RCC and Ben Shapiro

Okay, so I promised awkward questions and so there shall be. So let's start with the most awkward of the awkward questions. I don't really care about this question particularly much, but I get this question a lot, which is, as a

Jew, how does it feel that there are other religions that don't think you're getting into heaven? So let me ask you, what's the Catholic view on who gets into heaven and who doesn't?

I feel like I lead a pretty good life, a very religiously based life in which I try to keep not just the Ten Commandments, but a solid 603 other commandments as well.

And I spend an awful lot of my time promulgating what I would consider to be Judeo -Christian virtues, particularly in Western societies.

So what's the Catholic view of me? Am I basically screwed here? No. The Catholic view, go back to the

Second Vatican Council, says it very clearly. I mean, Christ is the privileged route to salvation. May God so love the world, he gave his only son, that we might find eternal life.

So that's the privileged route. However, Vatican II clearly teaches that someone outside the explicit

Christian faith can be saved. Now they're saved through the grace of Christ, indirectly received.

So the grace is coming from Christ, but it might be received according to your conscience. So if you're following your conscience sincerely, or in your case, you're following the commandments of the law sincerely, yeah, you can be saved.

Now that doesn't conduce to a complete relativism. We still would say the privileged route and the route that God has offered to humanity is the route of his son.

But no, you can be saved. Even Vatican II says an atheist of goodwill can be saved.

Because in following his conscience, if he does, John Henry Newman said the conscience is the aboriginal vicar of Christ in the soul.

It's a very interesting characterization, that it is in fact the voice of Christ. If he's the logos made flesh, he's the divine mind or reason made flesh, that when

I follow my conscience, I'm following him, whether I know it explicitly or not. So even the atheist,