Hope for some of my readers yet...maybe

The Tablet - Review: The Salvation of Atheists and Catholic Dogmatic Theology

There's quite a good summary of the controversy within the modern Catholic Church regarding its view of the potential for salvation for those outside of the faith.  It starts:

For most of history, Christians thought that the vast majority of people would go to hell. The gate of Heaven is narrow. In the twentieth century, hell fell into disrepute. Christians, including many Catholics, began to think that most people will be saved. God is merciful and loving. Dante would have turned in his grave. He knew who was going to hell and even to which region in hell.

Vatican II does not contain a single reference to hell even when speaking of eschatology. Karl Rahner claimed that the most significant teaching of the council was its “salvation optimism”. Lumen Gentium (LG), the council’s decree on the Church, was the key. It overturned centuries of salvation pessimism: all non-Catholics (which included other Christians, religious non-Christians and non-religious groups such as atheists) could be saved if they were ignorant of the Gospel and they sought God, or the truth, in their conscience. This was a dramatic development of doctrine. Some protested that it was actually discontinuous with previous teachings – and a minority claimed the council invalid. Others have sought to balance this emphasis with what critics have called a neo-Augustinian theology, foreign to the council. The debate continues.  

 This line further down caught my eye:

Bullivant, who teaches theology at St Mary’s University College, Twickenham, London, charts atheism’s complexities and types. He claims that the doctrine of invincible ignorance came into full play at the council and finally allowed the Church positively to appraise certain forms of atheism, when before it could only condemn them.

 Heh.  I didn't realise the Church had developed a special doctrine to describe the Catallaxy blog.

One of the books reviewed in the post argues that the LG decree has been read too often without its qualifications:

They ignore the first chapter of Romans, which is pessimistic. They ignore the footnote referring to Aquinas, which indicates that this salvation is only a “possibility”, not a reality. LG 16 ends with the necessity of missionary work and paragraph 17 develops that theme as an introduction to the decree on missionary activity, Ad Gentes.

That “rather often” suggests a salvation pessimism that was accepted by the Fathers and is not part of a neo-Augustinian plot after the council. 

 It seems to me that a large part of the problem here is that (as far as I know) the Catholic Church has no detailed position regarding what goes after death.   (With good reason, too, given the paucity of detail on the matter in all of the Bible.)  If you assume that most people go to Purgatory, and from there retain the possibility of changing and accepting things they have rejected in life, then that allows a way for ultimate salvation of nearly everyone, doesn't it?   I wonder what atheists would do in Purgatory:  keep interpreting the apparent evidence of their after-death survival in a science fiction way, perhaps?