The first reading today is taken from Numbers. It is during the time of the wilderness trek when Moses and the people have long since departed from Egypt but have not arrived in the Promised Land. There are lots of people on the trek and as you might expect, there are lots of problems and complaints. The Lord directed Moses to select 70 elders to help with the burden of leadership. As promised, the Lord gave the elders the gift of the Spirit and they immediately began to prophesy. At the same time there are two others, not selected as elders, who receive the same Spirit and they too are prophesying. Do the elders rejoice because the Spirit of the Lord is spreading among the people? Seems not. I guess human nature being what it is, the elders complain that the two are not officially elders. I guess their thinking is that the gift of the Spirit is only for elders. Moses corrects their misconception: “Would that the LORD might bestow his spirit on them all!”

Today’s gospel has a similar scene. “John said to Jesus, ‘Teacher, we saw someone driving out demons in your name, and we tried to prevent him because he does not follow us.’” Notice that John doesn’t say, the person does not follow Jesus, rather that the person “does not follow us.”  One may rightly assume that John means the person is not an official apostle, one of the insiders.  Like Moses, Jesus corrects their misconception: “For whoever is not against us is for us.”

Recently Pope Francis was speaking to a group of interreligious young adults in Singapore. His off-the-cuff comment included: “All religions are paths to God… I will use an analogy, they are like different languages that express the divine.” As so often happens, a snippet from some impromptu remarks made it onto social media and many read it in a negative light, as though the pope were saying that all religions are equally true. It strikes me that this was the modern equivalent of complaining that the Pope was speaking to folks that “don’t follow us” or aren’t part of the select few to whom the Spirit of God comes.

That is always the problem with social media snippets. Overall, the pope’s point was that all religions are ways of communicating with God, not that they are all “the same.” And in this the Pope is consistent with the long teaching of the Catholic Church. Consider some documents from the Second Vatican Council:

• Lumen Gentium (LG), one of the principal documents of the Second Vatican Council, states that non-Catholics “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.”
• Gaudium et Spes (GS): “The door of salvation, the church affirms, is open to all”
• Ad Gentes (AG): affirms that the “seeds of the Word” are found in every great faith. These “seeds” are referred to multiple times in conciliar documents and encyclicals, and refer to those elements identified in other faiths and cultures that contain rays of the same truth we find in the Gospel.

By the way, these are not recent innovations. The same idea comes from one of the church’s first great theologians, St. Justin Martyr, in the first century, who wrote that “the teachings of Christ are not alien to Plato.” In the 18th century, popes like Alexander VIII and Clement XI condemned as heretical the proposition that Christ’s grace does not operate within those of other faiths (“Errors of the Jansenists” and the encyclical Unigenitus).

By the way, the tradition has always and continues to hold that the “fullness of truth” exists in the Catholic Church and that the essential and intrinsic mission of the Church, the reason we exist, is to evangelize the nations.

Since the Council, the Church has produced some amazing documents on the evangelizing mission of the Church in the modern world. Documents such as Evangelii Nuntiandi (1987), Redemptoris Missio (1992) and one of my favorites: Dialogue and Proclamation. What I especially like about Dialogue and Proclamation is that it continues the thought of the conciliar documents affirming the elements of truth and grace (AG 9) found in the mind, hearts, rites and customs of non-Christian people (LG 17) due to the action of the Word and the Spirit in all people of good will, making the possibility of salvation available to all (GS 22). It then lays out a framework about interreligious dialogues for us regular everyday kinds of folks.  Church leaders and theologians are going to have their own dialogue, but we are to have

• a dialogue of life, where people strive to live in an open and neighborly spirit, sharing their joys and sorrows, their human problems and preoccupations;
• a dialogue of action, in which Christians and others collaborate in works of charity and community action; and
• a dialogue of religious experience, where persons, rooted in their own religious traditions, share their spiritual riches, for instance with regard to prayer and contemplation, faith and ways of searching for God.

After considering the biblical and conciliar foundations, Dialogue and Proclamation arrives at a theological statement concerning the salvation in Jesus Christ of the members of other religious traditions as well as the role that their traditions play in that salvation:

“From this mystery of unity it follows that all men and women who are saved share, though differently, in the same mystery of salvation in Jesus Christ through his Spirit. Christians know this through their faith, while others remain unaware that Jesus Christ is the source of their salvation. The mystery of salvation reaches out to them, in a way known to God, through the invisible action of the Spirit of Christ. Concretely, it will be in the sincere practice of what is good in their own religious traditions and by following the dictates of their conscience that the members of other religions respond positively to God’s invitation and receive salvation in Jesus Christ, even while they do not recognize or acknowledge him as their savior.” (§29)

“Would that the LORD might bestow his spirit on them all!” In His own mysterious way, the Lord has done exactly that. Take a moment to take all of this in… we worship a God who, as it says in 1 Tim 2:4, desires that all be saved. We worship a God who has sent his Spirit into the world to encounter the mystery of salvation. We worship a God who sent his only Son, Jesus as the core of that salvific mystery. A son who instituted the Eucharist and the Sacraments. A Son who commissioned us to go to the end of the world to reveal the mystery of salvation in a dialogue of life, action and sharing our religious experiences.

And here is a question for you. While this all applies to interreligious dialogue, I think it also speaks to intergenerational dialogue within our own homes, among our children and grandchildren, among our sisters and brothers, and within our extended families. Perhaps most importantly, in the dialogues of action and religious experience – sharing the lived experience of faith – why the Faith is important to you.

When I consider the Pope’s meeting in Singapore, I see Pope Francis speaking not only to an interreligious group, but also to a new generation of young adults to whom the mystery of the Spirit has been given and who the Lord desires they be saved.

We are commissioned to go and do likewise.

Amen

Image credit The Exhortation to the Apostles | James Tissot | Brooklyn Museum | US-PD