‘Carry Out the Work of Evangelization’

Ralph Martin speaks at the 2019 Lift Jesus Higher Rally in Toronto, Canada.

Ralph Martin was recently interviewed by Edward Pentin from the National Catholic Register about Vatican II’s teachings on salvation that are often misunderstood.We want to help our readers access this from our blog to make sure they don’t miss it! You can read the introduction below; you can read the article in its entirety here.

By Edward Pentin, for the National Catholic Register

It’s become a common false assumption, witnessed most recently in preparations for the upcoming Amazon Synod, that most, if not all, people are saved, even if they might not be Catholic.

But such a “universalist” view is not what the Church has ever taught, so how did we reach this point, and what does the Church really teach about the salvation of souls?

To find out, the Register asked professor Ralph Martin, director of graduate theology programs in the New Evangelization at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in the Archdiocese of Detroit. Author of the widely read book on spirituality The Fulfillment of All Desire, he has also written Will Many Be Saved? What Vatican II Actually Teaches and Its Implications for the New Evangelization.

In this email interview, Martin explains how some documents of the Second Vatican Council had a destabilizing effect on the Church, exacerbated by a failure to read them carefully, combined with various concepts of universalism put forward by theologians such as Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar.

Martin, who also serves as president of the evangelization organization Renewal Ministries, says he believes these theologians and other factors have “contributed to a weakening of zeal for holiness and for evangelization.”

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