Do Catholics believe in salvation by works?

Question: Do Catholics believe in salvation by works?

Answer: It would be a serious mistake for anyone to confuse the concept of divine justification with the concept/purpose of condign merit.

Nobody can “force” God to invite them into Heaven, by any means (works).

Anyone who is invited into Heaven (justified) gets there only by the timely and merciful application of the saving grace that Jesus obtained for us by his life, death and resurrection. That remains a free gift of God – for Catholics and everybody else.

Grace gets us into Heaven, but only if Jesus alone, judges it to be both sufficient and appropriate. That’s how we are justified.

Merit is the way we attempt to quantify/measure the incorruptible treasures that Jesus told us to store up in Heaven, by our good works, accomplished in his name, in hopeful anticipation of that great day.

A question about the possibility of divine justification, prior to Jesus’ perfect and atoning sacrifice, on the cross.

Question: In the Gospel of Saint Luke, Chapter 18, verse 9, we read the story of The Pharisee and the Tax Collector. In verse 14, it goes on to say that the Tax Collector went home justified, by God. I thought that prior to Jesus’ atoning sacrifice on the cross, nobody was ever justified, by God. What am I missing?

Answer: Prior to Jesus’ atoning sacrifice for the sins of mankind, God provided many types of opportunities for man to give God thanks and praise and to offer up imperfect forms of animal (and other) sacrifices to God, for various good purposes and intentions.

While none of those “forms” of worship (or even our best attempts at perfectly keeping the Old Law) had the power to destroy Satan’s power over man, or reopen the Gates of Heaven, they did serve to (imperfectly) please/appease God and impute a certain level of righteousness/justification to those who faithfully and correctly practiced them.

The souls of those who God considered to be “justified” in that manner, were supernaturally “marked” for eventual salvation, in Jesus Christ and subsequently detained in a special “place” in the afterlife – known (alternatively) as Hell, or “The Bosom of Abraham” – while they awaited the perfect and atoning sacrifice of our Holy Redeemer, on the cross, at Calvary.

Catholic Tradition informs us that Jesus escorted all those faithful souls to Heaven, while his dead body lay in the tomb, for three days and nights, awaiting his glorious Resurrection.

What do we mean when we say “Peace Be With You” at Mass?

Question: Precisely what type of “peace” are we hoping for when we say “Peace Be With You” at Mass?

Answer: The “peace beyond all understanding” that the 2nd person of the Holy Trinity became man in order to declare, is the peace between sinful mankind and God, which could only be achieved by the salvific work of Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son.

When we say “Peace Be With You” at Mass, we should be thinking something like this: “May God, according to the grace obtained for us by his divine son, forgive all our sins, justify us in faith and personally invite us to spend eternity with him, in Heaven.”

For people of true faith, that should also be enough to mitigate any of the temporarily anxieties and worries brought on by the stresses and strains of our mundane existence here on earth, until the day that we might be privileged to experience God as he really is.

Abortion As a Blessing, Grace, or Gift–A Renewed Conversation about Reproductive Rights?

The “deep thinkers” at IEET (Institute for Emerging Ethics and Technologies) firmly believe they are the smartest kids in the room, so they spent a lot of time attempting to justify what is (humanly and ethically) totally unjustifiable – abortion. Here’s their latest attempt at taking themselves and their twisted logic way too seriously. – Ed.

Our inability to talk in morally resonant terms about abortion has clouded the broader conversation about mindful childbearing. (There are no “morally resonant” reasons to kill innocent babies in the womb. – Ed.) The cost in recent decades has been devastating. In developing countries millions of real women and children have died because abortion-obsessed American Christians banned family planning conversations as a part of HIV prevention efforts. (This is total “BS”. A flat-out lie! – Ed.) Those lost lives reveal the callous immorality of the anti-choice movement. (Now these guys have unilaterally redefined “callous immorality” as SAVING innocent lives. – Ed.)

