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Respectfully, the provision of the new catechism that I cited is muddled and unclear. Looking just at the text, and not the footnotes or surrounding passages, it says that all persons of good will who strive to do God's will will be saved. That is clearly what it says.

Now, it is mitigated by the footnotes and by the surrounding text. But my point is that it robs all sense of urgency from the great command to convert the whole world. If you assume, as the modern mind is apt to do, that most people are basically good chaps trying to do the right thing, this provision can be read, and is by many, to suggest that they can be left to their invincible ignorance with no great danger. (Of course, that would be a grossly wrong conclusion to draw.)

This provision is a key weapon of the ecumenical movement which seeks to do the impossible by balancing the scandalous, to the world, infallibly defined doctrine that there is no salvation outside the Church with the Rodney King-like question "can we all just get along?".

Here is the excerpt of Section 1260 of the New Catechism:

Every man who is ignorant of the Gospel of Christ and of his Church, but seeks the truth and does the will of God in accordance with his understanding of it, can be saved. It may be supposed that such persons would have desired Baptism explicitly if they had known its necessity.

Compare that the thoughts of the Baltimore Catechism on the subject. The new formulation doesn't exactly fill one with a sense a great urgency to go out there and risk life and limb to convert the nonbelievers, does it?

I think the basic orientation here was to acknowledge that one cannot 'force' someone else to be a Catholic--in the same sense that one cannot 'legislate morality.'

Based on JPII's interest in 'ut unam sint' and his unflagging efforts to bring non-Uniates to Rome--as well as the initiatives with the Lutherans, etc., it would be hard to make the case that HE has lost the drive to convert the world.

At the same time, he has not been loosey-goosey--both with the Luterans and with the Jews he has held the line on certain items which cannot be negotiated.

As to our responsibility--I never viewed VII's document as a denigration of the call to convert.