in the flesh like men, they might live in the spirit like God.” — First Letter of Saint Peter 4:6[6]
The First Letter of Peter also speaks of Christ going to “preach to the spirits in prison” (1 Pet 3:19). The Creed itself professes this descent: “he descended into hell.”
What the descent to the dead means for the unevangelized
This truth of faith carries an immense message for our subject. The Catechism specifies that Christ did not descend to the dead to free the damned, “but to free the just who had gone before him”[7]: all those men and women who, before the Incarnation, had lived according to the light they received without ever being able to know Jesus' name. The Redemption did not begin on the day of the Passion for Christ's contemporaries alone; it reaches, retrospectively, all the just of every age. Christ's salvation is therefore not imprisoned by the chronology or geography of the proclamation.
A retrospective light upon all humanity
If Christ reached even in death those who could not have known him during their earthly lives, then no generation, people, or person is in principle beyond the reach of his grace. The descent to the dead is like a dramatic guarantee that God's saving will knows no impassable wall. It obviously does not excuse anyone from responding to grace, but it forbids us to draw a boundary beyond which God could no longer reach a heart.
Faith Seeking Understanding: From the Fathers to the School of Salamanca
Justin and the “seeds of the Word”
As early as the second century, Saint Justin, philosopher and martyr, developed a fruitful insight: the Word of God, fully revealed in Jesus Christ, has sown “seeds” of truth (logos spermatikos) everywhere. Socrates, Heraclitus, and the sages who lived according to reason shared in this light in their measure. This idea—developed in the related article—grounds a constant conviction of tradition: wherever someone seeks truth and goodness, he already touches, without knowing it, something of Christ.
Saint Thomas Aquinas: “the man raised in the forest”
The Middle Ages confronted the question directly. How does God, who wills everyone's salvation, treat someone who by pure accident is born where no one preaches? Saint Thomas Aquinas answered with an image that became famous: a man who had grown up alone, cut off from every proclamation.
“If someone brought up in this way, in the forests or among wild beasts, followed the guidance of natural reason in seeking good and avoiding evil, it must be held with complete certainty that God would either reveal to him by an interior inspiration the things necessary for belief, or send him a preacher of the faith, just as he sent Peter to Cornelius.” — Saint Thomas Aquinas, De veritate, q. 14, a. 11[8]
The answer is luminous: God does not withhold grace from someone who does what lies within his power. God finds a path—interior or exterior—to reach him. Cornelius again provides the key: the fidelity of an upright heart calls forth God's light.
The School of Salamanca and the salvation of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas
The question ceased to be theoretical in 1492. The discovery of an entire continent populated by human beings who had never been able to hear the Gospel posed the problem with new urgency. At Salamanca, the Dominican Francisco de Vitoria, in his celebrated Relectio de Indis (1539), defended a decisive thesis: the Indigenous peoples who never received the proclamation are not guilty of the sin of unbelief—they remain accountable for their faults against the natural law, but are not damned for a faith that was never proposed to them. Contemporary with the Dominican fight for the rights of Indigenous peoples, carried notably by Bartolomé de Las Casas, this reflection shows that when the Church faced the concrete case of an unevangelized world, she rejected rigorism and asked how God's mercy could reach its peoples[9].
- c. 155Justin and the “seeds of the Word”
In his Apologies (First and Second, c. 155), the philosopher and martyr teaches that the Word sowed seeds of truth everywhere and that pagan sages shared in them.
- 1256–1259Thomas Aquinas: “the man in the forest”
In De veritate (disputed at Paris, 1256–1259), Thomas argues that God sends the necessary light to anyone who follows natural reason.
- 1539Vitoria and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas
The School of Salamanca refuses to damn for unbelief the peoples of the New World who had never been evangelized.
- 13 January 1547Council of Trent: Baptism of desire
The Sixth Session (decree on justification, ch. 4) recognizes that the desire for Baptism can obtain its fruit.