Back home, here in the U.S., our inability to claim the moral high ground about abortion has brought us one of the most regressive culture shifts of a generation. (That’s because there is absolutely no moral high ground available when it comes to killing innocent babies. – Ed.) We are, incredibly, faced with “personhood rights” for fertilized eggs, pregnancies that begin legally before we even have sex, politicians with “Rape Tourette’s,” and a stunningly antagonistic debate about contraceptive technologies that could make as many as ninety percent of unintended pregnancies along with consequent suffering and abortions simply obsolete. (I think she is referring to various types of contraceptives that function by killing innocent life, after conception. But you never know! – Ed.)

The voices that are strongest on reproductive rights often falter when it comes to the cultural dialogue. At least part of this absence is because so many of the pro-choice movement’s leaders and funders are secular and civic in their orientation, awkwardly uncomfortable with the moral and spiritual dimension of the conversation, or, for that matter, even with words like moral and spiritual. From language that seems moderately wise–Who decides?–we fall back on “safe, legal and rare” (a questionable effort to please everyone) or even the legal jargon of the “right to privacy.”

A large pile of murdered teeny, weeny babies
numbering – so far – about 55 MILLION!

The other side talks about murdering teeny, weeny babies and then mind-melds images of ultrasounds and Gerber babies with faded photos of late term abortions. (As if none of these accurately reflect the sad reality of abortion, as well as the abortion mentality. – Ed.)  And we come back by talking about privacy?? Is that like the right to commit murder in the privacy of your own home or doctor’s office? (As a matter of fact, it is.  Now they’re catching on! – Ed.) Even apart from the dubious moral equivalence, let’s be real: In the age of Facebook and Twitter, is there a female under twenty-five in who gives a rat’s patooey about privacy, let alone thinks of it as a core value? (The right to privacy was merely the context and the false, fabricated  justification for the court’s ruling on the non-existent right to abortion. – Ed.) 

There’s more – but why bother? These guys are either deliberately, or by nature, almost totally ignorant about the truth of the issues they so poorly attempt to address. Probably because ignorance is their only hope! – Ed.

Seen on the web re: Illinois politicians using the Pope’s comments for cover on their vote to legalize homosexual marriage

Janet Baker

November 6, 2013 at 11:30 pm · Reply

I just don’t see it that he has been misrepresented. He said what he said. He had the chance to deny that he said we were not ‘to judge.’ But in fact that is Vatican II’s legacy, when it made the Church subsist along with all others in a greater ‘church’ where salvation may be found for all, without Christ, without the sacraments, without baptism. It is a doctrinal problem and Pope Francis’ words accurately reflect the doctrine of that cursed council. Perhaps God is letting us have enough rope to hang ourselves. It was easier to believe Benedict’s more elevated modernism, to hope it meant that everything was okay, would turn out okay, without the painful process that rooting out that council and that rotten doctrine. Maybe now the middle-of-the-roaders, who forget yesterday’s lesson as soon as they awaken each morning, will finally get it. What that awakening means for us, I do not know. It is the duty of the Cardinals to declare a manifest heretic. They can do that. If he allows a woman ‘cardinal,’ will they? By the way, this is not the first time the flaw has influenced our politics: democratic politicians, including Nancy Pelosi and Biden, cite the Council as the source of their votes on abortion.

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How is a Catholic to respond when somebody asks, “Have you been saved?”

“Yes, I believe in Jesus and received his justifying (sanctifying) grace when I was baptized into his Church. Jesus saved me. And at those times when I have sinned gravely and lost this grace, I returned to the Lord to be cleansed again by him in the Sacrament of Reconciliation (Confession) where I again received his justifying grace.

I am strengthened in my personal relationship with him by my worship of him and receiving him in Holy Communion at Mass; through my prayer, devotion and reading of the Scriptures; by my study of the teachings of the faith; through my good works prepared beforehand by him for me to perform while in his grace.

I have been saved, am being saved, and have supernatural hope that I will be saved.  I believe this because the Church, established by Jesus, through which this grace flows to me, teaches me that this is so.”

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By works a man is justified and not by faith only?

Q: By works a man is justified and not by faith only?

A:  I say … cut through all the rhetoric and admit that it’s God who saves … because he loves us … and he does it by means of the grace that Jesus obtained for all men on the cross … typically and freely dispensed through his universal church.