They receive the “elements of goodness and grace.” Of course. These are folks who have never been introduced to the Gospel or the Church which authenticated the Bible.
Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims can be good people who can just as well follow the Sermon on the Mount. However, it is through the salvific mission of the Church that prays for sinners and nonbelievers that in God’s mercy they may obtain salvation as a “revelation of his love.” That is what Ratzinger is alluding to. If you read Ratzinger’s long and heavily authority-referenced treatise you will get this whole picture. It took me several days of very careful reading and actually reading some of the footnotes as well as you would expect (as I say this with utmost humility) from someone with a postdoctoral degree from a major ivy league school. Please don’t use this against me. It is today a highly secular, some would call an anti-Christian university. I keep an open mind and went from Fabian socialist to hard right Reagan conservative. The study of economics, culture, and even science all require a deep historical insight.
The great convert who founded the Oxford Movement, John Henry Cardinal Newman once said, “To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.”
Many colleges an universities have what is called the campus Newman Club.
The history of Church takes you to Peter, Linus, Cletus etc. St. Irenaus, a disciple of St. John and his writings on the early Church and belief in the Eucharist. This is why folks like Dr. David Anders, a theologian who entered Wheaton to specifically disprove Catholicism and write the definitive proof on “why” Church doctrine is untrue, ended up being a convert to Catholicism.
Cardinal Newman recognized the obvious difference between the current Roman Church and the early church. He was too deep in history not to see it. He had to develop his famous idea of doctrinal development to explain it. He argued that all the later Roman doctrines and practices were “hidden” in the church from the beginning. They were made explicit over time under the guidance of the Spirit. But the problem that many Roman Catholics fail to see is that there is a difference between development and contradiction. It is one thing to use different language to teach something the church has always taught (e.g., the “Trinity”). It is another thing altogether to begin teaching something that the church always denied (e.g., papal supremacy or infallibility). Those doctrines in particular were built on multitudes of forgeries.
Cardinal Manning solved the problem by treating any appeal to history as treason. He called for blind faith in the papacy and magisterium. Such might have been possible had the fruits of the papacy over 1,500 years not consistently been the precise opposite of the fruit of the Spirit (Matt. 7:16).
Cardinal Newman said that to be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant. The truth is that to be deep in real history, as opposed to Rome’s whitewashed, revisionist, and often forged history, is to cease to be a Roman Catholic.
https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/be-deep-history/