- 1863Pius IX: invincible ignorance
The encyclical Quanto conficiamur moerore teaches that no one is eternally punished without voluntary fault.
- 1964–1965Vatican II: “ways known to God alone”
Lumen Gentium 16, Gaudium et Spes 22, and Ad Gentes 7 formulate what became the classic doctrine.
- 1990John Paul II: Redemptoris Missio
The missionary encyclical affirms that salvation is always through Christ and mission always necessary.
What the Church Teaches Today: What Really “Happens”
Pius IX: invincible ignorance is not a fault
In the nineteenth century, Blessed Pius IX formulated the principle that governs the whole question. Against the idea of a God who would damn someone for an accident of birth, he taught that people who live in invincible ignorance—ignorance for which they are not responsible—and observe the natural law can, under the action of grace, attain eternal life.
“Those who labor in invincible ignorance of our most holy religion and who, diligently observing the natural law and its precepts engraved by God on every heart, ready to obey God, lead an honest and upright life, can, through the effective power of divine light and grace, attain eternal life. […] God does not permit anyone to be punished with eternal torments who is not guilty of voluntary fault.” — Blessed Pius IX, encyclical Quanto conficiamur moerore, 1863[10]
The precise workings of invincible ignorance and Baptism of desire are explained in Can Someone Be Saved without Knowing Jesus?; they will not be repeated here.
Vatican II: “in ways known to God alone”
The Second Vatican Council gave this doctrine what became its classic formulation. Lumen Gentium states that those who, “through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, yet sincerely seek God,” and strive under the action of grace to do his will, “may achieve eternal salvation”[11]. Gaudium et Spes goes further by indicating how:
“Since Christ died for all, and since the ultimate vocation of man is in fact one, and divine, we ought to believe that the Holy Spirit in a manner known only to God offers to every man the possibility of being associated with this paschal mystery.” — Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes 22[12]
And Ad Gentes specifies that God can lead to faith, “in ways known to himself,” those who through no fault of their own are ignorant of the Gospel[13].
The Catechism: a desire for Baptism one does not know one has
The Catechism of the Catholic Church gathers all this into a remarkably clear formula, extending Baptism of desire to the unevangelized:
“Every man who is ignorant of the Gospel of Christ and of his Church, but seeks the truth and does the will of God in accordance with his understanding of it, can be saved. It may be supposed that such persons would have desired Baptism explicitly if they had known its necessity.” — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 1260[14]
In one sentence, this tells us what “happens” to a person who has never heard of Jesus but has lived uprightly under grace: God recognizes in him an implicit desire for what he would have chosen had he known it.
Always through Christ, never “alongside” him
One qualification is essential, without which everything would collapse into relativism: this person is never saved by his religion or by sincerity alone, but always by Christ, whose grace secretly reaches him. John Paul II stressed this point: for those who do not have explicit faith, “salvation in Christ is accessible by virtue of a grace which, while having a mysterious relationship to the Church, does not make them formally part of the Church but enlightens them in a way which is accommodated to their spiritual and material situation”[15]. There are not two paths of salvation, Christ's and another one. There is only one, and it can reach a person where the proclamation has never arrived.
Then, Concretely, What Decides?
What opens the door
Let us draw the threads together. For the unevangelized person, three things work together to “open” the door of salvation: seeking God—or at least truth and goodness—with a sincere heart; following an upright conscience, the law written on the heart (Rom 2); and doing so under the action of a grace that Christ secretly offers. None of these three comes from that person's powers alone: God is already at work in him first.
