If the Eucharist is needed for resurrection, what happens to Protestants who have only baptism?
A viewer asks: if we need the Eucharist for the resurrection, what happens to Protestants who have only the sacrament of baptism, then die saved but never received the Eucharist?
Answer
Jesus says in John 6:54 that unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man you cannot enter the kingdom, and he says the same about baptism in John 3, so both are required of Catholics. But this fits the same category as every other salvation-contingency question; the Eucharist is not so special that it has its own category of fulfillment. Officially, to be saved you must be baptized and receive the Eucharist, and that is what we preach. But there is another category outside that requirement, and those people fit under Pius IX's 1864 encyclical: they can still be saved by the knowledge they have of God's law and their obedience to it, the law written on their hearts, which Paul describes in Romans 2:14-16. In fact Paul uses that law written on the Gentiles' hearts against the Jews who had the written law and did not obey it. So no man will have an excuse before God, because the law is written on his heart so that he can obey and be saved.