Truth and Tolerance

The relationship between truth and tolerance is a problem that arose with the affirmation of democracy, of which freedom is the prerequisite. Since religious freedom was the first—and the mother of every freedom—it inevitably raises a theological-religious problem.
We ask ourselves: assuming that the Catholic faith is the true one, what will happen to the Christians of the Eastern Churches? Will God perhaps deny salvation and condemn to eternal punishment a believer of the Greek or Russian Church who, in practice, belongs to it by birth? And what if the person is a Protestant, a Buddhist, a Hindu, a pagan, or perhaps an atheist?

In the past it was believed that those who did not profess the true faith could not be saved, and therefore one also felt the duty to impose it by every means, even violent ones.
The conquistadors, in destroying and plundering pre-Columbian civilizations, morally justified themselves by thinking that, despite all the massacres and destruction, they were nevertheless bringing the true faith to those animists and therefore, in the end, were doing them good, opening for them the path to eternal salvation.
Even slavery in the southern United States was justified in religious terms: it is true that Black people became slaves, mercilessly exploited and victims of every abuse, but this also opened for them the road to salvation—better to suffer on this earth for the brief span of life than eternal damnation.

Today such ideas are absolutely banned from Christian thought, in the conviction that only free choice can lead to salvation.
From a theological point of view, the conviction has taken hold and is affirmed that one sins only if there is awareness of doing evil. If a Protestant, Buddhist, animist, or atheist acts with commitment to do everything he or she considers right and holy, then no sin has been committed; the person is in good faith and therefore will be saved.

In the past I have confronted intolerant and fanatical Muslims and, in the end, I had to admit that they were consistent, even though they were wrong, in my view.
I would note that this line of reasoning in practice empties religions of their content, and that tolerance itself ultimately presupposes a relativistic faith.

Religious tolerance arose historically from the disaster of the religious wars that devastated Europe, but theoretically it is based on the idea that no one possesses ultimate and definitive truth (this is the same basis of democracy). I may be convinced that the true faith is the Catholic one, but I do not claim that this is the absolute truth; therefore, those who believe in other religions or in none at all might well be right and thus must be respected. If I were absolutely certain that only the Catholic faith is the true one, then it would be my duty to impose it on everyone by every means, in their own interest, not mine: truth cannot have the same rights as falsehood (as the Syllabus still stated in 1870).

Muslims, communists, and positivists, on the other hand, think they possess the truth and therefore, consistently, are intolerant. If, as Marx maintains, religion is the deception of the bourgeoisie to exploit the proletariat, for what reason should it be tolerated? It must be destroyed in order to free the proletariat and create a just society.

In this way the world appears reversed compared to the past: from the wars of religion that so afflicted the Christian world—from the Christological wars of the early centuries to the medieval heresies and finally the terrifying religious wars of the seventeenth century—we have moved to mutual respect and cooperation, which in practice also places peaceful apostolic activity in parentheses, while one part (only one part) of atheism has begun an all-out struggle against religions. If positivism limited itself to a cultural and economic struggle (the dispossession of religious institutions), communism moved on to bloody and pervasive persecutions, so that communist regimes have created more martyrs than the entire history of humanity.