What closes the door: rejection, not ignorance
This must be stated plainly: ignorance itself never condemns. What closes the door is the deliberate rejection of a good one knows—the lie told to one's own conscience, the voluntary hardening against a truth one has glimpsed. Someone can be lost without ever having heard Jesus' name, but then it will be through his personal fault against the light he had, not because he lacked a light he never received.
| Situation | What is at stake | Catholic theology's judgment |
|---|---|---|
| Has never heard the Gospel, seeks God, and follows his conscience | Grace welcomed; implicit desire for Baptism | Can be saved—through Christ |
| Has never heard the Gospel but rejects the good he knows | Voluntary fault against conscience | Is lost through his own fault, not through ignorance |
| Has heard the authentic Gospel and consciously rejects it | Rejection of the Christ one knows | A distinct case, treated elsewhere |
A real possibility, not an automatic guarantee
The Church says “can be saved,” not “is automatically saved.” The distinction contains the whole truth. To affirm that the unevangelized person's salvation is possible permits neither certainty about the salvation of a particular individual nor the conclusion that mission is superfluous. The possibility opened by mercy erases neither the reality of sin, the seriousness of judgment, nor the difficulty of living uprightly without the help of the sacraments and the revealed Word. It is a hope, not a decree.
The case of infants
There remains the case of those who do not yet have the use of reason: children who die before any choice and before Baptism. This is a related but specific case in which the Church professes not certainty but firm hope, grounded in God's mercy and Christ's tenderness toward children. It is treated in What Happens to a Child Who Dies without Baptism?.
“If One Can Be Saved without It, Why Have Missionaries?”
The missionary paradox
The objection immediately follows: if God can save those who have never heard of him, why risk one's life to proclaim him to them? Would it not be better to leave them in their “saving” ignorance? The reasoning is specious, and the Church has always answered it. First, a possibility of salvation is not an easy path: without the Word, the sacraments, and the Church, the path toward God is infinitely rougher and more exposed to error and sin. Second, the Gospel is not merely a ticket to the hereafter; it is truth, joy, and abundant life now. To deprive a people of the Gospel because they “might” be saved without it would be like withholding a treasure because someone could survive without it.
Love does not calculate: the fire of Saint Francis Xavier
The best answer is not an argument but a face. In about ten years, Saint Francis Xavier traveled through India, the Moluccas, and Japan, baptizing tens of thousands of people. He died in 1552 at the gates of the China he longed to reach. No cold theological calculation drove him across the seas, but love: the certainty that Christ is the world's treasure and that one does not keep the beloved to oneself. His letter written from Cochin to the Jesuits of Rome bears witness to his grief over those multitudes who do not become Christian for lack of workers to instruct them[16]. Love does not reason that “they can do without him”; love runs.
Thérèse, patroness of the missions without leaving her Carmel
The Church made Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus, a cloistered nun who never set foot in a mission country, the patroness of the missions alongside Francis Xavier. The message is clear: mission is not primarily about distance, but love. One can carry the whole world in prayer and self-offering. These two patrons—the tireless traveler and the motionless Carmelite—say everything: zeal for those who have never heard of Jesus is the Church's beating heart, whether one travels to the ends of the earth or prays behind a grille.
Proclamation remains the ordinary way
We must therefore hold together two things the objection sets against each other. The “ways known to God alone” are extraordinary ways: God reserves them for those who could not receive the proclamation. But the ordinary way, the one Christ explicitly commanded—“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (Matt 28:19)—remains evangelization. To rely on extraordinary ways as an excuse to neglect the ordinary one would be to tempt God and betray the Lord's command.
What This Changes for You: Hope without Presumption
For an ancestor or loved one never reached by the proclamation
This question is almost never abstract. It has a face: an ancestor who died far from the faith, a friend from a culture the Gospel never truly touched, a loved one you fear may be “lost.” To anyone carrying this sorrow, the Church offers a solid word of peace, neither naïve nor desperate: God loves this person infinitely more than you do, he has done everything to save him, and he has paths you do not know. You may hope for his salvation.
Pray, offer, entrust to mercy
Hope does not mean remaining passive. Catholic faith teaches that our prayers and offerings are not lost: in the mystery of the communion of saints, they can reach those whom we entrust to God, living or dead. To pray for a loved one who was never evangelized, offer a Mass for him, and entrust his fate to Christ's mercy—this is a concrete answer open to everyone and more fruitful than every speculation.
The right disposition of heart: hope without presumption
The right word is hope. Neither the presumption that declares everyone saved in advance and makes faith pointless, nor the despair that damns multitudes in the name of a rigor God himself rejects. Between them stands Christian hope: trust that Christ, who died for all and descended to the dead to reach the just of every age, can find the way to every heart that sought him without knowing him—while we work, pray, and go forth so that no one will still need to be saved “without knowing it,” but may at last know, love, and name him.
For Further Reading
- Can Someone Be Saved without Knowing Jesus? — the possibility in principle and its full doctrinal mechanism.
- What Does the Church Say about the Salvation of Non-Christians? — the Church's position, religion by religion.
- How Should We Answer the Objection from Multiple Religions? — religious pluralism and its pitfalls.
- Is Baptism Necessary for Salvation? — the necessity of the sacrament and what can supply for it.
- What Happens to a Child Who Dies without Baptism? — the related case of infants.
- What Is Salvation? — what salvation actually means.
- What Is Actual Grace? — the grace that reaches a person where he is.
Notes and References
Blessed Pius IX, encyclical Quanto conficiamur moerore to the bishops of Italy (August 10, 1863)—DS 2866 (Denzinger). Latin text: “... eos, qui invincibili circa sanctissimam nostram religionem ignorantia laborant, quique naturalem legem eiusque praecepta in omnium cordibus a Deo insculpta sedulo servantes ac Deo oboedire parati, honestam rectamque vitam agunt, posse, divinae lucis et gratiae operante virtute, aeternam consequi vitam; cum Deus ... minime patiatur, quempiam aeternis puniri suppliciis, qui voluntariae culpae reatum non habeat.” English translation from the Latin: those who live in invincible ignorance of the true religion and faithfully observe the natural law can, under the action of divine light and grace, attain eternal life, for God “does not permit anyone to be punished with eternal torments who is not guilty of voluntary fault.” The same text (DS 2865, 2867) condemns indifferentism and recalls the dogma “Outside the Church there is no salvation” for those who are “obstinately separated” from her.
1 10First Letter of Saint Paul to Timothy 2:3–6: God our Savior “desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself a ransom for all.” A foundational text for God's universal saving will.
2Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office, letter Suprema haec sacra to Archbishop Richard Cushing of Boston (August 8, 1949), Protocol 122/49—DS 3866–3872 (Denzinger). Condemnation of Father Leonard Feeney's rigorist thesis: the Church distinguishes actual incorporation from union “by desire and longing”; in cases of invincible ignorance, God accepts an implicit desire contained in a person's good disposition of soul.
3Letter of Saint Paul to the Romans 2:14–16: Gentiles “who do not possess the law” bear within themselves “what the law requires […] written on their hearts,” to which their conscience also bears witness. Scriptural foundation of the natural law reaching the human person without Revelation.
4Acts of the Apostles 17:22–28, Saint Paul's speech at the Areopagus in Athens: “What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. […] He made them seek God, in the hope that they might feel after him and find him.”
5First Letter of Saint Peter 4:6: “For this is why the Gospel was preached even to the dead.” See 1 Pet 3:18–19: Christ “went and preached to the spirits in prison.” Scriptural basis for the descent to the dead professed in the Apostles' Creed.
6Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§ 632–635: between his death and resurrection, Christ descended to the abode of the dead “as Savior, proclaiming the Good News to the spirits imprisoned there” (§ 632). He did not descend “to deliver the damned […] but to free the just who had gone before him” (§ 633). “The Gospel was preached even to the dead” (§ 634, citing 1 Pet 4:6): the descent to the dead extends the redemptive work “to all men of all times and all places.” It manifests the universal scope of the Redemption.
7Saint Thomas Aquinas, Quæstiones disputatæ De veritate (disputed at Paris during his first mastership, 1256–1259), q. 14, a. 11, ad 1 — Latin verified against the Leonine edition online (corpusthomisticum.org): “Si enim aliquis taliter nutritus ductum rationis naturalis sequeretur in appetitu boni et fuga mali, certissime est tenendum quod Deus ei vel per internam inspirationem revelaret ea quæ sunt necessaria ad credendum, vel aliquem fidei prædicatorem ad eum dirigeret, sicut misit Petrum ad Cornelium.” — “If someone brought up in this way [in the forests, among wild beasts] followed the guidance of natural reason […], it must be held with complete certainty that God would either reveal to him by an interior inspiration the things necessary for belief, or send him a preacher of the faith, just as he sent Peter to Cornelius.”
8Francisco de Vitoria (c. 1483–1546), Relectio de Indis, public lecture delivered at the University of Salamanca (1539): the Indigenous peoples of the New World who never received the proclamation of the Gospel are not guilty of the sin of unbelief — “The barbarians who have never received any news of the faith or Christian religion will be damned for their mortal sins or their idolatry; but not for the sin of unbelief” (English transl. A. Pagden and J. Lawrance, Vitoria: Political Writings, Cambridge University Press, 1991). Strictly speaking: blameless ignorance excuses from unbelief, not from other faults against the natural law. This thesis of the School of Salamanca is contemporary with the defense of Indigenous rights carried by the Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas (c. 1474–1566), notably during the Valladolid controversy (1550–1551) against Sepúlveda.
9Second Vatican Council, dogmatic constitution Lumen Gentium (November 21, 1964), no. 16: 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 strive to do his will under the action of grace “may achieve eternal salvation.” Cited in CCC § 847.
11Second Vatican Council, pastoral constitution Gaudium et Spes (December 7, 1965), no. 22 § 5: “Since Christ died for all […], we ought to believe that the Holy Spirit in a manner known only to God offers to every man the possibility of being associated with this paschal mystery.” Cited in CCC § 1260.
12Second Vatican Council, decree Ad Gentes (December 7, 1965), no. 7: God can, “in ways known to himself,” lead to faith those who are ignorant of the Gospel through no fault of their own; but the Church retains the duty and sacred right to evangelize. Cited in CCC § 848.
13Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 1260, citing Gaudium et Spes no. 22 (see Lumen Gentium no. 16; Ad Gentes no. 7): “Every man who is ignorant of the Gospel of Christ and of his Church, but seeks the truth and does the will of God in accordance with his understanding of it, can be saved. It may be supposed that such persons would have desired Baptism explicitly if they had known its necessity.”
14Saint John Paul II, encyclical Redemptoris Missio (December 7, 1990), no. 10: “For such people, salvation in Christ is accessible by virtue of a grace which, while having a mysterious relationship to the Church, does not make them formally part of the Church but enlightens them in a way which is accommodated to their spiritual and material situation. This grace comes from Christ; it is the result of his Sacrifice and is communicated by the Holy Spirit.” There is one mediation, Christ's, never a parallel path.
15Saint Francis Xavier (1506–1552), collective letter to the Jesuits of Rome written from Cochin, India. Double dating: the old editions date it 31 December 1543 (H. J. Coleridge, The Life and Letters of St. Francis Xavier, vol. I, London, Burns and Oates, 1886, Letter XIV “To the Society at Rome”, passage verified p. 155-156), while the critical edition re-dates it to 15 January 1544 (G. Schurhammer and J. Wicki, Epistolae S. Francisci Xaverii aliaque eius scripta, Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu, Rome, 1944–1945, vol. I; Spanish text in Cartas y escritos de San Francisco Javier, Madrid, BAC, 1996; cf. J. Brodrick, Saint Francis Xavier (1506–1552), London, Burns Oates, 1952). In it he laments (paraphrase) that multitudes do not become Christian for lack of workers to instruct them, and dreams of visiting the universities of Europe, Paris especially, to recruit missionaries there. English text, verified in Coleridge: “There is now in these parts a very large number of persons who have only one reason for not becoming Christian, and that is that there is no one to make them Christians. It often comes into my mind to go round all the Universities of Europe, and especially that of Paris, crying out everywhere like a madman…” He was proclaimed patron of the missions, with Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus, by Pius XI in 1927.
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